>willingly allows to exist subreddits devoted towards domestic abuse and snuff
Serious question: why does this even bother you?
Serious question: why does this even bother you?
Not the person you aimed the question at, but…
I worked as a volunteer counsellor for a few years in my twenties. Some of the stuff I encountered during those years was folk who were going through horrific, long-term abuse.
One of the patterns that you notice is that abusers go to a lot of effort at times to show that their behaviour as normal. Both as a tool to justify it to themselves (this is normal — everybody does it — I'm not a bad person or doing anything bad), and as a tool to further control the abused (this is normal — this is what you should expect — you won't get any better elsewhere).
Anecdotally the ones who can find or create an active "community" of abusers — where two best friends both hit their partners and acknowledge it to each other, where everybody in an extended family beats on their kids, etc. — the abuse is worse because there is little or no sense of shame in what's done.
It's normal.
Now this was the 90s. Before subreddits were around. But this is why it bothers me. Yes, it's just words. But those words are probably making the lives of other people worse.
It bothers me for the same reason it bothers me that those things exist. They are terrible, and should not be given a platform. I don't feel that we, as a society, should tolerate terrible things in general, much less let them prosper.
Who decides?
There is a wide gap between being hesitant and serious about prohibiting things and accepting everything for fear of overreach, in my opinion. We need to work towards a middle-ground.
Not entirely true - the reaction in the UK to this whole incident has been quite negative from what I've seen. Then again, we're not overly happy with our press at the best of times...
People are not happy with the press hounding people to suicide. The Daily Mail has a nasty track record of outing LGBTQ people, for example.
If misogynists and abusers want to go and construct their own forums, nobody can legally stop them (as long as their discussion stops short of the various sorts of criminal speech, like conspiracy to commit). But nobody is legally obligated to support them, either.
Reddit tomorrow could say, "Welp, we're not going to host people who cause harm in way X". And that's perfectly American because they'd be exercising their own rights. That they choose to support abusers is legal, but it is well within everybody else's rights to point that out, with volume and at length.
Reddit could censor all instances of discussion featuring the phrase "hackers news" tomorrow, and it's not as if they would be brought up on freedom-of-speech charges.
You mean premarital sex, homosexuality, genital mutilation and women showing their faces? Hint: two of those things are still considered normal in much of the world.
We choose between letting everyone go free and dealing with the consequences, or restricting people and living with the consequences. There is no right answer.
There is no right answer, but restricting information is the wrong answer, primarily because it doesn't work. The leaked nudes are still available, even if not on reddit. You can still download pirated movies, even if it's not as simple as it used to be. Eventually, we'll have to figure out ways of preventing/minimizing the consequences, without restricting information.
That's the point - I can dump uuencoded blobs of text in HN that are stolen nudes. I'd be downvoted to hellban if I tried.
Online communities create their own standards. Reddit's standards exclude some groups of people. That's a weird choice to make - in the name of freedom of expression we're going to create an environment that is ridiculously hostile to large numbers of people to make sure they can't express their opinions.
So you're suggestion that instead, in the name of safety, we should create an environment that is ridiculously hostile to large numbers of people (banning them) to make sure they can't express their opinions?
If their opinion is "You should die you stupid fucking cunt" or "I'm going to find you and rape you and then kill you" then yes, ban those people.
"I'd do a lot worse than rape you. I've just got out of prison and would happily do more time to see you berried [sic]. #10feetunder."
"I will find you, and you don't want to know what I will do when I do. You're pathetic. Kill yourself. Before I do. #Godie."
I find it fucking baffling that you chose to defend those people, the people saying stuff like that, at the cost of their victims.
Caroline Criado Perez was not complaining about one or two people sending a few dozens of messages that were a bit mean. She was inundated with thousands of messages, from many people, threatening sexual violence and death. One man was sending 50 messages per hour, over about 12 hours. Another woman sent hundreds of messages. Perez's "crime"? She campaigned to have a woman on British banknotes after the Bank of England phased out Elizabeth Fry on the £5 - leaving no women on the banknotes.
I would be proud to ban those people from any service I ran.
Oh well, I find it weird that you're twisting my words so much, but I won't insult your intelligence because of it.
Anyways, I don't defend those people - I think they're morons, I would shame them, etc. (I would defend them in court, though, unless they actually (physically) harm anyone - because freedom of speech).
The problem is (1) banning/censorship is a slippery slope, and will inevitably results in censoring some inconvenient truth, and (2) it doesn't work, because the trolls can just make a new account. IMO, personal filters that each user can activate and tune to their desire (akin email spam filters) would work much better.
Yeah she was:
https://twitter.com/CCriadoPerez/statuses/375689920742182912
If you dig, you find that she's an aggressive jerk, and that's why she's a hate magnet. In a different political context, she'd be the "troll." Same for the person she's arguing with. I don't lump Kathy Sierra in this category, but there's a reason some people always find themselves in the middle of a shitstorm.
>I find it fucking baffling that you chose to defend those people, the people saying stuff like that, at the cost of their victims.
See, this is the thing. You see very, very few people defending that. But everybody who doesn't agree with banning vehement disagreement gets attributed that opinion. Every time. The same thing is happening with the so-called gamergate.
Who's being excluded by reddit's standards? Aside from egregious racists who become nuisances to others, and/or child porn distributors (both good exclusions, IMO), it seems like a free-for-all. You want to create a subreddit reflecting your odd interests, go ahead!
Without rehashing the obvious problems of giving a platform to harassment, child porn, spam, etc, just read about how Reddit supported and profited off bros like Violentacrez. Just a little research shows these corporations intervene heavily — but in peculiar ways. http://gawker.com/5950981/unmasking-reddits-violentacrez-the...
More broadly speaking, I would be very willing to bet that an internet community that places harsher standards on acceptable content would result in a better environment for those involved -- but Reddit's stance during the celebrity photo stuff reinforced their position of 'Reddit as a platform', and I don't see that going away.
That's the start of most 'war-on-obscenity' arguments, and usually leads to no constructive ideas. I hate the topic (abusive pornography/snuff) as much as you, but that rational is inappropriate given the peoples' wide variety of tastes in this world, if the material is indeed legal for your region of the world.
>> More broadly speaking, I would be very willing to bet that an internet community that places harsher standards on acceptable content would result in a better environment for those involved
historically that has only served to push users to other services. the success of the regionalization of 2channel into what 4chan is now is a good example. 4chan's success is widely attributed to the pseudo-anonymity that it's users enjoy, and the founder of the site spoke at TED a few years back on what exactly the benefits of such a relationship with their userbase is.
http://www.ted.com/talks/christopher_m00t_poole_the_case_for...
But this is exactly what you want - get rid of the low-quality users and offload them somewhere else. reddit has gotten itself quite a questionable image tolerating pornographic jailbait, necrophiliac porn, stolen nudes and domestic abusers on its platform for very long.
Signal to people who care.
"They shouldn't be posting X because I don't like X" sounds extremely entitled to me.
"They are damaging the brand value of the site" which has nothing to do with you. When I criticise Apple (and you use Apple products), there is no need to take it personally.
And of course, junk traffic breeds more junk traffic. Even if the first generation of a shady subreddit might make this up with quality in other parts of your site, it will invariably attract generation 2 and later which will create a mini-eternal September.
>And of course, junk traffic breeds more junk traffic. Even if the first generation of a shady subreddit might make this up with quality in other parts of your site, it will invariably attract generation 2 and later which will create a mini-eternal September.
You can argue both ways, the quality increase will attract more quality users.
* the single /r/whatever namespace, which was meant to be used as the marker for the canonical or default reddit on a particular topic (and is still used by users for that purpose, whatever disclaimers Reddit may want to hide behind now)
* the partly-shared moderation across subreddits
* talk about "the Reddit community" and "Redditors" (wait, it's not a community but rather "a community of communities"? http://www.redditblog.com/2014/09/every-man-is-responsible-f... ? Excuse me while I pick myself up off the floor), the Snoo branding and individual subreddits' customisation thereof, the promotion of shared Reddit meetups http://www.redditblog.com/2014/05/global-reddit-meetup-day-i... , and in general the consistent effort to promote a common identity for "Reddit" and "Redditors"
* other technical features like Reddit gold which likewise encourage the perception of Reddit as a single platform
The just-a-platform argument is hard one for any message board or single-host/owner, single-login cluster of message-boards to sustain. Reddit's even more poorly placed to sustain it than others. Twitter, for example, is much better placed to do so, even though it's a single-owner/host, single-login publishing system.