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Comment by ceol | Hacker News Reader

That rapist thread in /r/AskReddit was, next to the time a poor girl was harassed due to a user thinking she faked her assault story, the worst thing I've ever seen on reddit. The direct responses were exactly what the OP had asked, but the comment replies by users were flooded with rape apology and victim blaming. In one instance, a rapist had to tell people to stop apologizing for him because he knew he was an actual rapist.

I would never, ever point someone to reddit as a place to have an honest discussion. You might as well make a thread on 4chan and only ask for the worst possible answers.

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So you take the replies to replies from a single thread, and conclude that the site itself is useless? I suppose I should discount Stack Exchange, as there undoubtedly questions for which all of the answers are unhelpful or incorrect.

Your comment reeks of the typical reddit hate on HN, without anything to back it up.

I wouldn't say the entire site is useless, but the good communities are few and far between due to the reddit's culture abhorring any sort of moderation.

Would you like me to edit my reply to be more specific to /r/AskReddit? Certainly if you have a scientific question, /r/askscience is great, and /r/philosophy tends to be decent most of the time. But my point is that getting honest, relatively troll-free discussion on reddit, especially in the default subreddits, is uncommon.

Agreed. Compare AskReddit to something like Ask Metafilter, which is fairly aggressively moderated.

While you acknowledge it's not the case, you're still making the mistake of thinking of reddit as a single community that is run in a homogeneous way. But subreddits have successfully and neatly separated the wheat from the chaff.

Dig a little and you can find some great niche communities that don't exist outside of more archaic forum-style sites (communities that sites like quora would love to capture).

I know well of the niche communities in reddit. I frequent most of them to hide myself from the default subs. However, the same problems still exist.

For instance, I enjoy the show Adventure Time, so I subscribed to the /r/adventuretime subreddit. It was fine for a while, but then a submission popped up on my front page. It was a photograph of a group of kids cosplaying as Adventure Time characters at a local convention, and a few of the kids either had a "poorly done" costume or were heavier than the characters they were cosplaying. The top comments in this thread were saying hurtful things about their weight and attractiveness. Not fluffed up "jokes"; these were crude and would warrant a punch in the face in any real life situation. When I made a comment about how it was rude for them to say such things, and that cosplaying is about the person cosplaying, not the people viewing, I was met with hostility and downvotes. I even messaged the moderators asking them to remove the comments since they offered nothing but vitriol, but the only moderator to respond said, "I'm not their mother. This is the internet."

You can try to escape it by going into smaller and smaller subreddits, but you'll never outrun it. This is what I mean by it being pervasive.* It's in everything on the site. You can argue "reddit isn't a single community" and all, but there are some characteristics that permeate through almost all sections (or maybe eventually show up due to how the site is designed.)

* edit: I realize after I posted that this was a different comment chain. The comment to which I'm referring is this one, last paragraph: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4378485

If people acting like jerks offends you that much, you are going to have a bad time on the internet. Although if you know of anywhere besides HN that is mostly reasonable, please PM me :)

nitpick: just as you are offended by rude comments, I am offended by advocating violence as a response to rudeness. I don't think you were serious, but I have to say there's nothing you can say or write that actually warrants a punch in the face.

Defending poor behavior perpetuates it. Stop tolerating crappy behavior from users, and move to platforms where such childishness is met with disciplinary action.

Use your imagination. It's possible to have reasonable discussions on the Internet. It's just very rare, and everyone's too scared to a) not be the 'best site with all users' and b) have a reputation for 'censoring' content.

> Although if you know of anywhere besides HN that is mostly reasonable

Quora.

If I may rewrite your comment a bit:

"I wouldn't say the entire internet is useless, but the good websites are few and far between due to the internet's culture abhorring any sort of regulation.

"Would you like me to edit my reply to be more specific to [Facebook, YouTube, pick a popular site]? Certainly if you have a scientific question, [insert science website] is great, and [other website you like] tends to be decent most of the time. But my point is that getting honest, relatively troll-free discussion on the internet, especially in the popular websites, is uncommon."

While you seem to acknowledge that Reddit is several communities, not one, many of the things you say still make it seem like you're lumping Reddit into one community and one culture.

The trick to reddit is to stay the hell away from the default subs.

The fact that something is frontpaged greatly decreases the signal to noise ratio, the moderators are IMHO asshats.

Do some searching to find topics that interest you, and then unsubscribe from every single front page subreddit. You'll have a much better experience as a result.

Actually, ceol spent most of the comment providing a specific, layered example.

Much, much better support on Ask Metafilter. You have to pay a whole $5 for eternal access, but that's apparently enough to reduce the level of trolls by 9000%.

I keep hearing good things about Metafilter. Maybe it's the solution to my ever-growing problem of what to replace reddit with.

Meta filter has been around for years. Usually troll free, decent answers.

It's a wonderful community with a lot of different interests, and if you e-mail the admins to ask them a question they reply. Matt's built a good culture. I recommend it.

You lose something when you cross that wall.

Money?

Metafilter seems particularly relevant in light of Quora and App.net, and while the price tag has kept it obscure I've only heard good things about its community. So I'm curious what criticisms you have.

You lose access to answers from the sort of people who won't spend 5 bucks to get onto the site.

In some circumstances, that may be extremely relevant.

Or anyone who doesn't want the admins to have their True Name via paypal.

Ceol is right. I know Reddit is HUGE and is comprised of many different subreddits and today's Reddit is astronomically different from what it was 3 years ago when I left. But many male Redditors have deep seeded misogyny and they're in denial. Because of their aggressiveness their attitude used to affect a lot of site, NOT just their subreddit. I've seen female OPs ridiculed and downvoted off the front page while male OPs with the same conversation & stance would get upvoted. This is especially true for cheat stories, relationship problems, and male POV vs female POV style posts.

Remember when Bioware writer Jennifer Hepler got ganged up on by internet users and threatened with death and rape, called on her home phone and harassed, because of something she said about games 5 years earlier? That was Reddit's gaming forum. They ganged up on her because they felt Mass Effect 2 was apparently written wrong and she was the plague and scum that did it. That's just a tiny little fraction of the sexist shit Redditors can conjure up.

Back when I was a Reddit addict I'd see so many sexist posts. Not questionably sexist. Evidently sexist. When men would post "my girlfriend cheated on me" stories the Redditors would upvote and comfort the guy, give him their complete emotional support. They'd upvote the cheat stories to the front page when it was a man being cheated on. When it was a woman.... Naturally, Redditors would sympathize with the cheating boyfriend and ask the female OP if she did anything wrong. Revenge stories about men getting back at women were loved and would spend DAYS being on the front page from all the upvotes. Male Redditors would chime in with instructions on how to get the best revenge.

Anytime a woman would ask about what to do about her cheating boyfriend, they'd reply with "talk to him about it" and "maybe its something that you did". So sympathizing with rapists and blaming the victim is just up their alley.

And don't get me started on the Mens Rights subreddit whose posts would spill over onto the front page every other day. Those guys were drowning in their own testosterone. It's like they were angry that they're slaves to pussy, but rather than blame nature or themselves (their balls) they just blamed women for their problems. Don't know if it got better or worst, I'd rather not visit the subreddit at all.

After achieving mainstream popularity a few years ago the front page is now all memes and cats and all that sexist nonsense is isolated to it's subreddit. I would consider the memes the lesser of two evils.

The worst things are often a truth that needs to be heard.

You are writing from a position of fear. That people can express something that shouldn't be heard.

You can't fight the truth. And you can't fight the open expression of it.

The really difficult part, which is what my post was trying to explain; the really difficult part is actually _creating_ the open expression of truth.

Because you have to have a mix between real identity and the mask of anonymous.

I'm not writing from a position of fear. The thought process of rapists is an interesting— albeit chilling— subject to study.

My problem was with the responses to the rapists by what appeared to be normal, well-adjusted people: Heavily upvoted comments excusing what was textbook rape because alcohol was involved, or she said she wanted it at one point (or maybe she didn't and they assumed she said it), or because she "got a little slutty [and did something stupid]." There is nothing of benefit in those replies. All they serve to do is make actual rapists feel better about the fact they raped someone and make it harder for rape victims to come forward due to fear of similar reactions by friends, family, and law enforcement.

Certainly there's a benefit to anonymity in a discussion, and I'm in no way advocating for your identity to be attached to everything you post a la South Korea. My issue isn't with anonymity in general; it's with reddit. The mask of anonymity, the pervasive anti-moderation sentiment, the inexplicably held notion that they belong to some elite club of Internet-goers, and the karma system make for an at times vicious amount of groupthink and close-mindedness.

I think what I'm saying is that you're upset about a thing that is a necessary reaction to the telling of truth.

The reddit thread in question had an absurd amount of victim-blaming.

Not to disparage reddit as a whole, but there's a lot of close-mindedness and misogyny in the more populated subreddits.

You haven't said anything that has attacked my point.

You haven't said anything concrete enough to attack. Just a bunch of stuff about "the telling of the truth", whatever that's supposed to mean.

I hold that when you consider both subject matter and the community together, there are things which should not be discussed and analyzed. The reddit thread in question is an example. The community clearly demonstrated it was not equipped with the tools to handle that discussion.

Are you saying you can't comprehend what I was trying to mean?

Your second paragraph is exactly the attitude that I despise. I don't care what your intent is: the effect is you want to hide what people really think.

There are no tools to handle that discussion. And that doesn't mean it shouldn't happen. And that means we'll find the tools for it.

Clueless.

edit: I feel like I'm in the midst of the argument that HN doesn't want. And I both don't want it and do want it in the same breath.

HN doesn't have the self-examination reddit does. It just doesn't. HN manages it by careful changes to its ruleset.

Reddit manages it by having an incredibly uncontrolled diverse ecosystem of recursively examinative subreddits.

And while I admire HN's adherence to quality, I will endure downvote after downvote unto hellban in order to defy our stodginess.

The hell?

No, discussions which lead to more rape should not happen. This, I feel, is an unambiguous truth.

(I'm not saying that the particular reddit thread encouraged rape, though a psychologist much more well-versed than myself did -- but I don't think its a logical leap to see why victim-blaming would encourage self-rationalization of rape.)

The psychologist you cite I myself cited. The point of discussing anything is that no discussions lead to more rape.

Unless you're afraid.

If you're afraid that real discussion will cause more rape, and that the sacrifice of real understanding is worth pretending that that more rape doesn't exist.

Because that's the guarantee.

That's what that meh-ish psychologist proved.

We will not forget. Because there's nothing we're not afraid to know.

"The point of discussing anything is that no discussions lead to more rape."

"If you're afraid that real discussion will cause more rape, and that the sacrifice of real understanding is worth pretending that that more rape doesn't exist."

Please qualify these statements and explain why your argument is superior to that of a psychologist?

oh god I hate writing arguments from authority but... oh wait.

I'm only fighting an argument from authority.

Hah. I actually don't have to say anything.

But while I'm here, .;'';.

It's a troll face.

So, I suppose you would describe yourself as being absolutely in favor of unrestricted free speech. Nothing is off-limits. All shall be discussed.

Now, what happens when you mix this attitude with a self-moderating system? There will be no moderation at all. Every and any topic is able to be discussed by anyone. The fringe opinions mobilize and are given a powerful soapbox, and so horrible becomes the new normal. You can see this in nearly every thread on reddit dealing with sexism and (especially) race relations.

You can't say that the average internet citizen, wandering into any of the sickeningly racist discussions found weekly on r/videos, won't see the hundreds of upvotes on vile opinions without also seeing an illusion of consensus, the normalization of disgusting prejudice. And you can't say that won't have an effect on their thought process next time they interact with a person of colour. That is the price paid for unrestricted discussion of the worst crap people can dedicate themselves to typing on the internet.

That was just a particularly salient example. Everywhere else you see normalization of mysogyny, normalization of pedophilia (seriously, nearly any discussion of gymnasts during the olympics was disgusting). All this on a website with tens of millions of users, claiming itself as the front page of the internet.

You go on to say reddit has self-examination. Reddit is not a single organism; the self-examination you refer to comprises many disgusted users, yelling at the people spouting crap who carry along regardless. "Self-examination" in this fashion is not a substitute for actual moderation. SRS has started linking to the odd HN comment, by the way.

The crux is that tolerating and analyzing horrible opinions only serves to normalize them. There are some ideas that quite simply don't deserve to see a soapbox. You'll probably play the slippery slope card here. I don't care. We have many excellent moral frameworks with which to analyze ideas, and they are more than adequate for sorting out the grey area of what should and should not be allowed.

>So, I suppose you would describe yourself as being absolutely in favor of unrestricted free speech. Nothing is off-limits. All shall be discussed.

Yup.

>Now, what happens when you mix this attitude with a self-moderating system?

/r/AskScience

You can't make horrible opinions less horrible by making them invisible.

Askscience is heavily moderated.

> "I will endure downvote after downvote unto hellban in order to defy our stodginess."

You made some good points in the "nobody wants to read your shit" thread. You should apply those insights to your own posts here.

We signal, with downvotes and hellbans, the kind of shit we don't want to read. Some of your earlier posts in this thread were merely disagreeable, but you've descended into full-on trolling. Please don't do that.

Victim-blaming is not a necessary reaction to anything.

You're flat-out wrong. The word "necessary" has so many connotations that you can't control it.

Necessary means that it happens whether or not you want it to.

Necessary hurts.

Victim-blaming, like all blaming, is a matter of opinion. There is no objective truth in who's to blame -- not because the facts can't be established, but because blame is by its nature about meaning, not about whether events happened.

You're saying it's a necessary reaction to the telling of truth. He's saying it's not about truth, it's about opinion.

So yes, he is responding to your point.

And it's ineffective. If you have to say it's about opinion, you've already lost. I know that there are opinions that state that victim-blaming is a terrible thing.

I even believe it.

But we couldn't have this conversation unless this, _this itself_ was a reaction to the telling of truth.

Do you mean that the victim-blaming is what these people actually believe and therefore it's a form of "truth"? That we can say victim-blaming is wrong but the truth is, there's a lot of people out there who blame the victim for rape and that's something that should be acknowledged?

That's something I think I can agree with. Clearly, victim-blaming is a bigger problem than people might like to admit and while reddit represents a relatively small niche of society at large, there's clearly a lot of people sympathising with rapists and to just dismiss such comments as unproductive or unhelpful is ignoring a large problem in society.

>Do you mean that the victim-blaming is what these people actually believe and therefore it's a form of "truth"

That's obvious to the point of uselessness. I think we're on the same page re: victim-blaming being a big problem. I don't dismiss any of the comments that talk about victim-blaming.

The only thing I'm really pushing for is: this conversation should happen. And it is, between you and me.

The worst things are often a truth that needs to be heard. You are writing from a position of fear. That people can express something that shouldn't be heard. You can't fight the truth. And you can't fight the open expression of it. We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us.

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