SXSW and Reddit’s Introspection Problem
skepchick.org
skepchick.org
Regardless, this is a great example of how the challenges women face (particularly on the anonymous web) are even further worsened by inappropriate skepticism from those who claim those challenges don't exist at all. All of her points were unmistakably valid and yet she was publicly shamed, her Wiki vandalized (it says this happens 2-3 times a month, and that her page has been on a watchlist for years because of this), and most of these people weren't even at the talk.
And she's right; truly civil discourse just doesn't happen in most subreddits except in very rare instances where someone decides to take the high road. Regardless of gender, because karma exists, people'd rather not risk their worthless points over being the guy that says "Hey, that's not cool." Social janitorial work isn't pretty, but it needs to be done. If Reddit won't take responsibility for the direction of the discourse on the primary subreddits, users that value stimulating conversation over the same tired [pointlessly offensive] jokes will flock elsewhere.
The difference seems to be one of culture, not policing, or perhaps the difference only exists in our biased perception of the two.
4chan's /b/ board is considerably stricter than reddit.
The things that were allowed, and championed on reddit would have had you immediately and permanently banned from 4chan.
Near no filtering or maintenance, and none of this voting nonsense.
This is the most hilarious euphemism for "censorship" I've ever heard.
The guy that comes into her comment thread acknowledging he was one of the called out tweets goes on to say that he was admittedly kicking someone because they were down. What value does jumping on such a bandwagon add to the real issues besides reinforcing that behavior in others?
No, no I didn't. I was just making a joke.
Oh look, I just did some social janitorial work. Was your comment somehow deleted by my act?
Should I presume that Convo provides no moderation mechanisms because they would constitute censorship?
If it was used to mean "indicating disapproval", then I have absolutely no problem with it.
> "Regardless of gender, because karma exists, people'd rather not risk their worthless points over being the guy that says "Hey, that's not cool." Social janitorial work isn't pretty..."
Which doesn't read like it implies editing or deletion.
You called someone on the Internet "wrong" and "rude", which is about as far as you can get from "work" without losing consciousness.
"Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation."
People here are pretty strict about the types of comments that fly; for example, memes and dumb jokes are not something that the community here accepts. Personally I think that's great and the site is better for it, but it's not censorship to hold the other people in your forum or message board to certain standards of communication.
It really depends on the method used. Simply using downvotes to indicate disapproval, while not a route I would personally go, is, in my opinion, a productive way to discourage negative content.
It is not remotely "censorship" for a private individual to stop you from producing content in the spaces they control. They owe you nothing.
RW has a reputation for courting controversy. As a result, people tend to be more critical of her than they normally would. Regardless of the validity of her post here, nobody operates in a vacuum.
I personally suspect that her public shaming, wikipedia vandalism, etc., are less a function of her being a woman, and more a function of her being a fairly unpleasant and somewhat dramatic person
You know why she talks about people being mean to her all the time? It's probably because people are pretty fucking mean to her all the time. I have no clue why, if you aspire to be even a halfway decent human, you think she shouldn't be pissed about that and shouldn't talk about it. Might want to examine why that is.
I thought it was common knowledge that the primary subreddits are cesspools of hate.
People migrate to vigorously moderated subreddits (/r/askscience is big but good) or to less vigorous subreddits which have an expectation of decent behaviour. (Eg, any of the /r/true* groups.)
> If Reddit won't take responsibility
What are they supposed to do? Hire teams of moderators?
I was a user of that site for 6 years. I had over 85k karma points for comments, and several thousand story karma points. It seems like the audience has changed greatly in more recent years, and I want no part of it.
The users who evangelize that site, or are so devoted to it as to attend meetups are pathetically biased, and contribute nothing to the advancement of internet culture, or the culture of idea exchange.
I feel very sad for the site, as I thought, at one point, it was a great bastion of freely-exchanged ideas. And now it's just a great place to espouse radical views for worthless internet points.
stereotyping isn't really helping when talking about issues likes this
If you want to go to /r/python or /r/ruby, you can discuss your favorite language intelligently.
If you want to go to ... other ... subreddits then you can share conversation and media of a different nature. Some of which is quite unacceptable to the mainstream.
It's like saying the internet is a bad influence on society because porn and phishing. Yes, that stuff is there, but you can avoid it if you want.
But, more to the point, any criticism of Reddit is potentially viewed as an insult to the precious 'culture' that has been so pain-stakingly upvoted and meme'd to death. Reddit, like most aggregators, makes it far too easy to comment, and far too easy to vote on comments and stories.
Seriously? Your comment is largely hyperbolic animosity. Yeah, I get that endless image macros and memes are seen as a low-brow form of culture, but "internet culture" is very real and goes way beyond that. I don't understand why you've dismissed it entirely.
I'm willing to be wrong here. If you lump movements like open source and such in, I see your point. But often, self-identified "Internet culture" seems virtually indistinguishable from pop culture.
True, their contributions to culture have varied wildly along the scales of importance, intellectual value, or whatever metric you choose.
Some examples, though, of what I would consider to be generally culturally impactful movements born of internet culture: Anonymous, WikiLeaks, Occupy, digital piracy, and the gradually changing way people are learning to interact and communicate ("kids these days, with their phones").
Edit: And politics - Ron Paul and libertarianism, twitter everything, youtube debates. And I'm not saying I support all of these things, just that they are pretty widely relevant.
Reddit sans the default subreddits is substantially more pleasant. I'd go as far as to say that subreddits like /r/politics, /r/atheism, /r/worldnews, and even /r/technology are just cesspits.
I'm not sure what causes large subreddits to spiral into utter shit, but it does. I'm also of the general opinion that most of the large subreddits are poorly moderated - mods will rarely take action even against egregious trolls, and there is no attempts at leadership.
The main subreddit I use, /r/photography, has a relatively new mod team that actually actively ban trolls and initiate weekly/monthly events to steer the conversation (e.g., "no talk about gear" threads, "weekly photographers that inspire you", etc).
My money? Karma systems.
I don't think they scale as well as many would like. When you get up to "default subreddit" sized karma systems just turn into some sort of currency system that rewards those who are ultimately detrimental to the conversation: specifically those making repeated boring puns/memes because they are easy and formulaic, and those making formulaic complaints about superficial elements of the post in question (flooding entire comment sections with complaints about grammar/spelling/limited vocabulary).
I don't think these behaviors would be nearly so prevalent without a karma system. Why would the 200th person to comment on an article make the 200th comment about a "there/their" error, if not because they thought they would get imaginary internet points?
Karma systems take the initial reward for discussion (intellectual satisfaction) and out-bid it with gamification induced endorphin rushes.
it's also why I've unsubscribed from almost all the default subreddits (i'm still subbed to default_gems and bestof).
Also, its unfortunate to hear about how they tried to rope in Alexis.
She asked some interesting questions, It would be nice if she took the same amount of time that she took in shaming Redditors to answer her own questions.
Have I fallen victim to Poe's law or has the panelist? Is SRS mostly 'real' or mostly satire?
The reason I so strongly dislike them is because I know several people for whom it's not humour. They are dead serious.
At some point a bunch of SA goons took over the then-defunct subreddit, to use it as a platform to take down the highly active /r/jailbait. The effort continued to hold a mirror up to some of the more racist/misogynistic/etc comments of reddit.
A lot of the criticism of SRS comes from the fact that people don't like being called racist. Nearly everyone agrees that racists are bad people who deserve terrible punishments for their actions. No one wants to accept culpability for the fact that by upvoting a racist comment they are supporting racism.
Sure, there's plenty of legitimate cases where reddit needs to be called out and have a community effort around fixing some of their problems. But no one takes SRS seriously because, for all the good they have the potential to do, they're publicly harming their own image by crying wolf (or as they might say, crying poop).
In some ways, they have a laudable mission, but the way they go about it is without logic or regard for the rules of reddit. For SRS, it's not really about enforcing the standards of political correctness that they claim to stand for. It's more of a game where they choose someone to hate and then do whatever they can within the technical constraints of reddit to make life hard for that poster.
At one point, they were going after a guy who had posted a candid account of caring for his mentally disabled adult brother, because they felt he was being ableist. I went into the thread where they were coordinating the downvote ring, asked if he might not have some relevant real world experience, and was banned from SRS within minutes.
I think for most of them, its more about having an excuse to game the reddit commenting infrastructure, than any sort of moral cause. The reddit administration can't ban SRS like they do other voting rings, because of the negative publicity that would result.
An interesting experiment would be to post Chris Rock or Dave Chapelle comedy routines to a reddit discussion and see how long it takes for SRS to flag the racist.
The irony is thick and delicious.
No one cares about comments, you just downvote and move on. You can't even properly lurk in a thread where SRS has been active though as the whole point of downvoting ends up being so badly subverted.
Clearly the Internet gives the broken and angry people a voice they didn't have before. Sometimes that helps them, but often it seems to result in just a bunch bile being spewed around.
At what point does the combination of IP address + bile start to become a corpus for focusing our efforts at community remediation? Is there a common good to be had by finding out if these are communities of angry people or are they just scattered about in the general population. Can we help them? Should we?
Thus, peeping toms would normally be alone and feel some kind of shame, and maybe want to seek help, but now they have /r/creepshots and a receptive audience and validation.
I admit to being an active user there but there is a true lack of acceptance of criticism and the inability to see things from multiple points of view.
Unfortunately, it seems like getting an objective view on what happened at the panel would be impossible now but those tweets in response are pretty vicious and uncalled for.
Unfortunately people like this make their money from stirring up controversy so it is a never ending cycle.
False. On 8/13/12, I got a Google News Alert showing my name listed on a panel on the SXSW Panel Picker that I had never even heard of, let alone agreed to.
The way SXSW works, people submit panel concepts (presumably with the knowledge of everyone involved) in order to get 'votes' that help the SXSW team decide which panels to approve. I have no idea how long that post was getting 'votes' with my name falsely associated with it.
I immediately emailed Farhad, who was listed as the organizer:
> my email to Farhad
I wasn't even planning on being at Sxsw interactive this year.
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt but this appears to be remarkably unprofessional.
Please have my name removed from this immediately: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/3709
Let me know when it's done.
Thanks Alexis
> Farhad's reply (Jason, reddit's PR, CCed)
Hey Alexis,
I'm sorry, I guess there's been a misunderstanding. I asked Jason Bellinger at Reddit PR -- CCd here -- a couple months ago if you would do it; he said that either you or Erik Martin likely would be able to.
I thought that we were submitting a generic "Reddit representative" for the event, but apparently we put in your name. (This entry was being coordinated by Slate's PR company -- I didn't create it.) I'll contact them to get your name removed ASAP.
Jason, do you know if Erik will be able to take part -- should we switch his name in there?
> Jason (reddit PR)
Hey Farhad -
I had said that I'd get back to you if they were interested, and as they aren't going this year, I didn't confirm it with you. I'm sorry if there was a misunderstanding here.
> Farhad
Ah, it's my mistake, then; I understood that to be either/or. I do apologize and will get it taken care of.
---
I do believe there's a discussion to be had about promoting civility (and curbing bigotry, assholish behavior, etc) on social media -- these ills exist on wordpress, on youtube, on twitter, and yes, on reddit -- but when one can't even honestly invite participants, let alone frame the debate, we all miss an opportunity.
I've had & heard frank & thorough discussions on the subject with friends like Latoya Peterson (www.racialicious.com) and Christina Xu (www.awesomefoundation.org) so I know it's possible, but my concern is that there are people engaged who'd prefer pageviews over progress.
- Yes you never agreed to the panel, but how does this email chain not reflect an honest invitation?
- Of course the debate was framed; it is impossible for an event to not have context. Would you have preferred it framed differently? How so?
- Are you implying that these panelists prefer pageviews over progress? If not, who are the boogeymen you are invoking here?
The original article claimed, "To balance things out, Farhad invited Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian, but he dropped out, so it was just the three of us." Saying that Alexis "dropped out" is simply wrong, so the statement is disingenuous at best, dishonest at worst.
The context of "dropped out" is universally "The person went from participating to not participating". Alexis was never participating.
Dropping out means that you were planning to go and then you had to cancel. Whether Farhad knew this before or not, Alexis's email was very clear and so there's no excuse to claim today that Alexis dropped out of anything.
The author is now being deliberately disingenuous.
How so? Farhad is not Rebecca. She may be, as we speak, still completely unaware of Farhad's e-mail exchange with Alexis.
"Oh, uh, it fell through."
"Oh, ok."
I can think of hundreds of other variations of the same exchange that don't include negligence on the author's part. This isn't a cross examination - which is the price we pay when we gleefully shoved a knife in the chest of real journalism and twisted it hard, and went and partied with blogs afterward.
"To balance things out, Farhad invited Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian, but he dropped out, so it was just the three of us."
"he dropped out" is clearly false.
This is part of the responsibility of self-publishing.
It reminds me of grammar arguments on the internet; people don't like what she says, so they find some easily arguable but minor flaw in the text to jump on.
Those three sentences do not need thorough researching. Maybe she just needs to write a quick email to Alexis for a comment/confirmation (or omit the 3 sentences). Or are bloggers not journalists, anymore?
Also, I didn't attack the premise of this article at all, so don't lump me in with that crowd—I just think that the author does a disservice to her premise/argument. For what it's worth, I agree with the high-level sentiment of the article (though not all of the details).
Of course they're not. For better and for worse, bloggers are not and never have been journalists in any useful sense of those two words. Blogs do, however, fill some of the same niches that used to be the exclusive purview of journalistic channels, such as news curation and commentary.
If you're expecting blogs to match the rigor of journalism, you're just setting yourself up for disappointment. I should note, however, that blogs are much more of a two-way street; they're more likely to get things wrong, but they're also more likely to be corrected when that happens.
That was the view I came away with after reading the article.
Her blog post starting out fine, but half way through, she decided she was more interested in mud slinging and shaming than having that discussion she so desperately wanted to have. It is left up to the reader to infer a motive for her choice in direction.
[0] Shaming I'm not so concerned about - a few of those tweet authors should definitely be fucking ashamed of themselves.
Thou dost protest too much, by the way.
If there are images of child sexual abuse being put on Reddit people can contact the Internet Watch Foundation (http://www.iwf.org.uk/)
There are other problematic images: non photographic images of child sexual abuse not hosted in the UK. I have no idea if these are on Reddit, nor what Reddit would do about those. Christopher Handley trials suggest that these are criminal and could cause trouble for Reddit.
And the sexualised (not not sexual) images of children are also a problem. Luckily Reddit has banned /r/jailbait and continues to ban similar subreddits.
My guess it was a stab against Gawker Media?
The jerks were in the wrong, but I think the wrong approach is to engage them in their own medium. They are vocalizing their beliefs because they know it will provoke a reaction. You'll never convince them, so the best thing is to ignore them and get on with your life. In the case of reddit, the problematic set is best left to fester and dealt with at higher levels (bans, filtering) or discussed out of band (as in the linked post). "Arguing with a fool only proves that there are two," as they say.
That might be backwards, I am undecided.
There are plenty of other meta subreddits where criticism is welcome. Reddit's only problem with those other subreddits is "brigading".
If they wanted to have that kind of discussion, why not use a panel moderator to ask those questions and invoke that conversation in the portion of the event the panelists were driving?
I didn't attend this, but based on Skepchick's own summary, the presence of Chen on the panel, relying on the audience to challenge their criticism, other posts online covering the panel and the fact MrGrimm felt the need to strait up "filibuster"; I get the impression they were there to recite well-known criticism rather than engage in analysis of reddit.
I wonder if, out of an audience of 300, nobody was able to meaningfully challenge the panel's position or if those that could just didn't bother. Why didn't they?
Take the top post in SRS right now as an example, there are things in that subreddit that are very obviously misogynistic and then there are things that they simply "don't like" or are unwilling to even have a discussion about. The comments in that subreddit are just as insidious and redunctionary as the commentary they proclaim to be against. It's done in some sort of tongue-in-cheek irony style, but it's not, it's gross and annoying to read.
The mob mentality is bad either way, and the tweets are a gross depiction of the dark side of reddit. But for every post in SRS, I encounter dozens of trolls every day that are downvoted for homophobia, racism and misogyny.