Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacobolus | Hacker News Reader

Circa 2005 reddit was a forum for nerdy young tech people, talking about miscellaneous web links but mostly focused around nerdy tech stuff. Nobody I know who read reddit circa 2005 wanted it to become a white supremacist hate forum. When it started to attract large numbers of white supremacists who deposited their steaming piles of bullshit (hate speech, vicious personal attacks) all over the site, lots of people reading the site (including those who had been there since 2005) were appalled. Obviously advertisers also don’t want to associate their brands with hate speech (or child porn, etc.).

View on HN

I joined Reddit around 2007, and my perspective is completely the opposite of yours. Reddit was a place where you could create your own community, and moderate it as you see fit (as long as it's legal). It was a place where people respected free speech, and that you don't have to agree with someone but you'll defend their right to see it.

White supremacy or hate wasn't really a thing on reddit until the past few years. The controversial content on reddit were r/jailbait (which I'd say a majority of the community agreed with; although many did begrudge the shifting of the overton window on 'we host anything that is legal'), but then "social justice" became a thing and a new crowd of redditors seemed to want to de-platform people.

I don't have a time machine, but I suspect if you polled a majority of redditors in 2017 whether they'd support the de-platforming that is happening today, a majority would vehemently disagree.

A bunch of abusive Reddit sub-fora (whose users had a way of spilling out across the general site and violating the site guidelines) were banned in the 2011–2015 timeframe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...

But my impression is that being the central hub of one of the most aggressively hateful online pro-Donald-Trump communities in 2016 attracted a larger number of abusive users and increased the visibility of the problem.

The beauty of reddit, in theory, is that you don't have to subscribe to subreddits you don't like. This worked really well, and still does, to a large extent. Of course, if you have political content on /r/videos, /r/pics etc as is the case today, you're gonna have a bad time. I wish there was more aggressive modding in non-political spaces, and less modding in the places that are.

Huh? I typically associate Reddit with the far left, not the far right.

In the early days the primary political jockeying was for Ron Paul. That's pretty far-right. For culture-war it was pro-atheism.

AFAIK it’s still pro-atheism. And Ron Paul was basically the only Republican not in bed with the Halliburtons of the world, which was considered progressive in 2008.

I think a more fair characterization of reddit at that time was firmly anti-theism. I'm not religious, but I definitely remember those days from when I was still the primary demographic of Reddit (early 20s male in college, hyper-jacked into to news, IT-worker and programmer, science-focused, etc.).

Somewhere along the way, Reddit (and HN?) drifted SO left-wing that it started non-ironically referring to “libertarian” and “far-right” as interchangeable.

“Far-right atheists”. Okay.

r/atheism was a default sub in those days. r/politics was mostly Ron Paul. Both things can be true at the same time without working together.

It never was though? Not the site. Some subs might've been, but the site overall never was. Most I've seen is having to leave some subs I used to frequent because the mods became crazy, and their madness definitely didn't lean right. Most I've seen of odious subs like that is people complaining of their existence, but they didn't contaminate the rest of reddit.

The place used to be far more liberal both in the sense of openmindedness and in the sense of people having the ability to tolerate people they didn't actively like. That atmosphere is mostly gone.

it never attracted a large numbers of white supremacists

they're a tiny part of the population online and in real life

you can mute users and stick to your own subreddits because you only see what you choose to follow

you're feeding into the narrative and creating the problem of censoring everything

That frame of mind assumes that there’s only two camps, the Racists and Non-Racists…when there’s a third: Parties that want to sew discord for thier own interests, be it civil discord, ad revenue, or ‘user engagement’.

You Could NOT escape the stuff towards the end of the Trump administration. It wasn’t only Reddit.

thats the frame of mind that the op is using so talk to them

It attracted a large enough number of toxic users that many parts of the site (those not aggressively moderated) were littered with personal attacks and hate speech, which was unpleasant for everyone else.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com