This article seems to take SRS as a legitimate subreddit. I always thought SRS was a satire, an over-the-top parody of extremist feminist/minority groups.
Have I fallen victim to Poe's law or has the panelist? Is SRS mostly 'real' or mostly satire?
Have I fallen victim to Poe's law or has the panelist? Is SRS mostly 'real' or mostly satire?
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.
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.
The reason I so strongly dislike them is because I know several people for whom it's not humour. They are dead serious.
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.