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Not really. It seems like the Internet equivalent of burning books. Just because I think the content of the book is awful doesn't mean I'm in favor of book-burning. You might say, "Oh, we'll only burn books that are offensive" — but that is just as true for everyone who has ever burned books. There are many books that actually are awful and not worthy of any respect, but we still look askance at book-burning as a practice.

Dwight Eisenhower initially supported purging communist books. But later, he had a change of heart, telling students:

> Don't join the book burners. Don't think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book, as long as that document does not offend our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship.

> How will we defeat communism unless we know what it is, and what it teaches, and why does it have such an appeal for men, why are so many people swearing allegiance to it? It is almost a religion, albeit one of the nether regions.

> And we have got to fight it with something better, not try to conceal the thinking of our own people. They are part of America. And even if they think ideas that are contrary to ours, their right to say them, their right to record them, and their right to have them at places where they are accessible to others is unquestioned, or it isn't America.

It's less like burning books and more like urban renewal. People don't consider reddit threads to be stores of historical knowledge; they're street-corners where people mingle. If those people are mingling to do illegal things or form hate mobs, the town is under no obligation to keep the street corner available to them.

... which, actually, may draw an interesting parallel between book burning and gentrification. Perhaps a topic for another day. ;)

> The only rational argument people can make against the "purging" (of blatantly racist etc. subreddits) is the "slippery slope" argument, which is usually known as a fallacious logical device.

Not at all true. I don't like any removal of content by reddit employees (as opposed to subreddit moderators) beyond what is required by law. Whether it leads to more and more removal in the future is irrelevant. I would like reddit to be a place for completely free, uncensored expression.

And before the political philosophy experts pounce, I am well aware of the argument. It's not a free speech violation when it's a private company choosing what content to host. I'm not saying reddit doesn't have the right to censor. I'm just saying I would prefer that they didn't.

> I'm not saying reddit doesn't have the right to censor. I'm just saying I would prefer that they didn't.

I'm genuinely curious as to why. Do you feel your experience on reddit is harmed if /r/coontown is gone? Or is it just the principle of the matter?

> Do you feel your experience on reddit is harmed if /r/coontown is gone?

Not directly, of course. My experience on reddit isn't directly harmed if any community I don't visit is removed. But it would be pretty obviously unrealistic for me to propose that reddit remove all subreddits except for the couple of dozen that I'm subscribed to.

But there's obviously some middle ground between 'free-for-all' and 'only your subreddits' that allows for moderation of the subreddits that are literally evil.

Sure, there is plenty of middle ground. It's a continuum. I just personally prefer the free end of the continuum.

I think you still get the free end of the continuum if /r/coontown is gone.

The discussion is not over whether to ban only /r/coontown.

But the discussion is also not over whether to ban most, all, or even some subreddit's. It's over a fairly targeted removal, though reddit doesn't have a rubric for targeting in the future, which understandably makes some people nervous---people who like a nice, ordered, clear set of rails to ride on. But this is social, and that's not how social works. It still doesn't take much common sense to guess at what's in and what's out.

I mean, what we're basically seeing is this;

Yishan Wong, 2012: "We stand for free speech. This means we are not going to ban distasteful subreddits. We will not ban legal content even if we find it odious or if we personally condemn it."

spez, 2015: Wow, that REALLY didn't work. So we're not going to do THAT anymore. Tune in on Thursday and we'll talk about what we'll do instead.

Does this mean your favorite subreddits might get killed? Possibly. But probably not. And that's likely to be good enough for an awful lot of users. More importantly, "an Internet with a front page that doesn't have a CoonTown is a better internet" is a pretty easy assertion to buy.

Until they explain what their plans are tomorrow, we are all just guessing what the future will be

I don't feel like your 2015 phrasing captures the essence of the announcement. The announcement says less that free speech didn't work and more that free speech was never a goal.

That's why the contrast between the quotes is so notable: "Neither Alexis nor I created reddit to be a bastion of free speech, but rather as a place where open and honest discussion can happen"

I guess I just disagree on what we're basically seeing.

Well, I never accused Reddit leadership of being consistent. ;)

> I would like reddit to be a place for completely free, uncensored expression.

This is nice in theory, but it basically requires defending the rights of hate groups to silence those they hate. It's hard to freely express yourself when there are people calling for your extermination, or treating everything you say as if it came from the mouth of a five year old.

Why would the targets of hate speech be in subreddits dedicated to that hate speech?

They wouldn't be, but neither is that hate speech limited to the subreddits that are dedicated for it.

I am 100% certain that I could go to the comments of any top post on pics, videos, funny, games and probably a dozen other default subs and find some hate speech with a positive score.

Remove the subreddits that these people call home, and they automatically feel less welcomed on the site.

> I am 100% certain that I could go to the comments of any top post on pics, videos, funny, games and probably a dozen other default subs and find some hate speech with a positive score.

You're saying you could go look for hate speech and find it. That doesn't seem all that troubling to me. Don't go look for it, and you will find it much less frequently.

Maybe it's not as troubling if it needs to be searched for. But it doesn't need to be searched for. It's everywhere on the defaults, that's the troubling part. You don't have to go to a specifically racist subreddit to see racism. You don't have to go to a specifically woman-hating subreddit to see misogyny.

I'm saying that it is everywhere. Not "I could find some hatred in some submissions", but "I could find hatred in any submission".

This discussion is not about reddit announcing to more strictly moderate the default subbreddits. I think they would be wise to do that, and I would have very little problem with it (especially personally, since I don't subscribe to hardly any of the defaults).

The discussion here in this specific chain of comment started because I responded to this:

> I would like reddit to be a place for completely free, uncensored expression.

By saying:

> This is nice in theory, but it basically requires defending the rights of hate groups to silence those they hate.

Allowing the hate groups a home on reddit makes them feel comfortable. Deleting the hate group subreddits reduces their ability to silence others. It sends a message to both the haters and their targets that the hate is not welcome.

If it's a choice between censoring a bunch of evil bigots, and letting their uncensored speech censor the people they hate, I will pick censoring the bigots every time.

So, why are you here at HN, which has much stricter guidelines and much more active moderators than reddit will ever have site-wide? Reddit is still vastly more "free" than HN, and yet...the caliber of conversation here is generally higher (not always, and the HN demographic has its blind spots), and I believe it is precisely because it has no tolerance for fools.

In short, I don't care about racist's "right" to rant on reddit. They can go write it on the wall of the cave they live in, for all I care.

> So, why are you here at HN

HN is roughly the equivalent of a single subreddit on reddit. I don't have a problem with individual subreddits with strict moderation, because those policies don't affect the policies of other subreddits. HN doesn't (as far as I know) intend to be a host for a plethora of communities each dedicated to a specific topic or hobby.

> Reddit is still vastly more "free" than HN, and yet...the caliber of conversation here is generally higher (not always, and the HN demographic has its blind spots), and I believe it is precisely because it has no tolerance for fools.

HN generally has high quality discussion, but so do many (mostly small) subreddits.

Are those subreddits threatened by a ban on /r/fatpeoplehate?

If not, there's very little to be concerned about.

Perhaps a bit extreme, but the underlying point is applicable here.

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

There is no talk of banning socialists, trade unionists, Jews, or any other thing that is not a subreddit or user devoted to hate. Further, no one is "coming for" redditors that spew hate...they're merely being shown the door.

The comparison of this quote, which is about people literally being thrown into jail for their beliefs, to racists being told they can't post hate speech on a privately owned website, is disingenuous, at best.

> about reddit’s policy on the more offensive and obscene content on our platform.

As is readily apparent, literally anything can be considered offensive and obscene.

I think we'll have to agree to disagree on definitions of "readily apparent" and "literally anything."

Though the "I know it when I see it" definition of obscenity is frustratingly open, it actually works in practice. Real human societies have implemented it and continue to implement it. This is not something you can write a script for, but that doesn't mean it doesn't work (I find technically-minded people generally have a bias against things that can't even be scripted in theory... Those things make up a lot of the world, inconveniently).

And yes, that means Redditors live in a world of ambiguity. Welcome to the world, I guess. Such ambiguity doesn't imply that, say, /r/science or /r/popmusic would be on the chopping block, and it'd be absurd to argue it does.

At least, the fact that /r/coontown is on the chopping block doesn't threaten /r/science any more than some hypothetical change in leadership in the future that decides Reddit is more profitable without any subreddits, and that can be a good enough point to settle on.

So relax; your favorite subreddit is not under threat, unless it probably should be. Ambiguity is the nature of real social structures, because humans are ambiguous creatures. ;)

> Though the "I know it when I see it" definition of obscenity is frustratingly open, it actually works in practice.

Maybe we'll have to agree to disagree on that as well. There is nowhere near as much freedom of expression in the world as I would like. I'm not sure if you have a definition for "it works in practice" other than "real human societies have implemented it." I suspect there is a huge correlation between people who think that current policies are working fine and people who have never been affected by those policies.

> So relax; your favorite subreddit is not under threat, unless it probably should be.

Good grief. That is a very troubling statement.

I don't understand why you would claim no one who posts in /r/science would ever be capable of producing a post, opinion, or content that could fall under reddits new guidelines for deletiong and/or banning.

Do you believe everyone who touches /r/science cannot, or will not, touch these other subreddits (and vice versa, the people in /r/coontown cannot post in /r/science?).

On what do you base that belief?

That's not my belief at all. The belief is that there's no likely scenario where /r/science gets killed because it's a toxic wasteland of racism. /r/coontown, in contrast, gets no such consideration; it is a toxic wasteland of racism. And if it somehow comes to pass that /r/science's content were to follow in coontown's footsteps, then by all means, cut /r/science out too.

Reddit's owners are moving in a direction where they've decided to take a small stand against the worst of the worst harmful subreddits, and people seem to be taking this as a dog-whistle that every forum is up for possible deletion at the whim of some arbitrary, uncontrolled bogeyman tomorrow. That's not how obscenity censorship works and it isn't how human decency works. It's how people of a certain political bent like to pretend they work (because the world would be easier to understand and predict if that were true), but that belief doesn't stand the test of reality.

Where your thinking is flawed is in the idea that major subreddits won't be affected by reddit's stance change. Specifically, banning isn't the only way to affect a subreddit, it's merely one of the most final.

As for your fixation on /r/coontown.

Can you remind me, wasn't there a famous person once who made a quote about the unpopular opinions being the ones that needed defending?

There's a clear difference between what /r/fatpeoplehate was doing and /r/coontown. You may not like that they exist, but your offense should not be enough to get that subreddit banned.

OTOH, reddit is a private company and they can do what they want, but taking the moral highroad in this argument from your side is silly, especially seeing how you seem to be wanting to infringe on others' free speech because you don't like what they use it for.

And wasn't there a famous person that had a quote pertaining to that? I think so.

And yet, for someone who values the freedom of expression, limiting another persons freedom due to something as simple as 'offense' is a slippery slope to limiting their freedom of expression due to someone else taking offense at what they say.

This is why the quote is applicable and your response is lazy.

They are not threatened by a ban on /r/fatpeoplehate, but they are absolutely threatened by a vaguely policy for banning things that are deemed offensive or inappropriate.

I don't agree that the caliber of conversation is higher here. It's more directed since HN has a single topic, but I've never had someone completely change the way I think about a topic the way I have at reddit.

The amazing part about reddit is the sheer spectrum of people you meet. For you that's obviously not interest, but for me, I'd much rather have that experience than what HN gives me.

But I also don't choose, I simply experience both, which is the answer to your original question.

It's also the answer to Hubski's complaints about reddit. I like being able to have a deep conversation with someone about software dev, laugh at a cat pic, and learn something new about a subject I know little about, all in the span of a few hours.

HN will never give that sort of experience.

> HackerNews doesn't allow racism [...]

HN is the equivalent of a single sub-reddit. Readers see the titles of all submissions that make it to the top pages or to the RSS feed they are using. They also see the user name that submitted the story, and the site it is from.

This necessitates restrictions on content, because nearly everyone has some kind of content they do not want to read to the point that they will choose not to visit sites where they cannot avoid it. Without restrictions, it would be too much effort to pick out the things you are interested in from among the things that you find extremely distasteful or offensive that it just would not be worth the effort for most people.

Reddit has sub-reddits. As long as an offensive sub-reddit is not made a default sub-reddit, and you do not subscribe to it, and you aren't subscribed to sub-reddits (or external sources) that discuss whether or not Reddit should allow offensive sub-reddits, you will rarely or never see that offensive sub-reddit.

For example, I had no idea that /r/coontown existed until it was mentioned several times here on HN.

Reddit would be best off in the long run, I think, if they set the line at legality under the laws applicable in whatever state they are incorporated, along with a no doxing and no FPH-like material, combined with a logical split of Reddit into two sets of sub-reddits: Prime Time Reddit (PTR) and Uncensored Reddit (UR).

The two would share accounts, but only PTR shows up on your front page, and there would be a link to take you to a UR front page (or maybe an option to show UR top content after PTR content on a unified front page, with a separator between the two sections).

Both would require (1) legality, and (2) no doxing and FPH-like behavior. PTR would in addition require that sub-reddits (including their topic, their acceptable submissions, and their comments) be things that would be acceptable if they were part of a US nationwide prime time television show.

Advertisers would be able to specify whether their ads just go to PTR, just to UR, or both, and maybe there should also be separate Reddit Gold systems on the two.

By the standards of US prime time television, almost all of Reddit would need to be on UR, even the heavily moderated parts.

Yeah, at least for language. Fuck is a lot more common on Reddit than it is on prime time television.

I probably should have went with US cable television, with the premium networks (HBO, Showtime, Starz, and so on) excluded, and with a more European approach to nudity and sex.

So, Huffman just announced more or less the policy you just suggested.