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Comment by rm999 | Hacker News Reader

When you see drastic and sudden changes in reddit, it's usually something external. In this case the beginning of December marks the end of the semester for college and high school students, who use reddit more during reading period/christmas break. They will soon start school again and things will return to normal.

That kind of behavior has been pretty much the norm for years at reddit. Not to say it's ubiquitous, reddit still has great content and what I'd call 'safe' subreddits where that behavior isn't tolerated. Also, to be clear to those who don't know, 'OP is a faggot' is supposed to be an ironic meme rather than hate speech. A terrible meme, but I wouldn't want people to misunderstand and think reddit has become a cesspool of hate.

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I hate this sort of joke. It reinforces the behavior for people who don't see it as a joke. And there's a lot of them.

"Oh, it's OK and funny to call people faggots"

I wish regular Redditors would stamp this shit out.

No, I'm not being unnecessarily precious or PC. I used to laugh at distasteful misogynistic jokes (and worse) but somebody pointed out to me that joking about it normalizes it. And to the depraved part of society the joke is missed and they see it as support for their depravity.

There are a number of things we try to stamp out and it is damn hard.

I mod a subreddit with over 100K users. It's difficult to control trolls and others...

At the same time I have petitioned to Yishan directly several times to block /r/picsofdeadkids to no avail.

I use RES to heavily filter out the content I don't want to see.

And while that works wonderfully, I am often turning off the filter as well just to see what is on /r/all...

It is more successful to self-temper and manage your own experience on reddit than to try and change reddit.

Maybe this money will add the ability to ignore people, or better, ignore entire groups of people pre-emptively. There are some subreddits I don't want anything to do with, nor the scum that dribble out of them.

Too true. And in the same way we forget "simple" tasks like googling a tech support question are actually advanced behaviors, we become blind to the fact that the vast majority of the world isn't ironically playing with our expectations all the time.

And furthermore, irony and the "it's a joke" mentality can be used to justify the continuation of behaviors that don't meet people's own standards. It's easier to repeat a lame justification for thoughtless behavior than to spend months working to break a bad habit.

I have been reading hacker news for over 2 years. I started reading reddit last week when I learned about subreddits. The vast majority of my friends (all between 25-32) don't read reddit but are aware that it exists. There is an insane amount of growth that could happen there. I don't know much about their income, but saying "reddit is dead" or other comments because you don't think the quality is as good as it used to be is a stretch when saying the valuation shouldn't be $400m.

Seems to me like reddit could become the dominate messaging system and could be the best possible choice to replace craig's list if they decided to add classifieds.

It has huge growth potential and should not be underestimated so easily.

You may need more than a few days on reddit before saying things like "reddit could [../] replace craigslist"

> They will soon start school again and things will return to normal.

Except when they don't[1].

> . A terrible meme, but I wouldn't want people to misunderstand and think reddit has become a cesspool of hate.

The language originates from 4chan, where it is also used ironically. I get rather annoyed when I hear people dismiss 4chan as homophobic, because under the surface, it's actually not. Then again, if Reddit is starting to mimic 4chan in terms of its language and linguistic memes, either 4chan's reputation is ill-deserved, or Reddit's reputation will start to resemble 4chan's.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_september

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