Racism is okay on Reddit
April 12, 2018 7:44 AM Subscribe

Unlike some web communities, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman has stated that racism is permitted on the platform.
posted by agregoli (184 comments total) 20 users marked this as a favorite

Vice: Here Are Reddit’s Whiniest, Most Low-Key Toxic Subreddits

So far as I can tell when people's favorite hate-speech subreddit gets deleted because Reddit gets worried about its bottom line, they wind up at /r/CringeAnarchy [I'm not going to link it & tw: openly genocidal Nazis, violent transphobes, etc]
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:49 AM on April 12, 2018 [8 favorites]

Reddit, where you can say anything at all (unless of course we think you're Russian, then we'll ban you).
posted by Dysk at 7:53 AM on April 12, 2018

Gotta love good old free speech absolutism, where the right of bigots to be bigots is more important than having a community where people don't get chased out for who they are.
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:57 AM on April 12, 2018 [55 favorites]

When people ask me about MetaFilter, I tell them "it's like Facebook without all the idiots, or Reddit without all the assholes."
posted by sexyrobot at 7:58 AM on April 12, 2018 [52 favorites]

I'll say this: at last they're honest about it, instead of doing the usual "we're taking steps to address x in our platform" PR shtick Facebook and Twitter do every couple of months while doing jack shit (or should I say @jack shit) to actually address the situation in a meaningful manner because they're too concerned about their bottom lines without alienating a part of their userbase.

It's also why I'll never have an account there.
posted by lmfsilva at 8:00 AM on April 12, 2018 [12 favorites]

v. v. concerned about ~900 Russian accounts because posting is war, Nazis ok though
posted by indubitable at 8:01 AM on April 12, 2018 [3 favorites]

I'm solely on reddit because I am subscribed to one of the most low key, niche, low traffic sub-reddits devoted to something I love, with a bit over 5k subscribers, and I am torn between staying because it has nothing to do with the above, or leaving it, because OF the above.
Goddammit, people.
posted by Major Matt Mason Dixon at 8:01 AM on April 12, 2018 [19 favorites]

"This means on Reddit there will be people with beliefs different from your own, sometimes extremely so. [...] I don’t think we should silence people just because their viewpoints are something we disagree with."

"Sometimes, on Reddit, there will be people whose core belief is that you are subhuman and should be exterminated. We will provide a platform for their message, along with an army of bots and disgruntled young men to amplify it. Your attempt to participate in this valuable discussion will be downvoted and hidden almost before you can post it."
posted by uncleozzy at 8:02 AM on April 12, 2018 [123 favorites]

Reddit is enjoyable so long as one continually updates filters and stick to small subs. As soon as a sub get's popular then it starts to go to hell.
posted by microm3gas at 8:03 AM on April 12, 2018 [16 favorites]

The US obsession with free speech as an axiomatically good thing has always struck me as simplistic in the extreme; and even by the very low standards of the US free speech debate, Huffman's views are so simplistic as to be childish.

Of course speech is a form of behaviour, in the sense that he's using "behaviour" - it's something that you do that affects the world. (And in fact, producing written speech remains the predominant form of behaviour online, other than the various forms of passive consumption, which have orders-of-magnitude smaller effects).
posted by chappell, ambrose at 8:04 AM on April 12, 2018 [29 favorites]

The US obsession with free speech as an axiomatically good thing has always struck me as simplistic in the extreme; and even by the very low standards of the US free speech debate, Huffman's views are so simplistic as to be childish.

We deify free speech in the US, and treat it as an end unto itself. As I said in a previous thread, the culture here lionizes a court ruling giving the okay to an act of intimidation and terror as a symbol of freedom.

In such an environment, Huffman's position is unsurprising.
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:09 AM on April 12, 2018 [7 favorites]

Reddit has a history both of making a safe space for racists under the guise of free-speech absolutism, and deleting toxic subreddits as soon as they receive any attention in the mainstream media. It's truly the most incoherent, hypocritical, cowardly stance possible.
posted by Vulgar Euphemism at 8:11 AM on April 12, 2018 [36 favorites]

"If we exclude no one explicitly, we are just excluding a lot of people implicitly." -Sumana Harihareswara.
posted by fings at 8:12 AM on April 12, 2018 [81 favorites]

Given that US courts use commerce jurisdiction to extend the reach of our laws regulating content on the Internet to non-US persons and companies (see, e.g., SESTA/FOSTA) maybe a country with stronger hate speech laws (Germany?) should charge Huffman with some hate crime facilitation. Personally.

I'd imagine it would go nowhere but I'd enjoy the hell out of it.
posted by snuffleupagus at 8:13 AM on April 12, 2018 [12 favorites]

I swore off reddit the night of the US presidential election because I could not bear to see /r/thedonald invade the frontpage/everywhere else crowing about it. Haven't been on since.

Before that, I couldn't have imagined leaving. I feel like it's impacted my life for the better.
posted by Grimp0teuthis at 8:14 AM on April 12, 2018 [4 favorites]

Reddit, where you can say anything at all (unless of course we think you're Russian, then we'll ban you).

No, it's much more base and self-serving than that. Whatever the reddit management pretends, there's no principled ideological stand here, as their history clearly shows. The only "principle" is whether the company is drawing heat for something. reddit was more than willing to ban the pedo subs, the fat-hate subs, the celebrity nude subs, etc as soon as they negatively affected the company.

Maybe it's just the way I use it, but I don't see Reddit as a community. It's a collection of thousands of isolated subreddit communities. It's very easy to stick to the good parts and have zero contact with the toxic ones.

The problem with this is that it doesn't address the problem of racism on the site, which still exists whether you view the site as one big community or as a million little ones. So the racism continues to spread and fester, whether it personally impacts you or not. It's like living in a town with a lot of KKK activity and hate crimes but shrugging and saying you never visit the parts of town where the Klan operates.
posted by Sangermaine at 8:18 AM on April 12, 2018 [38 favorites]

Maybe it's just the way I use it, but I don't see Reddit as a community. It's a collection of thousands of isolated subreddit communities. It's very easy to stick to the good parts and have zero contact with the toxic ones.

So what, we just shouldn't care about the people conspiring to exterminate minorities because we don't have to read that part? What the fuck is this argument and why does it keep showing up here?
posted by selfnoise at 8:20 AM on April 12, 2018 [72 favorites]

I'm solely on reddit because I am subscribed

Reddit has alot of linked content that gets sourced/bubbled/highlighted faster than anywhere else I find.

So - for technical topics, it's not bad.

However... IMO, you should approach Reddit with the same rule as YouTube... NEVER READ THE COMMENTS...

In fact, also IMO - there is only one site on the entire internet, where in my 24-years of being online has proved to have a truly valuable and decent community... Hint, hint... (Best money I have ever spent anywhere)
posted by jkaczor at 8:23 AM on April 12, 2018 [3 favorites]

Yeah, Huffman seems to be dividing the set of actions covered by “posting to Reddit” into two categories, “beliefs” and “actions,” in a totally arbitrary and self-serving way. Super disengenuous.

Agreed. While the division between beliefs and actions is useful in the offline world (you can't outlaw racist beliefs, because you can't police people's thoughts; only their discriminatory / racially motivated actions), posting to reddit is all action and zero belief.

You can't stop people using racial slurs in their mind, but typing them out and hitting "send" is certainly an action, and one that is -correctly- illegal in many places outside the US.
posted by chappell, ambrose at 8:25 AM on April 12, 2018 [17 favorites]

Reddit ad for racist site urges whites to 'continue their lineage'

A spokesperson claims that approving this ad was a mistake, but really, would you be surprised?
posted by uncleozzy at 8:28 AM on April 12, 2018 [3 favorites]

Wow. Makes me happy I never opened an account there.

Thank {insert deity} for Metafilter. And for the $5 entry fee that keeps the obvious trolls at bay. And for the ever-vigilant mods who keep the persistent trolls at bay, and keep the rest of us from turning INTO trolls.
posted by caution live frogs at 8:29 AM on April 12, 2018 [18 favorites]

The only "principle" is whether the company is drawing heat for something. reddit was more than willing to ban the pedo subs, the fat-hate subs, the celebrity nude subs, etc as soon as they negatively affected the company.

This. Are media figures or social media influencers (god I hate that phrase) getting a lot of traction calling out a particular subreddit or collection of them? Are advertisers or regulators being asked to comment? Cut off the debate, protect the bottom line. Otherwise, MOAR FREEZE PEACHES R U TRIGGERED SNOWFLAKES? Even in the recent New Yorker article's portrayal there was an easily detectable egelord/shitlord attitude among Reddit's own content monitors.

The woman in the captain’s cap said, “O.K., someone just asked, ‘How will the exact phrase “kill yourself” be handled?’ ”
“It all depends on context,” Ashooh said. “They’re going to get tired of hearing that, but it’s true.”
“Uh-oh, looks like we missed a bestiality sub,” the woman in the captain’s cap said. “Apparently, SexWithDogs was on our list, but DogSex was not.”
“Did you go to DogSex?” Ashooh said.
“Yep.”
“And what’s on it?”
“I mean . . .”
“Are there people having sex with dogs?”
“Oh, yes, very much.”
“Yeah, ban it.”
“I’m going to get more cheese sticks,” the woman in the captain’s cap said, standing up. “How many cheese sticks is too many in one day? At what point am I encouraging or glorifying violence against my own body?”
“It all depends on context,” Ashooh said.
...
Last April Fools’, instead of a parody announcement, Reddit unveiled a genuine social experiment. It was called r/Place, and it was a blank square, a thousand pixels by a thousand pixels. In the beginning, all million pixels were white. Once the experiment started, anyone could change a single pixel, anywhere on the grid, to one of sixteen colors. The only restriction was speed: the algorithm allowed each redditor to alter just one pixel every five minutes. “That way, no one person can take over—it’s too slow,” Josh Wardle, the Reddit product manager in charge of Place, explained. “In order to do anything at scale, they’re gonna have to coöperate....”

...[t]he upper-left corner was a choppy, flickering purple, as the Blue Empire and the Red Empire battled for dominance. A graffiti artist, or artists, wrote, “9/11 was an inside job”; a few minutes later, the “was” turned into “wasn’t,” and the “an” became “anime.” Elsewhere, “Dick butt” became “Dick butter,” then “Dick buffet.” And then the swastikas appeared—just a few of them, but enough to make Wardle raise the hood of his sweatshirt, retreat into an empty conference room, and shut the door, looking pallid.

In his office, Huffman met with Chris Slowe, Reddit’s first employee, who is now the chief technical officer.
“How is Place going?” Huffman asked.
“Pretty much as expected,” Slowe said. “A lot of memes, some Pokémon, and a barrage of dicks.”

posted by snuffleupagus at 8:35 AM on April 12, 2018 [10 favorites]

So what, we just shouldn't care about the people conspiring to exterminate minorities because we don't have to read that part? What the fuck is this argument and why does it keep showing up here?

First of all, it's not an argument. A previous comment mentioned the idea of reddit as a community and I commented on that. Does it suck that Reddit (at its top level) is embracing unrestricted free speech as a principle? Absolutely, but guess what? So does your entire fucking country, but that doesn't mean every American is complicit just by living there.
posted by rocket88 at 8:43 AM on April 12, 2018 [14 favorites]

The US obsession with free speech as an axiomatically good thing has always struck me as simplistic in the extreme; and even by the very low standards of the US free speech debate, Huffman's views are so simplistic as to be childish.

If the US was obsessed with free speech Colin Kaepernick would still be an NFL quarterback.
posted by srboisvert at 8:44 AM on April 12, 2018 [108 favorites]

Once again, thank you to our mods here on Metafilter.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 8:45 AM on April 12, 2018 [14 favorites]

So does your entire fucking country, but that doesn't mean every American is complicit just by living there.

This is (maybe?) a common misunderstanding of the First Amendment. It only protects against government action. Generally speaking, private entities can limit speech on their platforms however they see fit (although it starts to get complicated where that intersects regulated markets and commercial communications etc). There's definitely no First Amendment bar to Reddit banning Nazis if it wants to.
posted by snuffleupagus at 8:52 AM on April 12, 2018 [23 favorites]

I keep justifying my use of Reddit as a good way to keep tabs on events in my current small city, vegan gif recipes, and all the regional and international beer communities for my podcast.

But you know what? I can use the #ygk hashtag for my city, the internet is a wealth of vegan communities, and I need to go craft an AskMe to find out about non-reddit beer communities because THIS IS BULLSHIT.
posted by Kitteh at 8:55 AM on April 12, 2018 [3 favorites]

So does your entire fucking country, but that doesn't mean every American is complicit just by living there.

Membership in America is not practically voluntary for most citizens, but otherwise it sure does make you complicit.
posted by selfnoise at 8:55 AM on April 12, 2018 [11 favorites]

If the US was obsessed with free speech Colin Kaepernick would still be an NFL quarterback.

Hey, I didn't say that the US wasn't equally or more obsessed with racism. But yes - great point.

"The US" is probably unhelpful here. "The large group of white people who see free speech as an unequivocal good" would have been a better framing, and it comes down to the right to say what you want without consequences, which is a big part of white privilege.
posted by chappell, ambrose at 8:56 AM on April 12, 2018 [4 favorites]

Once again, a reminder that Reddit stops advertising from appearing on "controversial" subreddits so that corporate ads don't appear next to the racist content. This sounds benign or even positive, but in fact means that anyone who only visits, say, r/InterestingFactsAboutSpaceAndNoHarrassmentOfWomen or r/CuteGiraffePicturesButNoRacismPlease or whatever is actually financially subsidizing the racist subreddits. Reddit has remarkably figured out a way to monetize cute puppy pictures to fund Nazi organization.
posted by Homeboy Trouble at 8:57 AM on April 12, 2018 [75 favorites]

Couple comments removed. I have all kinds of high-sodium-content opinions about Reddit too, but we aren't on Reddit so let's make an effort to avoid lapsing into needlessly crappy framing of comments toward one another over here.
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:04 AM on April 12, 2018 [11 favorites]

v. v. concerned about ~900 Russian accounts because posting is war, Nazis ok though

As someone pointed out in the /r/announcements thread, both Twitter and Facebook discovered millions of propaganda accounts. Even correcting for the relatively smaller size of Reddit, that still suggests that Reddit's methods for discovering propaganda accounts have missed the mark by several orders of magnitude. Especially when your consider that the Putin/Assad/Erdogan boosters will find you almost immediately if you start badmouthing them. And then, of course, the_donald.

Yeah, this was finally the last straw for me.
posted by tobascodagama at 9:05 AM on April 12, 2018 [6 favorites]

I am more okay with people just being out with their support of racism than the mealy mouthed passive aggressive bullshit I see a lot of people attempting. At least with the "out with it" method I'm not playing mind games.

I would agree with this were it not for the anonymity. If people could only post as themselves, verifiably, with as picture of their face, the free speech of bigotry would be something they'd have to live with the consequences of. Instead, they can just hide behind endless throwaway accounts.
posted by UltraMorgnus at 9:06 AM on April 12, 2018 [5 favorites]

Reddit membership is a choice while citizenship, aside for the privileged, is not. Choosing to support reddit by being a subscriber, despite their loathsome policies, is more akin to voting a bigot into office because he'll lower your taxes.
posted by dazed_one at 9:07 AM on April 12, 2018 [7 favorites]

Reddit ad for racist site urges whites to 'continue their lineage'

I'm surprised that, in this age of surveillance-capitalist adtech, the racial eugenicists haven't started using demographic ad targeting: show people with a high probability of being in group A ads with pictures of smiling parents with adorable kids, and everyone else ads for the things they'd miss if they became parents (expensive adventure holidays, lifestyles in areas unsuited for families, 2-seater sportscars, &c.), with the odd ad for vasectomy clinics or similar.
posted by acb at 9:08 AM on April 12, 2018 [2 favorites]

This sounds benign or even positive

It doesn’t sound that benign - aside from your excellent point that they’re subsidising the heinous shit with the nice stuff, it also shows that they are aware of the heinous shit’s existence, and they know it’s unacceptable to their advertisers.

Added to their policy of “delete stuff when we get called on it”, this means that we’re not looking at a group of principled libertarians, willing to let their commitments lead where they may. We’re looking at the kind of pieces of shit that will tell a sexist joke around their buddies, but wouldn’t dare to if a woman was present.
posted by chappell, ambrose at 9:13 AM on April 12, 2018 [11 favorites]

It's very easy to stick to the good parts and have zero contact with the toxic ones.

the thing is? it's actually not that easy for some people? for me personally, i can't deal with reddit because you'll be in an innocuous friendly discussion of something and everyone is behaving like normal nontoxic human beings, and one person who is, in the context of that discussion, perfectly pleasant to interact with, happens to be posting under a username that's rapey or grossly misogynist or racist, which a whole lot of the reddit userbase seems to find, if not actively delightful and hilarious, then at least just not really anything worth caring about one way or another for them.

like whatever issues i might have with metafilter, i can at least be 100% sure that if i do happen to see someone joining in a friendly discussion about cute cats with the handle WomanBeater5000 or face_r4p3r, i will very quickly also see their banning.
posted by poffin boffin at 9:14 AM on April 12, 2018 [45 favorites]

Absolutely, but guess what? So does your entire fucking country, but that doesn't mean every American is complicit [in white supremacy] just by living there.

no but all white Americans are. there was a moment during Shay's rebellion when the white working class joined in with black folks to rise up against plantation owners for their rights but they were easily convinced that they could have rights over black folks and sold out to a system of elevated status for whites (ie white supremacy) that kept the bulk of the material and emanent wealth (eg land, capital, education) isolated from all people of color but particularly from black folks

also, buddy, there was a little thing called 'colonialism' perpetrated by every wealthy Western nation for centuries that made a global market out of slavery and subjugation so what are you even talking about, lol
posted by runt at 9:19 AM on April 12, 2018 [3 favorites]

However... IMO, you should approach Reddit with the same rule as YouTube... NEVER READ THE COMMENTS...

so bury your head in the sand about issues of oppression and hope they'll go away?

you know this really only works for people with a lot of privilege, right?
posted by runt at 9:22 AM on April 12, 2018 [11 favorites]

As someone pointed out in the /r/announcements thread, both Twitter and Facebook discovered millions of propaganda accounts. Even correcting for the relatively smaller size of Reddit, that still suggests that Reddit's methods for discovering propaganda accounts have missed the mark by several orders of magnitude.

Arguably all reddit accounts are propaganda accounts. Certainly everyone posting to /r/thedonald is engaging in propaganda. I guess that's okay because their IP doesn't geocode as Russian?
posted by Dysk at 9:23 AM on April 12, 2018 [3 favorites]

I'm not so sure why people needlessly frame Reddit as "something else". Change AskMe to ChatFi, allowed the number of categories to expand so they cover specific niches and have rando members mod those categories then it is exactly the same. The real difference there is server cost.
posted by P.o.B. at 9:23 AM on April 12, 2018 [1 favorite]

Maybe it's just the way I use it, but I don't see Reddit as a community. It's a collection of thousands of isolated subreddit communities. It's very easy to stick to the good parts and have zero contact with the toxic ones.

it me.

For me, the programming, software, and nutrition communities are just fantastic. They are busy, active, and moderated, and you can read them for days and weeks and never see any bigoted content.

It's sort of like saying that the phone company is guilty of terrorism because Al Qaeda used their phone line to plan a bomb plot in New York. Reddit is more like a common carrier for an enormous massive cluster of different communities.
posted by theorique at 9:26 AM on April 12, 2018 [8 favorites]

I've been undecided on dropping reddit for a while, and the big problem for me is "what's left?" Facebook is actively predatory. Twitter and tumblr are broken by design and environments that encourage brigading and harassment. Imzy had good communities but failed its business model. r/bisexual and r/nonbinary are at least reasonably moderated from the worst aspects of biphobia and transphobia. I suppose I could continue to shout into the void on my own blog or Dreamwidth, but that is a wee bit lonely.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 9:28 AM on April 12, 2018 [3 favorites]

Using reddit is funding white supremacists. That's how I see it. There are plenty of other places to have a community.
posted by agregoli at 9:29 AM on April 12, 2018 [13 favorites]

The real difference there is server cost.

And culture. Reddit and MeFi could, hypothetically, be implemented on the same back-end software, but, as lived-in communities, they have radically different cultures. Reddit has an anything-goes culture that sticks to John Perry Barlow's small-L-libertarian idealism of “the Internet sees censorship as damage and routes around it” and, consequently, rejects any claim that that alt-right edgelordism is anything more than a minor irritation or a (potentially subjectively distasteful) part of the great market place of ideas. MeFi, however, has a distinctly progressive ethos, and is emphatically not a great melting pot of all ideas, Nazi and non-Nazi alike.
posted by acb at 9:29 AM on April 12, 2018 [9 favorites]

As always, thank you, Metafilter, for somehow managing to continue to be Metafilter, a site that's open to the public and yet somehow also not a public urinal/spittoon. The more contact I have with Reddit, the more grateful I am for this place & the work that goes into it.

I mean this, genuinely.
posted by foldedfish at 9:29 AM on April 12, 2018 [8 favorites]

I've been undecided on dropping reddit for a while, and the big problem for me is "what's left?"

Tumblr is an endless maelstrom of drama and art, suitable for 15 minute binges of "OMG OMG OMG." However, it won't fill your craving for substantial, sustained conversation that requires higher brain functions.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 9:31 AM on April 12, 2018 [4 favorites]

Conversations here are wonderful, but are limited in scope; no threaded discussions, which means it's considered rude for two or three people to wrangle a single issue for fifty comments; "any topic you like" is limited to MetaTalk; plenty of topics are off-limits. (There's good reasons for those, but that doesn't mean it's bad for people to want to keep discussing them.)

I don't visit MetaFilter for discussions about the different tropes in paper fanzines vs online fanfic archives, nor for talk about LGBT issues in non-Christian social communities. Not that we couldn't have a discussion about those - but it would indeed be *a* discussion, not an ongoing set of conversations that build on each other.

MF is wonderful, but it doesn't have themed topic forums; Reddit is still popular despite its horrible policies because it's one of the few places that still does, and doesn't require them to be linked to your wallet name.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 9:41 AM on April 12, 2018 [28 favorites]

Are we really debating whether there is anywhere online to have a decent conversation that isn't reddit? Like, the fact that we're having that conversation here surely invalidates one side of that argument out the gate?

The structure of metafilter isn't set up for minority-group discussions, and there's at least a dozen different topics that are notoriously bad to do on metafilter.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 9:42 AM on April 12, 2018 [13 favorites]

It's sort of like saying that the phone company is guilty of terrorism because Al Qaeda used their phone line to plan a bomb plot in New York.

no, because nobody is a federal prosecutor going after reddit on terrorism charges and 30%+ of Verizon's phone lines aren't being used for terrorism plots

instead, what people are saying is that it's shitty for a website to allow the practice that actively and intentionally damages large groups of individuals and especially for its CEO to ground this argument as a moral standing
posted by runt at 9:42 AM on April 12, 2018 [10 favorites]

More to the point, Reddit is not a common carrier. As has been pointed out, Reddit does not require each subreddit to "pay its freight", but in fact forces the regular subreddits to subsidize the bigoted ones, as they intentionally keep the latter ad-free.
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:45 AM on April 12, 2018 [9 favorites]

I guess that's okay because their IP doesn't geocode as Russian?

That does seem to be a reasonable explanation for how the Reddit admins arrived at such a ludicrously low number of "suspicious accounts", yeah.
posted by tobascodagama at 9:46 AM on April 12, 2018 [1 favorite]

Conversations here are wonderful, but are limited in scope; no threaded discussions, which means it's considered rude for two or three people to wrangle a single issue for fifty comments;

What would be difficult about those two or three people taking that side discussion to email?
posted by agregoli at 9:54 AM on April 12, 2018

> Huffman has added a long edit to his comment that begins, "In the heat of a live AMA, I don’t always find the right words to express what I mean."

I went back to read this "clarification" but then remembered that following his original comment, I'd finally blocked reddit in /etc/hosts and the site wouldn't resolve. I smiled.
posted by giraffeneckbattle at 9:56 AM on April 12, 2018 [5 favorites]

These are the same arguments we’ve had over and over again about Facebook or Twitter. All of them are actively terrible, and all of them have, to some degree, swallowed the internet. The network effect is an actual thing, and it would be great if people could acknowledge that. If you have a rare medical condition, say, or you don’t have a local community of people of your orientation/expression/whatever, Reddit might be that the only place where you can get information you need or commiserate with people who understand you.

I fucking hate Reddit with the fire of a thousand suns, but I’m not gonna tell the lonely, otherwise isolated kid with Disorder X that she’s a bad person for “supporting” Reddit by looking for what little human connection she can find. I’m gonna continue to hate the people who make Reddit terrible.

Honestly. Save your vitriol for the people who have actual power here. An advertiser boycott makes a lot more sense than self-righteously beating up on the little people.
posted by schadenfrau at 9:57 AM on April 12, 2018 [51 favorites]

What would be difficult about those two or three people taking that side discussion to email?

reading the side conversations can be edifying, at times

'reddit sucks and should be burned and salted' is a valid opinion/argument to make but 'there are plenty of extant reddit substitutes; it would not be missed' is kinda, not?
posted by prize bull octorok at 9:59 AM on April 12, 2018 [4 favorites]

Let's be clear, I'm not saying "keep reddit." I'm asking what do we need to do in order to create community-moderated discussion spaces for groups. And asking what alternatives exist for my little slice of that need.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 9:59 AM on April 12, 2018 [4 favorites]

but I’m not gonna tell the lonely, otherwise isolated kid with Disorder X that she’s a bad person for “supporting” Reddit by looking for what little human connection she can find.

Though the fact that she gets a net positive from Reddit bespeaks privilege in itself. Not all people have this level of privilege.

And it's the little people, in aggregate, who enable evil. Evil triumphs when good people do nothing, or when good people go along for the ride and rationalise it as not really that bad in the grand scheme of things.
posted by acb at 9:59 AM on April 12, 2018 [1 favorite]

Though the fact that she gets a net positive from Reddit bespeaks privilege in itself. Not all people have this level of privilege.

I mean, lots of people grit their teeth through pretty terrible things to get at something that they need. You seem to assume that people of color or trans folk or women or rape survivors — all of whom are people who can expect to encounter some terrible things on Reddit — aren’t among those who grit their teeth to get at what they need. You don’t know what you’re talking about.
posted by schadenfrau at 10:04 AM on April 12, 2018 [27 favorites]

no, because nobody is a federal prosecutor going after reddit on terrorism charges and 30%+ of Verizon's phone lines aren't being used for terrorism plots

In addition to which, Verizon isn't shrugging and saying "whaddaya gonna do?"

I've never been a member of reddit, and never heard anything about it that made me want to be. Yesterday I finally got around to deleting my Facebook account (which I stopped actively using ages ago), and zapped LinkedIn while I was at it; I deleted my Twitter account six months ago. I'm down to MetaFilter and occasionally Mastodon. I'm fine with that.

I recognize that neither of those is perfect, and nothing is going to be perfect for everyone. But MeFi works hard at the places where it needs to improve, and that matters. I love MetaFilter, but ultimately I really don't need an online community; I get along fine without one. But I do sometimes miss Facebook not for itself but for the interaction with folks I know in the real world. But you know, I have email, and a phone, and work a couple blocks away from some of them - we could get lunch!

I know it's not the same, and I also know that being able to do without those kinds of connections is both a privilege and a sad abandoning of the vision of connectedness that meant so much to a lot of people in the early days of the Internet. But I'm not willing to accept connectedness hosted by folks who won't watch out for the people who most need to connect, by folks who profit off racism and misogyny and hate and who shrug at incitement to violence and the notion of responsibility to community. If those folks won't draw a line in the sand, I will.

I'm not saying marginalized folks should abandon reddit; I am the opposite of marginalized in basically every respect and it's not for me to say what anyone else should do. I won't judge folks who stay because they feel they need to, either in order to stay connected or in hopes of encouraging change. But I certainly won't consider joining reddit unless and until I hear both the folks who run it say they're going to change things, and voices I currently hear talking about how toxic it is start saying that yes, it's better now.

And I think maybe I'll take a look at who's advertising on reddit and let them know my thoughts as well.
posted by nickmark at 10:06 AM on April 12, 2018 [2 favorites]

In other words: those people all exist on Reddit. I trust them to know what’s best for them, and I’m not going to dismiss them as “privileged” just because they manage to find some value on Reddit. That is, honestly, incredibly myopic, and speaks to ignorance about how Reddit is used by marginalized people.

On a totally different note:

Can any of the lawyers provide some hope at future regulation about inciting speech?
posted by schadenfrau at 10:07 AM on April 12, 2018 [12 favorites]

Schadenfrau said what I meant much more succinctly and clearly.
posted by nickmark at 10:09 AM on April 12, 2018 [2 favorites]

All that said, I don’t know what to do. Reddit, more so than Facebook or Twitter, is kind of a social cancer incubator, and it genuinely scares me. They’ve at least shown that they’re vulnerable to attacks on their business model, so...idk. Boycott’s the only thing I can think of.
posted by schadenfrau at 10:14 AM on April 12, 2018 [3 favorites]

Though if you do browse Reddit without an adblocker, or, even worse, pay for a premium account, you are actively supporting a nurturing habitat for Nazism. Your actions are making the world marginally shittier.
posted by acb at 10:16 AM on April 12, 2018 [1 favorite]

reading the side conversations can be edifying, at times

I personally love that Metafilter doesn't let 2-3 people have a side discussion about something not pertinent to the main topic at hand. What I was saying is it doesn't prevent conversations - since people can have those to their heart's content on email - it prevents conversations from muddying up a larger conversation with more people, which I find valuable. Given that a ton of side conversations is also difficult to mod, I think it's a net gain when these aren't permitted on a wider topic.
posted by agregoli at 10:18 AM on April 12, 2018 [1 favorite]

Can any of the lawyers provide some hope at future regulation about inciting speech?

Not great, especially with Gorsuch instead of Garland. Under Brandenburg v. Ohio, "the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action." Emphasis on imminent, as in grab your pitchfork and meet me in the square.

More in LII's explainer on the Brandenburg Test.
posted by snuffleupagus at 10:20 AM on April 12, 2018 [2 favorites]

Homeboy Trouble: Once again, a reminder that Reddit stops advertising from appearing on "controversial" subreddits so that corporate ads don't appear next to the racist content. This sounds benign or even positive, but in fact means that anyone who only visits, say, r/InterestingFactsAboutSpaceAndNoHarrassmentOfWomen or r/CuteGiraffePicturesButNoRacismPlease or whatever is actually financially subsidizing the racist subreddits. Reddit has remarkably figured out a way to monetize cute puppy pictures to fund Nazi organization.

Okay, is this 100% true? Because I have wanted to use this argument with friends who weasel-word their way around their use of Reddit ("there's nowhere else I can talk to people about how the Elgin Marbles are from Mars except for r/ElginMarblesAreFromMars, and I never go on the bad subreddits" or whatever), and I didn't know for certain if anyone who visit Reddit is contributing to the success of white supremacist/etc. subreddits.

Anyone can jump in here with an answer, so that I can either use this as ammo, or discard it as a support for my argument: if you use Reddit, in any way, you are, whether you want to be or not, actively supporting racists' (and fascists and homophobes and antisemites etc etc) use of one of the most viewed sites on the internet as a platform for their hate, yes?
posted by tzikeh at 10:21 AM on April 12, 2018

It's not like they've got different servers for the nazi subreddits and the less-nazi subreddits - all those advertising goals are going toward reddit as a whole, not being earmarked to pay mods on the good subreddits. I'm not sure what else you're asking - it seems to come down to your definition of 'directly'.
posted by sagc at 10:40 AM on April 12, 2018 [5 favorites]

sagc - I just mean, if you're on Reddit, you can't say that you're not helping to financially support Nazis having a platform and a voice on the internet, because you are. If that's the case, then I have some people I need to hit up with some emails, because they've told me that if they only ever visit their innocuous subreddit, they're not helping the Bad People in any way.
posted by tzikeh at 10:42 AM on April 12, 2018 [1 favorite]

Reddit could be a lot better and I wish there were better alternatives, but there aren't. I wish we could return to the 90-00s where the internet had smaller decentralized sites (forums, webrings, newsgroups) but that internet is gone with only a couple of exceptions, and those exceptions are mostly unknown unless someone invites you.

Internet communities for most people are reddit, tumblr, facebook and twitter. If you want to talk about something very niche there's reddit and that's mostly it (unless you count 4chan, and that's even worse). If you're lucky you may get or find an invitation to a community discord/slack where everything is siloed but that doesn't mean it'll be better moderated, it just means outsiders can't find out what's going inside.

If you're throwing the word "privilege" around, I'd say someone who can choose to not use reddit is a lot more privileged than someone for whom reddit is their only source of social support. Maybe the ones who would be left without any alternative should have more of a say than people yelling at reddit from their high horse.
posted by Memo at 10:47 AM on April 12, 2018 [7 favorites]

In general, I think "this alternative is superior to reddit in every way including racism" is going to be a much more powerful statement than "don't go to reddit even if that's where the discussion is because then you are basically a nazi too."

People need constructive options for what to do, not just general negative statements. I do think that the structure of reddit (and the general idea of a network of subreddits) has provided some big advantages over the disjointed forums and discussion groups that preceded it. Is anyone working on building a less-toxic version of that?
posted by mosst at 10:50 AM on April 12, 2018 [12 favorites]

I would much rather see a push to contact the advertisers and remind them that they're supporting a Nazi-friendly site even if their ads don't show up on the Nazi pages, than castigating individual users who find value in some corner of Reddit.

"You are helping pay for Nazis by reading text on pages that may or may not have visible ads on them!" is rather less reasonable than "[this list of] advertisers are paying for Nazi propaganda!" But we're not here railing at the advertisers, because those are abstract and distant, not people with names in front of us.

Target corporate evil, not the individuals who haven't rearranged their lives to stay out of one particular corner of that evil. (It's not like FB and Twitter are clean here; their policies just don't match their actions.)
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 10:51 AM on April 12, 2018 [15 favorites]

What's gonna happen if say, a bunch of Sex Workers start using the platform to get around SESTA. Will Reddit be the only defender of Sex Workers, or will they cowtow to the federal regulation and show their free speech isn't for women who need it for safety but only for groups who already have power.

I still use reddit, I know it's not a popular thing to say, but I don't see reddit as monolithic. I don't go to "/thedonald" I don't even go to any political subreddits these days. Just the music, gaming and coding subreddits which has an occasional outburst of whiny man children (particularly in video game subreddits).

Still , boy that Huffman sure is a piece of shit. At least he's a consistent piece of shit.
posted by symbioid at 10:54 AM on April 12, 2018 [1 favorite]

"There exist repugnant views in the world. As a result, these views may also exist on Reddit. I don’t want them to exist on Reddit any more than I want them to exist in the world, but I believe that presenting a sanitized view of humanity does us all a disservice. It’s up to all of us to reject these views."

What a crock of shit. First of all, you're already admitting to some level of sanitation. You won't allow calls to violence and all that -- but that is part of humanity, humanity sometimes wants to kill or hurt people for no good reason. People make and view child pornography, you mostly ban that, even though it's technically sanitizing humanity. You don't allow links to pirated content, yet that's part of humanity too.

What he is really saying is that he does want racist content and the racist side of humanity on his site and he wants to be the platform for racists and such groups. He is welcoming such content, supporting it, spreading it. Allowing this sort of shit has nothing to do with free speech. This is a private business, a private website, the government isn't involved here. Free speech doesn't mean everybody gets to say whatever they want everywhere, it just means the government usually can't step in to stop or control your speech. A private business has no obligation to do the same and on Reddit, allowing that content is tacit approval. Yes, this is okay to post, okay for us to advertise on, okay for us to analyze, okay for us to share and spread and expose myriad others to them.

"Though if you do browse Reddit without an adblocker, or, even worse, pay for a premium account, you are actively supporting a nurturing habitat for Nazism. Your actions are making the world marginally shittier."

Browsing with an ad-blocker is still supporting the site, making it more visible and popular to advertisers. If you ever post there, you're also contributing to the site directly.
posted by GoblinHoney at 10:56 AM on April 12, 2018 [13 favorites]

Reddit has a real advantage (that also serves as a disadvantage) to other forums and discussion websites: ease of transition from one community to another.

If you joined Reddit to discuss cats, and you want to discuss trains, you don't have to sign up for the trains forum. You just visit /r/trains (oh I do hope that's not about something else) and there you go. Of course, this ease also enables brigading and other horrible shit.

Communities become entrenched. If you're really into niche hobby X, and the X subreddit is the biggest discussion forum, you can't really leave Reddit unless you convince a lot of people to join a different forum. But if you do that, you lose any potential new members who might come over from other sections of Reddit. So you're encouraged to retain a Reddit presence even if you move away.

Reddit really sucks in a lot of ways as a company and as a platform, but until a competitor comes around that offers communities a similar experience and an ease of migration, Reddit will remain top dog. It's hard to fault individuals when the choice is basically "use Reddit, or be disconnected from your community."
posted by explosion at 10:58 AM on April 12, 2018 [14 favorites]

The problem with Reddit is that the overall tone of the site leans heavily toward being racist, misogynistic, toxically masculine, and xenophobic to such a degree that even casually browsing the most popular categories subjects one to that mentality.

Reddit radicalizes young white men. Sure, it has some sections with few people in them that aren’t radicalizing. But the MAJORITY of the site, the parts most people see, the parts new users and guests are automatically shown when they go there, are radicalizing. And like Twitter, the people actually running the company are totally fine with it. They support those principles and make sure they get as much visibility as possible, while blatantly silencing opposition. Only when they come within arm’s reach of actual legal trouble do they even say they don’t support it, and only then in the softest, most “We just can’t do anything about it” language possible, as if they aren’t actively running the software and consciously choosing which users to ban.

I run out of internet as much as the next person, but at the end of the day, one has to decide whether they want to give the privilege of their traffic to sites that strive to encourage white supremacy. There are other, smaller forums, and tools like Slack in which one can create and foster communities. NextDoor is one that has a lot of traffic, although it is based on geographical proximity and not subject.
posted by Autumnheart at 10:58 AM on April 12, 2018 [10 favorites]

Sure, you can craft a Reddit experience for yourself that's free from violent bigotry, through the careful curation of subreddits and the judicious use of filters.

Your participation still supports and enables one of the world's largest platforms for the recruitment, radicalization, and organization of violent bigots of all stripes.

Reddit will not change until enough people leave that it hurts them.

Leave.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 11:06 AM on April 12, 2018 [8 favorites]

Indeed, the quintessence of the issue is that you MUST curate Reddit content in order to get rid of the violent bigotry, because you’re automatically subscribed to all of it when you create an account. And you cannot curate content unless you do create an account. If you’re a guest, you get violent bigotry as the default experience.
posted by Autumnheart at 11:10 AM on April 12, 2018 [4 favorites]

Speaking of Slack, there’s been a bit of discussion about having a Metafilter Slack, and apparently one was created a couple years ago but didn’t really catch on. Perhaps now its time has come! I’m a long-time member of a telnet BBS that finally relocated to Slack, and I have to say that it’s quite convenient and flexible.
posted by Autumnheart at 11:13 AM on April 12, 2018 [4 favorites]

I think these are the same questions regarding black twitter or women's march organizing on facebook. I just had my #DumpFacebook moment but that comes with the full awareness that I'm cutting myself off from a couple of peers who do LGBTQ and mental illness advocacy there.

If your use of reddit is limited to the cute cat pics and the train hobbies, sure, I think you should quit. But pushing that as a universal prerogative without any realistic attempt to build alternatives is going to harm members of marginalized groups. And no, Slack is not an alternative.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 11:15 AM on April 12, 2018 [10 favorites]

If you’re a guest, you get violent bigotry as the default experience.

Except perhaps in reading those niche subreddits or better curated subreddits that people cite as the reason to hang around. But you can totally button your Reddit account and still read those.

I suppose that's still traffic to reddit, and ad impressions, but it doesn't inflate their active account numbers.
posted by snuffleupagus at 11:16 AM on April 12, 2018

Speaking of Slack, there’s been a bit of discussion about having a Metafilter Slack, and apparently one was created a couple years ago but didn’t really catch on. Perhaps now its time has come!

I've got no problems with folks spinning up little spin-off Slacks, any more than spin-off anything elses (and folks have done so on any number of occasions in one form or another), but I'll note that the idea of an official one is something we've talked about and passed hard on after looking at the various cost and technical and moderation issues that come with it.
posted by cortex at 11:22 AM on April 12, 2018 [6 favorites]

I have the privilege of not needing Reddit or FB or Twitter to have an internet life or having MeFi as an alternative to those things, but I do feel weird when people forget that not everyone does. Again, yay for the existence of Slack and Mastodon and etc, but I’m hoping you’re also thinking of how to migrate marginalised communities who have used those platforms b/c they don’t know or have access to those alternatives. Or else you’re just creating a nicer walled garden.
posted by Kitteh at 11:24 AM on April 12, 2018 [9 favorites]

If you're throwing the word "privilege" around, I'd say someone who can choose to not use reddit is a lot more privileged than someone for whom reddit is their only source of social support. Maybe the ones who would be left without any alternative should have more of a say than people yelling at reddit from their high horse.

Mmm, I’m reluctant to get into the Who Is More Privileged question [look, fine, it’s me] but firstly I’m really sceptical of these “it’s impossible for me to quit Social Network X” because impossible very frequently boils down to “inconvenient” and so are lots of actions that are nevertheless worth doing: voting, veganism, turning down a lucrative job offer from Big Tobacco, etc.

More importantly, the least privileged people in this discussion are probably the ones who don’t give a fuck about reddit one way or the other, but are the victims of Nazis, child abusers, violent misogynists and so on, and there’s ample evidence that reddit not only permits content from their abusers but encourages those abusers to form and grow self-reinforcing communities. They’re welcome up here on the high horse, and let’s ride the horse into the reddit boardroom, Braveheart-style, and together let’s hit the CEO with a morningstar.
posted by chappell, ambrose at 11:26 AM on April 12, 2018 [1 favorite]

Reddit will not change until enough people leave that it hurts them.

Leave.

When this kind of rhetoric is directed at Facebook, there's an immediate backlash of, "but I use FB to connect with my family! With distant friends! To keep track of events happening in ____ community!"

Is it acceptable when pointed at Reddit because the connections people make there are often topic-based instead of people-based, and the assumption is "you can get information about your topic of interest anywhere?"
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 11:36 AM on April 12, 2018 [7 favorites]

There's a lot of quality stuff on Reddit provided you know where to look for it. But you have to keep working at it since the garbage has a tendency to migrate and subreddits mutate.

That migration seems to be accelerating and I know my time there is going to end once I find myself filtering more than reading.
posted by tommasz at 11:37 AM on April 12, 2018

I would happily say exactly the same thing about Facebook if this were a thread about bigotry on Facebook. Personally, I have in fact left Facebook in part because of its role as an incubator of bigotry. For that matter, I will not join Twitter for the same reason.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 11:44 AM on April 12, 2018 [2 favorites]

To follow up on my own comment, I just deleted my account on reddit, and I won't be going back.
The RPG I love has an amazing standalone community, and I'm going to support that with my clicks and my eyeballs and my contribution to the conversations. Hell, I'm even going to throw them a few bucks via Patreon.
To each their own, but I really can't fathom hanging around my little isolated corner of reddit, while the rest of the site burns and still somehow generates income by my being there. It just doesn't pass the smell test.
If enough people vote with their feet, so to speak, I feel that the message will be heard.

~~Facebook, Instagram, Twitter,~~ and now ~~Reddit.~~
posted by Major Matt Mason Dixon at 11:48 AM on April 12, 2018 [3 favorites]

People who have responsibility for Reddit’s incubation of Nazis, in approximate order:
1. People who own Reddit
2. Nazis on Reddit
3. People who advertise on Reddit
.
.
.
? Joe Liberal who is active on Reddit and just ignore all the Nazi stuff because he can ignore it, but who might actually be absorbing some of its toxicity
.
.
.
?? People who come to Reddit to learn how to cope with difficult life thing X, Y, or Z or join communities of other people like them

Seems ...weird... to focus your ire on the bottom rung of that ladder.
posted by schadenfrau at 11:56 AM on April 12, 2018 [46 favorites]

Mmm, I’m reluctant to get into the Who Is More Privileged question [look, fine, it’s me] but firstly I’m really sceptical of these “it’s impossible for me to quit Social Network X” because impossible very frequently boils down to “inconvenient” and so are lots of actions that are nevertheless worth doing: voting, veganism, turning down a lucrative job offer from Big Tobacco, etc.

My local bi and pan group has had an average attendance of 1.5 after six months of attempting to grow it. The center is just now opening up weekend hours (after months of my offers to be the person doing it). There's a youth group that covers about a dozen schools across multiple counties.

So yeah, inconvenient is a good word for it.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 11:59 AM on April 12, 2018 [10 favorites]

And that goes for FB, Twitter, etc.

It’s just bizarre that this ends up in this argument every time. If you actually care about having an effect, help organize a boycott of Reddit (Twitter, etc) advertisers or something. Otherwise it kind of just looks like you want to feel superior by beating up on people who may not have the privilege of taking absolutist positions on the various communication media of our dumb world.
posted by schadenfrau at 12:00 PM on April 12, 2018 [17 favorites]

To just really clearly prepend this: on the subject specifically of reddit and of Huffman's comments/position on free speech and hate speech and so on: it's addled nonsense and I disagree vehemently. I also don't find the re-re-re-revelation that reddit's leadership is bad super interesting right now, so I wanted to respond to something else that's been a thread in this and other discussions. So:

I’m really sceptical of these “it’s impossible for me to quit Social Network X” because impossible very frequently boils down to “inconvenient” and so are lots of actions that are nevertheless worth doing: voting, veganism, turning down a lucrative job offer from Big Tobacco, etc.

Looking at this as a more general structural issue about how people relate to social media at large and online services that are (at least as ubiquitous services) still a pretty new thing:

I think "impossible" is for all but a handful of people an overstatement—e.g. it would, for me, be more or less impossible to "quit" MetaFilter but that's a matter of ownership and employment that doesn't apply to the vast majority of MeFites—but I think there's a relevance to the idea that inconvenience can be a matter of degree ranging from literal mild inconvenience up to hardship.

Like: being a vegan in a food desert is different from being vegan where there's reliable access to vegan-friendly food; being a vegan in poverty is different from being a vegan with budget to spare on good, tasty, low-hassle vegan food. Being vegan isn't any less or more of an ethical issue either way, on paper, but how much ruling out meat and dairy from your diet is an inconvenience or a hardship depends a hell of a lot on that. (Veganism is a metaphor I'm running with for this point of comparison, please let us not start arguing about veganism qua veganism. There was a whole thread recently if you want that, go search for it instead.)

So when folks struggle with their relationship with problematic social media and discussion platforms, I see a lot of it through that lens of different folks having different circumstances. Not everyone's inconvenience is the same; it's not even a simple spectrum ranging from "a little" to "a lot", let alone a single fixed value we can point at and say "it's this much". It's a multivector thing, and everybody is gonna work out that analysis differently.

And I think that's a big part of why there's never a consensus position on quitting this or that corporate social media platform in protest. Because there's value in quitting, and there's utility in using the platforms, and it hashes out differently from person to person.

And that utility is the big sticking point: as folks have noted, in this and lots of other discussions, people who get genuine community use out of some little corner of a given platform are filling an actual need. Social, support, resources, safety. These are things that can and do exist within the superstructure of a larger, unquestionably problematic platform. If it were just a matter of pure convenience or preference, there'd be less friction about calls to collectively move away from a given platform. But if folks are meeting an otherwise unmet need in their life, walking away from that can be scary, isolating, emotionally gutting, dangerous. It ends up being a choice between having access to something definitely valuable but problematic, or potentially having access to nothing at all. It's a messy position to be in.

I agree with the idea that, for the goal of getting people to meet their needs elsewhere, working toward positive alternatives is a better motivator than chastising folks for meeting their needs where they are now. Offering or collaborating to create a solution will get people in motion and avoid creating shitty feelings in a way that hard-line "you are a bad person unless you prioritize this issue over your own needs" arguments will. In general I think this is territory where prioritizing a mix of empathy and thoughtful targeting goes a long way. There are far richer (figuratively and literally) targets for collective anger and shaming on this stuff, who unambiguously deserve it.

Personally I think all of the biggies have spent their chances thrice over and would be happy to see them wither on the vine and give way to a new generation of smaller, less corporate, more ethically-grounded platforms where folks can meet their social needs without having to be stuck with the compromise of corporate apathy toward and enabling of hateful, toxic behavior. I have mixed feelings about whether and how and when we'll get there.
posted by cortex at 12:04 PM on April 12, 2018 [35 favorites]

People make and view child pornography, you mostly ban that, even though it's technically sanitizing humanity. You don't allow links to pirated content, yet that's part of humanity too.

In these cases, they would be criminally liable for hosting illegal content. They aren't banning it because it's virtuous to do so (although it is) - they are banning it because it's against the law.
posted by theorique at 12:18 PM on April 12, 2018

Honest question: If I am subscribed to only a few select subreddits and always use an adblocker on reddit, are they benefitting from me in any significant way?
posted by mkuhnell at 12:18 PM on April 12, 2018 [1 favorite]

I'd say that they sure are - you're an active user, you add to pageviews, and every time you click an upvote or a downvote link, you're creating content. It all allows them to charge higher rates for their ads.
posted by sagc at 12:26 PM on April 12, 2018 [5 favorites]

It depends on your definition of "significant".
1) You subscribe, which means you have a login, which contributes to their user count, which they can use to tempt advertisers (regardless of whether you actually see ads)
2) By visiting, you contribute to page views, see 1)
3) If you don't just read the site but actively post comments or posts, you are providing content, which contributes to drawing others to the site. (if nobody posted, there wouldn't be any reason to visit)
posted by Roommate at 12:27 PM on April 12, 2018 [4 favorites]

"They aren't banning it because it's virtuous to do so (although it is) - they are banning it because it's against the law."

I wouldn't lump piracy in with child pornography in terms of being against it is virtuous. Copyright and trademark laws seems wholly virtuousness and exist out of capitalist expedience.

"Honest question: If I am subscribed to only a few select subreddits and always use an adblocker on reddit, are they benefitting from me in any significant way?"

If you're posting , voting, or clicking content, you're contributing to the site. At the very least, as the least active a user - no account, very limited useage, don't even click through to anything... I'd argue you're still helping them by making their website more heavily visited.
posted by GoblinHoney at 12:27 PM on April 12, 2018 [1 favorite]

me: I have some people I need to hit up with some emails, because they've told me that if they only ever visit their innocuous subreddit, they're not helping the Bad People in any way.

schadenfrau, among others (I'm not picking on you, schadenfrau; you just summarized other comments well in yours):

People who have responsibility for Reddit’s incubation of Nazis, in approximate order:
1. People who own Reddit
2. Nazis on Reddit
3. People who advertise on Reddit
.
.
.
? Joe Liberal who is active on Reddit and just ignore all the Nazi stuff because he can ignore it, but who might actually be absorbing some of its toxicity
.
.
.
?? People who come to Reddit to learn how to cope with difficult life thing X, Y, or Z or join communities of other people like them

Seems ...weird... to focus your ire on the bottom rung of that ladder.

So, to clarify my response: the people I'm talking about are well-off, straight, progressive-thinking white women (a mix of single, married with no kids, married with kids, SAHM, DINKs, DI2Ks, etc.) who are VERY PERFORMATIVELY LOUD ALLIES with marginalized or injured groups so long as it's convenient for them to be (they all change their Facebook icons with alacrity whenever something happens in the world and they think that's activism), who have said to my face that they only read their few subreddits about quilting or hiking or gardening or art history or City X, and therefore are in no way responsible for any of the ugliness.

They're ignoring it because they can afford to. They are absolving themselves of any responsibility because they haven't bothered to think about it, or more specifically in a few cases, smugly informed me that I was wrong when I told them that they are an active part of the problem by being on Reddit, and they need to decamp. I believe that I can 100% without compunction tell them that they are guilty of financially supporting a platform that gives the microphone to hate, and that they should shuffle the fuck off of Reddit pronto, because staying makes them... what do we call people who are the opposite of allies? Axes?
posted by tzikeh at 12:31 PM on April 12, 2018 [2 favorites]

And the reason I'm talking to them is because they're who I can immediately reach. I can't reach the Nazis, and I sure can't reach the owners of Reddit. Organizing against the advertisers will take time. But the more of us who make noise among our friends and acquaintances about not actually literally helping to support the Nazis, the faster we can foster a movement away from Reddit. I mean, this is TG/AL in action, isn't it?
posted by tzikeh at 12:38 PM on April 12, 2018 [4 favorites]

Can someone explain to me what happened to Usenet? Reddit seems like A Usenet reader with ads. Did it die of spam? Or did ISPs just stop providing access to the protocol because of pirated software and porn?

I remember when Usenet forums were the best part of the internet, but there was a lot of edgelordy shit going on there too, depending on where you hung out.
posted by rikschell at 12:52 PM on April 12, 2018 [1 favorite]

Usenet died as a combination of spam and ISPs dropping the protocol due to piracy. Most people had already moved on to other media.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 12:54 PM on April 12, 2018 [2 favorites]

Can someone explain to me what happened to Usenet?

Google bought it. Or rather, Google hosts the archives and shows updates to them; posting on/via Usenet = posting for Google. It's still possible to use Usenet via those ISPs that provide specific access, but most people's awareness of it is "those weird Google groups with the old-style little arrows in front of the quoted text."
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 12:55 PM on April 12, 2018 [2 favorites]

Honest question: If I am subscribed to only a few select subreddits and always use an adblocker on reddit, are they benefitting from me in any significant way?

I don't have an answer to that, but stopping my Reddit Gold years ago was a no-brainer.
posted by mikelieman at 12:57 PM on April 12, 2018 [1 favorite]

Usenet died as a combination of spam and ISPs dropping the protocol due to piracy. Most people had already moved on to other media.

The last time I paid a provider for usenet was before comiXology. I still get emails advertising terabyte blocks....
posted by mikelieman at 12:59 PM on April 12, 2018

Not sure why anyone thinks Reddit's making a ton of money off advertising. They're funded by VC money, recently having raised 200 million dollars in their latest funding round last year. Organizing against advertisers is basically a waste of time, Reddit's loaded right now.

I also don't see how Reddit is financially profiting off nazis using their service? If anything it costs them time, money and bad PR to deal with these nasty fringe communities.

Can someone explain to me what happened to Usenet? Reddit seems like A Usenet reader with ads. Did it die of spam? Or did ISPs just stop providing access to the protocol because of pirated software and porn

ISPs gradually dropped support for usenet servers as part of the service they provide as the web became more popular. The fact that a large part of usenet was used to traffic pirated warez and porn didn't help. You can still participate in usenet, but now you have to pay for an account with a dedicated service provider like News Hosting.
posted by Fidel Cashflow at 1:00 PM on April 12, 2018 [3 favorites]

I agree with the idea that, for the goal of getting people to meet their needs elsewhere, working toward positive alternatives is a better motivator than chastising folks for meeting their needs where they are now. Offering or collaborating to create a solution will get people in motion and avoid creating shitty feelings in a way that hard-line "you are a bad person unless you prioritize this issue over your own needs" arguments will.

I think this is the point where the 'be the change you want to see in the world' argument falls apart because of the massive power differential between the people who want to do better and the people who have had the money and infrastructure to build a thing

conversations about oppression and power in a microcosm looks like a community group banding together to protest a developer who is planning multi-million dollar developments in the neighborhood that will price them out. and, having experienced this in my city, and having read about it in other cities, it's never, ever, ever the residents who win out - they're not the ones with deep pockets who are in cahoots with city councils, who are able to play the 'you should be doing this nicely' card when they're pushed into legal confrontations or negotiations over contracts, and so on

of course, it's both nice and necessary that they can band together but having money to back it up is such a huge, nearly-unconquerable advantage. reddit getting VC and big media support (ie Conde Nast) to keep you afloat for most of a decade is not in the cards for smaller platforms. nor is keeping up the fight if you're not a known quantity for most

I, of course, believe in individuals organizing to do good in the world - but I also practically realize that the deck is and will always be stacked against individuals who seek to be the change they want to see and, in a 5000-foot view of things, it's very rarely ever the little guys who end up winning
posted by runt at 1:03 PM on April 12, 2018 [1 favorite]

Here Are Reddit’s Whiniest, Most Low-Key Toxic Subreddits

Should be noted that /r/incels has already been banned for hate speech and encouraging suicide. The former subscribers then migrated to /r/braincels (which still advertises itself as "a fun, energizing, and thought-provoking atmosphere for incel culture"), which bragged at first about all the new subscribers and now is claiming that the hardcore haters are all "false flag" types from /r/inceltears .
posted by Halloween Jack at 1:10 PM on April 12, 2018 [3 favorites]

runt: it's very rarely ever the little guys who end up winning

Sure, with that attitude.

I'm hopeful (?!?) that it seems that slowly but surely, ever-increasing substantial pockets of American citizens are (re-) learning the power of organized, persistent protest, which we seemed to have lost somewhere along the way.

(I used the "incredulous" punctuation because I am not a hopeful person by nature, and that's underselling it)
posted by tzikeh at 1:12 PM on April 12, 2018 [2 favorites]

tzikeh, I've been organizing in my community for going on three years now on issues of anti-racism. if you go into movement work under the assumption that your idealism will carry you through and all these things will be realized in your lifetime then your commitment will not be sustainable. you need to trust that you have ethical imperative to do the good thing, that this work will be carried out, and even though you will often lose because the other side is well-funded, you're not nearly as capricious as they are and that you will trust that the work will continue even after you're gone

you need to find ways to make the work itself fulfilling. that way, even if you're jaded to it, you can't stop doing it. I've learned at least that much from my very generous mentors
posted by runt at 1:19 PM on April 12, 2018 [10 favorites]

I wouldn't lump piracy in with child pornography in terms of being against it is virtuous. Copyright and trademark laws seems wholly virtuousness and exist out of capitalist expedience.

Good point.
One is despicable child abuse.
The other is unauthorized use of intellectual property.
They aren't in the same universe.
posted by theorique at 1:29 PM on April 12, 2018

Thanks, guys, for the info about how I might be unintentionally aiding them. I don't have great alternatives for what I need/want, but I'll probably go ahead and just leave.
(Although it's a good point that advertising is a drop in the bucket compared to VC.)
posted by mkuhnell at 1:29 PM on April 12, 2018

I'm just gonna add "Browses reddit" to the list of things that make me a bad person:
-Has a Facebook account
-Eats meat
-Drives a gas-powered automobile
-Watches football and hockey
-Dog isn't a 'rescue'
-Sometimes forgets the reusable bag at the grocery store and has to use a plastic one
posted by rocket88 at 1:41 PM on April 12, 2018 [19 favorites]

but I'll probably go ahead and just leave.

I'm not generally a fan of this strategy - you are very much a drop in the bucket of the millions of reddit users out there and your leaving of the site has little to no impact on their bottom-line. if you want to do the emotionally challenging work of calling bullshit out on a site that normalizes bullshit, that'll do more to make things a better place for the people who are the most affected by racism

I used to frequent reddit a lot and I had people and sometimes even mods thank me privately for calling people out when they didn't have the emotional availability to do so. likewise, I've thanked other folks for doing the same

all it takes is making one person's experience of a shitty site, especially if they have nowhere else to go, that makes the endeavor worth it. the brigades are toxic, some people are just... odd, but there's good people on there who could use the support
posted by runt at 1:42 PM on April 12, 2018 [12 favorites]

runt: tzikeh, I've been organizing in my community for going on three years now on issues of anti-racism. if you go into movement work under the assumption that your idealism will carry you through and all these things will be realized in your lifetime then your commitment will not be sustainable.

Thanks for your advice. I've been organizing for a long time, so I'm not in danger of having my idealism crushed.
posted by tzikeh at 1:42 PM on April 12, 2018

What's gonna happen if say, a bunch of Sex Workers start using the platform to get around SESTA.

Reddit already preemptively banned anything that might serve that purpose. From /r/announcements "As of today, users may not use Reddit to solicit or facilitate any transaction or gift involving certain goods and services, including: ... Paid services involving physical sexual contact;" and it seems likely that they will ban any that pop up in the future. Most of the people in that thread were too mad about gundeals getting banned to notice but the policy change was almost certainly made in response to SESTA.
posted by metaphorever at 1:46 PM on April 12, 2018 [3 favorites]

I think this is the point where the 'be the change you want to see in the world' argument falls apart because of the massive power differential between the people who want to do better and the people who have had the money and infrastructure to build a thing

Sure, and like you say when the fundamental issue is that the deck is stacked, there's not a good simple answer for unstacking it. That said, in the face of it being hard to just go out and start one's own reddit/facebook/twitter, I think it's still generally more useful to approach folks stuck on one of 'em circumstantially in the spirit of "what if we can make something else work" rather than "you're the problem because you haven't found an alternative". And that's where I think some of the friction comes up, above in the thread and in similar discussions.
posted by cortex at 1:51 PM on April 12, 2018 [9 favorites]

I guess I don't get Huffman's belief/assertion that free discourse is the way to learn new views, and thus combat racism. Is this backed by scientific evidence? Is it the wisdom of a founding father or a philosopher that's been obscured over time? Like, what's the full justification of this, so that I don't guess that it's just unexamined dogma?

It’s dogma, and it’s alarming that the CEO of reddit, of all places, is doubling down on this contention that racism can be eliminated through reasoned debate & dialectic and that the truth will set you free and all of that bullshit. Reddit racists are not engaging in good-faith discussions about the scientific merits of their belief system; “speech doesn’t matter because it’s not behavior” is basically equivalent to “lol why u mad tho?”

It's ironic that the people for whom “free speech” is allegedly so sacrosanct are the same people who will make fun of you for taking what they say seriously. Spez is either naive, disingenuous, or some hybrid of the two.

In other words, what Sartre said back in 1944:

“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. It is not that they are afraid of being convinced. They fear only to appear ridiculous or to prejudice by their embarrassment their hope of winning over some third person to their side.”
posted by Maurecia-Flavored Ice Cream at 1:58 PM on April 12, 2018 [33 favorites]

The Sarte quote is a great one and, interestingly enough, it's one I first read on Reddit. It's popular in r/politics and other liberal/leftist/anti-Trump subs and gets posted often.

I think some of the weird, heightened language around Reddit has to do with people not interacting with it as often as they do the other dregs of social media like tumblr, Twitter, Facebook. It's easy to turn up your nose at Reddit being somehow uniquely evil when you have zero actual interaction with the site. It's really just the same dumpster fire as the rest of them and I use it just like I use the rest of them because why not? Why should I leave? They're the assholes, they can leave.

Of course you may say, why bother with any of them? To which I say, what else am I supposed to do while at work?
posted by asteria at 2:29 PM on April 12, 2018 [6 favorites]

All I know is that we need more Juche supporters.
posted by bookman117 at 2:36 PM on April 12, 2018 [1 favorite]

Reddit was better when it was called Usenet.
posted by Kadin2048 at 2:48 PM on April 12, 2018 [3 favorites]

> It's really just the same dumpster fire as the rest of them and I use it just like I use the rest of them because why not? Why should I leave? They're the assholes, they can leave.

The difference is that reddit has clear, obvious evidence of subreddits - of which the vast majority of the site are aware - which are racist and misogynistic cesspools but chooses to let them be. Sure, there are places like that on Tumblr and Facebook but most people won't ever come across them and the site itself might only be aware of the with some proactive investigation (not to say they shouldn't be doing that anyway but that's another matter). But they're right there on the front page of reddit. They're one of the main talking points about the site. Reddit's "uniquely evil" as you put it because they are taking a stand to defend the vile groups and the racism and the swastikas and the rape threats and etc etc that are right there, clear as day, organised into neat little easily accessible forums where they could, should they wish, be picked off one by one.
posted by giraffeneckbattle at 3:01 PM on April 12, 2018 [7 favorites]

Thanks to GenderNullPointerException, Schadenfrau and cortex for their points, especially the personal experiences. I understand that convenience isn’t measured on a binary scale and will vary between people. I’m also sympathetic to the usefulness of social networks in general and the particular advantages of individual social networks. So every individual needs to balance the utility that they get from using a service against the harm that they cause by supporting it. If there’s a lot of utility for the relatively small harm you cause by your use, then the choice to continue using it makes sense. That’s why I gave a number of examples - I should note that I’m not a vegan, because it would be difficult for me and it isn’t a sufficiently high priority for me (of my other examples: I vote for elections that will impact me as an expat, but not for “local” representation; and I’m currently unemployed because I turned down an opportunity in the petrochemicals sector. I don’t use any social networks. Your choices will and should be different.)

f you actually care about having an effect, help organize a boycott of Reddit (Twitter, etc) advertisers or something. Otherwise it kind of just looks like you want to feel superior by beating up on people who may not have the privilege of taking absolutist positions on the various communication media of our dumb world.

It’s not a priority for me right now in terms of effort invested, but assuming that it was - how would one best organise a boycott, or decide whether a boycott is worthwhile? I’d suggest that you could do worse than discuss it in a broadly left-leaning forum with people who will engage thoughtfully and discuss the issue sympathetically (including personal perspectives on why they may not want a boycott). As well as boycotting the services personally and explaining your reasoning. This thread [re: reddit’s CEO on record as being cool with racism on reddit] seems like an appropriate place to discuss the practicalities of not using reddit.
posted by chappell, ambrose at 3:10 PM on April 12, 2018 [3 favorites]

The discourse about free speech ideology has changed a lot. I think this is true both on Metafilter and in society at large. Five years ago, free speech fundamentalism was a respectable position in most bookish communities.

I think the standard arguments for free speech fundamentalism have gotten harder to defend. It is hard to look at Reddit, or certainly the internet in general, and say that the marketplace of ideas sorts the wheat from the chaff, sunlight is the best disinfectant, the best resistance to bigotry is to argue against it, etc. These ideas only make sense in a purely ideology-driven model, not a data-driven model or even a decent theory-driven one.

Contrary to the alarmist claims, the vast majority of Americans, left and right, still believe in free speech as an ideal and a legal principal. What more people have realized is bullshit is the view that one can maintain that ideal when managing a healthy community.

Reddit is behind the curve on this one, but even they have progressed a bit since the days of r/fatpeoplehate. Society will continue progressing, I think, whether Reddit does or not. At some point, advertisers are going to get cold feet like they did with Laura Ingraham, and ignoring that will get costly. Reddit's irresponsibility is bad, but they are on the wrong side of history, and their libertarian idealism will grow stale soon enough.
posted by andrewpcone at 3:11 PM on April 12, 2018 [11 favorites]

Also - just from a historical perspective and analysis - can we blame the current state of reddit on the massive DIGG migration, because I swear reddit wasn't nearly as toxic until that exodus and it became filled with... Zoo Crew listening "it's just a joke maaaaan" types.
posted by symbioid at 3:27 PM on April 12, 2018 [1 favorite]

The difference is that reddit has clear, obvious evidence of subreddits - of which the vast majority of the site are aware - which are racist and misogynistic cesspools but chooses to let them be.

How is this different from the Facebook groups promoting similar views? Or the Tumblr or Twitter accounts spreading misinformation in service of racism and misogyny? Honestly, out of the four, Twitter is probably my favorite and I also think it might be the worst of the four when it comes to that. Then I realize I am being unfair and it's clearly Facebook as evidenced by reality and who our president is. Reddit, like Tumblr, still seems niche in a way those two are not.

Which doesn't mean Reddit shouldn't change, that it doesn't just seem counterintuitive as well as unethical but no one asked me.

can we blame the current state of reddit on the massive DIGG migration, because I swear reddit wasn't nearly as toxic until that exodus and it became filled with... Zoo Crew listening "it's just a joke maaaaan" types.

Weirdly enough, I feel it's gotten a little better since the election. I'm not sure if this is due to the exodus in response to Pao which preceeded that, the admin trying to clamp down on the more glaring stuff and Putin bots, or what. But I can actually talk positively about feminism and "pro-SJW" topics and get upvoted. I can have decent conversations on those topics!
posted by asteria at 4:06 PM on April 12, 2018 [7 favorites]

the vast majority of Americans, left and right, still believe in free speech as an ideal and a legal principal. What more people have realized is bullshit is the view that one can maintain that ideal when managing a healthy community.

No one in America has ever argued for total free speech legality. Nobody wants it to be legal for a random person to come to knock on your door and say, "I'm a police officer - let me in; here's my warrant" (*shows fake warrant*) and case your house for a burglary later. Nobody wants it to be legal for someone to say, "I'm a doctor; I have a cure for your grandmother's cancer; pay me $10,000 for these pills and she'll be fine." Nobody wants it to be legal for someone to stand over you, looming, and say, "put your wallet in the bag or I'll shoot you." The argument of "of course I was never going to shoot that person; I was just talking!" will not be usable as a defense.

We have laws against many kinds of speech. We understand them so well that we don't even think of those as "free speech" issues.

What we haven't done, is agreed that actively inciting hate and promoting discrimination is in the same group of harms as the above, because there's not an easily identified single victim. We've always had problems with laws that protect abstract groups -- environmental laws, civil rights, safety and accessibility requirements. What we need is an awareness that being hateful in public is a harmful action, just like waving a knife around in public is not acceptable, and saying "look, it's not crowded in here; people can move out of the way if they don't want to be hit" is not a reasonable claim.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 5:59 PM on April 12, 2018 [16 favorites]

When people ask me about MetaFilter, I tell them "it's like Facebook without all the idiots, or Reddit without all the assholes."

Except it's not really very much like either and is a good deal older than both.
posted by walrus at 6:05 PM on April 12, 2018 [2 favorites]

How is this different from the Facebook groups promoting similar views?

Joe Bloggs goes to Facebook.com, he gets a login prompt. He creates an account. He gets asked to add some friends or search for some groups. He does this according to his interests. Exposure to racism: limited to his friend network's racism and racist groups he has explicitly searched for.

Joe Bloggs goes to reddit.com and the racism, trumpism, ableism, queerphobia and I could go on is right there. On order to avoid it, Bloggs has so register an account, unsubscribe from the front page, and find subreddits according to his interest (any of which may or may not be racist etc. in the way that seems to be reddit default, even if their supposed topic had nothing at all to do with racism).

No, they're not the same. One silos stuff to an extent by default, the other loudly and proudly puts the worst of the worst front and centre.

TERF groups for example, do exist on Facebook. Every now and again, Facebook pulls their finger out, responds to the boatloads of reports, and closes the group. They set up a new one fairly sharpish, but they're at least kept somewhat on the run, with some hurdles to a continuity of organising. By comparison, even I, not a reddit user, can name you a handful of massive TERF subreddits. They have existed, utterly unmolested, for years and years.

One is useless, perhaps intentionally so. The other actively encourages evil.
posted by Dysk at 6:45 PM on April 12, 2018 [12 favorites]

I just checked the reddit front page and can't tell what is so horribly offensive about the standard mix of memes, gifs, Apple news and political clickbait.

Then I went through a couple of the most popular subreddits - askreddit, worldnews, til and I guess I should pat myself on the pack for wading through a cesspool? I just don't see it.

IMO reddit occasionally enters a runaway karma-feedback loop where a single topic dominates. At various times it has been Ron-Paul love, net-neutrality, cop-hatred etc. That's pretty much why I faded out a few years ago. It was just too tedious.

(I bet that mefi is much whiter than reddit)
posted by tirutiru at 3:40 AM on April 13, 2018 [7 favorites]

There's a (net upvoted) mockery of BLM in the comments of a thread about a drunk squirrel. There are sexist, transphobic, and racist jokes comparing Michelle Obama to a man, and to a monkey in the thread attached to the picture of Barack Obama with biceps photoshopped on. I could keep looking, but I'm good thanks. It's right there on the mainstream, not directly from our relating to hate topics or subreddits. It's endemic to the site.
posted by Dysk at 4:46 AM on April 13, 2018 [11 favorites]

(And those were the first two threads I looked at, both above the fold of the front page)
posted by Dysk at 4:46 AM on April 13, 2018 [4 favorites]

While private entities aren't directly constrained by the First Amendment (which refers specifically to "Congress"), the example and case law of the 1A has typically guided online forums in favor of more free speech rather than less.

One, this is a demonstration of why understanding of how injurious hate speech is needs to be pushed. Hate speech harms people, in a real and measurable way.

Two, do remember that Gene Volokh is a commentator from a conservative movement that has been utterly consumed by bigotry. His last bit gives the game away:

Calls for a new First Amendment exception for “hate speech” shouldn’t just rely on the undefined term “hate speech” — they should explain just what viewpoints the government would be allowed to suppress, what viewpoints would remain protected, and how judges, juries, and prosecutors are supposed to distinguish the two. Saying “this isn’t free speech, it’s hate speech” doesn’t, I think, suffice.

Translation: The group I belong to ideologically has been so consumed by bigotry that pulling it out would cause our ideological house to collapse, so I'm just going to muddy the waters so I can convince you that it's "viewpoints" that people are attacking, and not outright hatred and bigotry.
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:23 AM on April 13, 2018 [6 favorites]

Volokh is a conservative, but he's not an empty suit. That advocates for abridging a civil liberty should "explain just what [conduct] the government would be allowed to suppress, what...would remain protected, and how judges, juries, and prosecutors are supposed to distinguish the two" requires no "translation" and should not be controversial.

Defining "hate speech" without having a suppressive effect on speech we want to protect really is a challenge.
posted by snuffleupagus at 8:44 AM on April 13, 2018 [3 favorites]

(I bet that mefi is much whiter than reddit)

Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. But unless MetaStormfront is a thing that I missed, I don't see how that's relevant to a discussion of Reddit's history of providing a space for violent white supremacists to organise?
posted by tobascodagama at 9:38 AM on April 13, 2018 [7 favorites]

One is useless, perhaps intentionally so. The other actively encourages evil.

In 2018 we're really arguing that Facebook is the least offensive of the two? Really? *gestures towards the 2016 election* REALLY?

So glad we could have another post about Reddit where the same people convince themselves they're being a brave activist by not going to a social media site and that those who do are bad. Never gets old. Totally doesn't it make it seem like MeFi in general has some weird grudge against the relatively similar but much more popular platform known as Reddit.
posted by asteria at 10:26 AM on April 13, 2018 [9 favorites]

(I bet that mefi is much whiter than reddit)

even if it is, the white people of Metafilter are generally a mix of the folks who would earnestly go to an anti-oppression training and get a lot out of it or have already been to them. ie wokeish but not active or radical about it

reddit, in the 10+ years of experience that I had on it (I was a migrant from the whole Digg HD DVD key scandal) were mostly a range of dudes who weren't comfortable with considering any idea that suggested feminism/anti-racism all the way to actual white supremacist / men's rights activist / red pill / incel / PUA / etc folks who would cluster within their own subreddit and then intentionally organize propaganda/recruiting sprees along with brigades across the larger subreddits to somewhat decent success (eg GamerGate / the Chimpire)

it's like the difference between trying to talk to both your racist uncle and your moderate but still very traditional parents at Thanksgiving about criminal justice reform, and talking to your well meaning friend who watches a lot of MSNBC and has been to like 2 protests about the same topic except x1000000000 and every single day
posted by runt at 10:34 AM on April 13, 2018 [4 favorites]

In 2018 we're really arguing that Facebook is the least offensive of the two? Really? *gestures towards the 2016 election* REALLY?

Facebook did more damage because of its greater scope, but their policies are less problematic than Reddit's, which was at one point the largest white supremacist website worldwide by both traffic and membership.
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:45 AM on April 13, 2018 [5 favorites]

*gestures towards the 2016 election* REALLY?

If some Facebook ads and comments is all it takes to topple your democracy, you've got far more fundamental problems than Facebook.
posted by Dysk at 10:45 AM on April 13, 2018 [2 favorites]

The general ethos and upvote/downvote patterns on the mainstream subreddits I'm familiar with hew a lot closer to the MetaFilter White Wokeish Liberal standard than not. We'd have better conversations about what's wrong with Reddit without the hyperbole about how vile and scary it is.
posted by prize bull octorok at 10:49 AM on April 13, 2018 [3 favorites]

It's not fucking hyperbole, that's the whole point, Jesus fucking Christ.

"IT'S FINE OVER HERE IN MY FILTER BUBBLE" is a shitty-ass take.
posted by tobascodagama at 10:51 AM on April 13, 2018 [4 favorites]

I didn't say it was fine, but good luck convincing people to ditch Reddit by describing something that doesn't match their experience of it at all.
posted by prize bull octorok at 10:56 AM on April 13, 2018 [2 favorites]

Yeah if people don't care about using a platform that supports racists, it is hard to convince them, as evidenced by this thread.
posted by agregoli at 10:58 AM on April 13, 2018 [2 favorites]

(Doesn't match their experience BECAUSE they are comfy in their bubble, hello)
posted by agregoli at 11:00 AM on April 13, 2018 [2 favorites]

The general ethos and upvote/downvote patterns on the mainstream subreddits I'm familiar with hew a lot closer to the MetaFilter White Wokeish Liberal standard than not

this was never my experience of reddit. it was every other day that the subs I was in, like /r/AsianAmerican, would spot some racist, top-voted comment/article and be like 'man what the fuck reddit' and that was from just that very specifically narrow lens of racism against Asian-Americans

like, the /r/China sub, for all four years of its existence, was literally just a gathering place for white dude expats in China and had top-voted self posts about how to best pick up Chinese girls. the existence of and the huge membership in /r/The_Donald should, at least, prove that wrong if not the like 8 years of obsessive Ron Paul posts that was the entirety of the Front Page (this was before the subreddit feature was introduced)
posted by runt at 11:34 AM on April 13, 2018 [4 favorites]

good luck convincing people to ditch Reddit by describing something that doesn't match their experience of it at all

I spent a very, very, very long and very emotional labor intensive time trying to convince people on reddit that it was actually kind of racist to assume that, for example, most robberies were committed by black folks or that Native folks were poor because they were lazy alcoholics, that it was actually due to like historical effects from being repeatedly displaced and oppressed

it worked so long as you reminded yourself that it was less about convincing the person/people you were actually replying to and more about the fact that someone was pushing back against the bullshit in a public thread that a lot of people read. you'll never get your racist uncle to admit that he's an asshole but if you can show to the rest of the family to see that he's an abusive, petty tool then they'll start thinking his bullshit ideas are reflections of his abusiveness and pettiness. so long as you kept a steady, reasonable voice and the fuckers didn't brigade you, it wasn't hard and you can get a measure of your success bc of the karma system

something something sophistry something something rhetoric and subversion, etc etc, ends justify the means, whatever etc
posted by runt at 11:43 AM on April 13, 2018 [7 favorites]

I would not dream of arguing that anyone's experiences with specific subreddits are wrong, only that MetaFilter gets very het up about Reddit and the "yes, and" pileup of descriptions of Reddit's awfulness often veers into the hyperbolic.

I think Facebook's policies are objectively worse and on Twitter you are far more likely to encounter hate speech without going looking for it, but we seem to be able to have normal dialogue about those sites.

There are hugely problematic and toxic elements embedded within Reddit and encouraged by its policies and structure. It's also pretty much the only game in town when it comes to replicating a certain usenet-like discussion environment on the web. I would like Reddit to be better. MetaFilter is not where I would go to have a conversation about how that could be achieved, despite being the first place I go to talk about nearly everything else.
posted by prize bull octorok at 11:46 AM on April 13, 2018 [6 favorites]

I'll agree with that though I think reddit is much more culpable in how it served and serves as a breeding ground for obscenely anti-social behaviors. but if our aim is to go after worse policies and even worse users, and you wanted to really eliminate a locus for just the worst bullshit out on the web, going after the Chans and Voat should be your first stop. it's just that most of us don't have a stake in the existence of those platforms since I sincerely doubt many of us have had the occasion to lurk there much less have accounts or a regular presence
posted by runt at 12:15 PM on April 13, 2018 [3 favorites]

The difference with those is that while reddit has turned up in mainstream news stories from time to time ("Fappening", etc), the MSM typically doesn't turn their lens on voat or 4chan.
posted by theorique at 12:28 PM on April 13, 2018 [1 favorite]

well, they talk about Anonymous every once in a while but yeah, they don't tend to mention 4chan or its lesser, somehow worse cousin, 7chan by name
posted by runt at 12:40 PM on April 13, 2018

I think you mean 8chan? Which, of course, started when 4chan finally started cracking down on posters of child pornography.
posted by tobascodagama at 12:46 PM on April 13, 2018

I would not dream of arguing that anyone's experiences with specific subreddits are wrong, only that MetaFilter gets very het up about Reddit and the "yes, and" pileup of descriptions of Reddit's awfulness often veers into the hyperbolic.

I think there's a couple different ways you can look at a site like reddit:

1. As the sum of its parts.
2. As the median of its parts.

And if you're trying to sort out the general character of it, some fair and reasonable take on how much of a problem the place is, those are going to produce really different results.

Because, like, there's plenty of nice little subreddits. That's part of the difficulty of suggesting to people successfully avoiding toxicity to just leave: it's not their experience, it's not what's visible to them. Somebody hanging out in a chill subreddit about this or that indie game, or talking about geoscience with geoscience nerds, or trading knitting tips, they aren't going to look at reddit primarily as a place where nazis and misogynists hang out. This has been covered plenty before; whatever specific opinions or stances folks have about reddit in the end, I don't think this specific bit is all that in dispute. Reddit consists in part of subs that aren't cesspools, and in part of subs that very much are.

So if you spend time on reddit, in non-shitty subs (or in subs where to the extent that there's shittiness it's low-level and or not something you feel overly affected by or attuned to), and you look at reddit and say, what's the median awfulness though? The answer might be "not really particularly awful at all". Sure, there's the racism and the misogyny off in those gross bit, but there's all this nice stuff, and boy there's a lot of these non-toxic nice little subs. On average, in the average sub, in the average comment, things aren't so bad. To say otherwise feels hyperbolic.

But if you look at reddit as the sum rather than the median of its parts, it's a site made up of Perfectly Nice Little Subcommunities + Nazis + Misogyny + Etc. As as sum, it is a place that very much includes a whole bunch of gross awful hateful bullshit. Averaging it all out to "nice enough with some gross outliers" is, basically, a coping mechanism that downplays the unavoidable reality that in raw terms it hosts, and has for years and years, a bunch of super awful gross shit, and doesn't seem to be doing all that much about it.

Folks focusing on the median are gonna see folks focusing on the sum as trading in hyperbole. Folks focusing on the sum are gonna see folks focusing on the median as trading in soporifics. They're not really compatible frameworks in which to grapple with the question of how bad reddit is or what the moral implications of participating there are, so of course it's going to lead to this very much, thread to thread, recurring clash on the point of who is mischaracterizing or failing to put stuff in proportion.

The fact that that argument itself tends to happen in every thread belies for me the idea that "MetaFilter" has a position on it vs. loose subgroups of the site with different general consensus positions on it having positions on it, but then I've been watching MeFi v. reddit arguments play out both here and there for as long as reddit has existed so I feel a little bit like the tired dad in the room at this point.
posted by cortex at 1:13 PM on April 13, 2018 [15 favorites]

I think you mean 8chan?

There is also 9gag. Which is backed by venture capital.

While we're at it, SA is not innocent in all of this and somehow always seems to get a pass, except for gamer-specific salt about goonsquad.
posted by snuffleupagus at 1:22 PM on April 13, 2018 [3 favorites]

The fact that that argument itself tends to happen in every thread belies for me the idea that "MetaFilter" has a position on it

well you probably don't get the same feeling of externality from the hive mind when you perceive yourself as going against the grain of a thread, chief
posted by prize bull octorok at 1:36 PM on April 13, 2018

My experience is as often as anything dealing simultaneously with competing claims of externalizing bias from either side of arguments, both convinced that the unrighteous position-MetaFilter-has is the one in conflict with their own reasonable-but-put-upon take. Like I said: tired dad.
posted by cortex at 1:41 PM on April 13, 2018 [5 favorites]

Thanks, dad.

Buys cortex "user tears" mug
posted by snuffleupagus at 1:53 PM on April 13, 2018 [2 favorites]

steals mug, changes text to "used tears", returns it
posted by tobascodagama at 1:55 PM on April 13, 2018 [1 favorite]

For sale: tears mug, never used
posted by cortex at 2:23 PM on April 13, 2018 [10 favorites]

It's not "averages" so much as a frustration that, having killed my accounts on just about every service accessable to a general internet user and with an active population of more than a few thousand, there is not a godsdamned recommendation I can make right now.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 2:47 PM on April 13, 2018 [1 favorite]

there is not a godsdamned recommendation I can make right now.

It's shitty turtles all the way down.
posted by dazed_one at 5:24 PM on April 13, 2018 [2 favorites]

That's some powerful bothsides-ism from the big boss.

I object to this 'cozy little bubbles' nonsense. r/todayilearned has 18 million subscribers.. The general tenor is pretty liberal-ish both in mode and median. Of course it's only lightly moderated, so every thread has some shitposting, and very occasionally some of that crap floats to the top. If reading a couple of those ruins your day, then yes, stay away and save your sanity.

I totally understand the anti-nazi call to arms that is dominating discourse here. But in a more global context - every regional subreddit has own venoms, dramas and culture wars, and your concerns seem as parochial as theirs. r/india is about the size of metafilter, and with all its issues, a thousand times more pleasant than Indian twitter (which is honestly surprising so I keep thinking it must be transient).

strong cw on the news that dominates r/india right now

And gtfo with usenet being better. Maybe at it's very best, it was. But I only ever read the smaller newsgroups and there was plenty of noise even there. Eg. in rec.music.indian.classical there were idiots who would flame each other in every thread, and the rest of the community couldn't do anything about it.
posted by tirutiru at 6:26 PM on April 13, 2018 [8 favorites]

How is this not knowingly and willfully creating a toxic work environment for Reddit employees?

Seems like a huge potential HR liability to me.
posted by Freen at 12:48 PM on April 14, 2018 [2 favorites]

Defining "hate speech" without having a suppressive effect on speech we want to protect really is a challenge.

Yeah, this. Especially defining it in a way that appears to be politically neutral.
posted by corb at 5:13 PM on April 15, 2018 [1 favorite]

In the current political context, it is impossible to define it in an apolitical way, because hate encompasses comparatively mainstream political beliefs.

This is a feature, but a bug, mind.
posted by Dysk at 11:07 PM on April 15, 2018 [6 favorites]

How is this not knowingly and willfully creating a toxic work environment for Reddit employees?

The question sort of reminds me of this article from Wired about outsourced content moderation, and how it impacts the people who perform that job.
posted by theorique at 6:21 AM on April 16, 2018 [2 favorites]

I joined MetaFilter in 2001, and Reddit in 2012. Over time I've switched to Reddit. The reasons why: (1) categorized discussion, rather than a random mess, allowing self-managed curation [i]in[/i] of topics that actually interest me, and [i]out[/i] of topics that don't; (2) threaded, heirarchial discussion within topics, rather than a random mess; (3) downvoting, meaning that the worst of the idiots and assholes get pushed down to the "nobody reads this" zone; (4) generally more powerful markup language, including image linking; (5) millions upon millions more users, implying that the bell-curve of discussion interestingness extends out further such that the best of the best discussions are better, and the generally good exist in greater quantity (as do the worst, [i]which I don't have to deal with[/i]); (6) comment editing -- if I want to edit my comments I [i]will[/i], thanks.

MeFi's characteristics as a random mess do provide occasional serendipity, however it also provides me with incessant confusion and disorganization. When I do come back, I find that I can't tolerate it for long. It's like trying to find something in a sorted and organized library, rather than the jumble bin at the secondhand book store.

As for racists, free-speech fundamentalists, and pests in general: I downvote, I flame when the flaming is good (another behaviour not well-tolerated at MeFi), I agitate others against them, and I block them from sending me PMs.

The reasons that they don't come here are not due to any inherent superiority of MeFi; they don't come here because they are cheapskates who will not pay $5; the aggressive moderation here will weed them out; and the MeFi community is not big enough to attract them. Back in the day, they absolutely [i]did[/i] come here. If the name ParisParismus still means anything to anyone, it means that MetaFilter [i]never was[/i] the shining city on the hill, it had sewers, and those sewers had rats.
posted by aeschenkarnos at 12:38 PM on April 17, 2018 [3 favorites]

If the name ParisParismus still means anything to anyone, it means that MetaFilter [i]never was[/i] the shining city on the hill, it had sewers, and those sewers had rats.

We also have exterminators chasing those rats out, while Reddit says "what rat problem?"

Also, downvoting is a horrible system. It is codifying toxicity into your community, which is why I see experts on building social communities routinely point out that such negative interactions are pretty much community poison.
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:50 PM on April 17, 2018 [5 favorites]

I'm not sure people are suggesting that mefi is, or always was, perfect. I fact, I'm sure people aren't. At any rate, stuff was worse in the past here, yes. Now it's better! The fact that there were failings here once doesn't tell you anything about the current state of the place, mind, and it certainly doesn't mitigate our excuse those same failings continuing on a larger scale elsewhere.
posted by Dysk at 4:18 AM on April 18, 2018 [4 favorites]

(And for reference, am I trying to say that mefi is perfect? No. There are still many issues here. But it is not comparable to old mefi, or to reddit.)
posted by Dysk at 5:53 AM on April 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

It's amusing to read all the debate about What Reddit Really Is when we have it in the CEO's own words: it's a place where hate speech is acceptable.
posted by tobascodagama at 7:43 AM on April 18, 2018 [11 favorites]

Also, downvoting is a horrible system. It is codifying toxicity into your community, which is why I see experts on building social communities routinely point out that such negative interactions are pretty much community poison.

Is Reddit a "community"? I would argue that it is more like a very large and open-ended online game. It has communities within it, certainly, but Reddit taken as a whole is certainly not a community. It's just too big and heterogenous.
posted by theorique at 9:17 AM on April 18, 2018 [4 favorites]

If the name ParisParismus still means anything to anyone

I mean, it means to me "that guy who was a career asshole and who we banned and then eventually banned again until he stopped trying".

That assholes will show up is more or less a given in a community of any size over any amount of time; whether and how that community decides to respond to assholery is a more interesting question and one that has a lot more to say about the aims and the long-term quality of life there. How that community's leadership talks about their goals and standards matters a lot, too.

I'm proud of MetaFilter's relative civility and decency and capacity to be a space where folks can be a little bit open and vulnerable sometimes about things. I also think we've got plenty of problems and are going to continue to struggle, day to day and year to year, to make things work here and to find acceptable compromises to a lot of the challenges that come up in online communities. I also think the site has gotten a lot better over the years thanks to a lot of deliberate effort both from the moderation staff and from the community members at large. All of those things exist in superposition; the good stuff doesn't eliminate the bad stuff, and the bad stuff doesn't negate the efforts to do better.

But we have been actively working year after year to be better, and part of that has been doing things like (a) banning career assholes and (b) not arguing for the importance of protecting hate speech on the fucking website.
posted by cortex at 12:35 PM on April 18, 2018 [14 favorites]

cortex: But we have been actively working year after year to be better

MetaFilter's conversational dynamic is unambiguously better. However, a conversational forum is more than the emotional/cultural dynamic, it's also the content of discussions, and the interface through which discussion is undertaken. MeFi is a private club, a writers' circle, a corner store; Reddit is the train station, the public library, the supermarket.

Just to zero in on one specific aspect of interfacing. As a matter of what appears to be pride, MeFi topics are sorted only by date. As far as I am aware--and I would love to be corrected--the site has always been a daily firehose of whatever interesting topics motivate random members enough to curate a link or two or three and assemble an introduction around them. These are not sorted, keyworded, or in any way distinguished from each other according to content. Even the old Trivial Pursuit colour-code category system (Literature, Science & Nature, History, Entertainment, Sport--or perhaps Politics, as sport is entertainment) would be some improvement. (Fark.com, another name from way back when, used this approach.) But no.

Consequently we have the box of chocolates, you never know what you're gonna get. And there is some appeal to that, there really is, it is why I still check in from time to time. However it ought to be at least possible in theory for users to indicate an interest in a topic and be able to see posts on that topic more clearly. But no.

On Reddit, as with Usenet, topical division is clear and sharp. (And generally enforced quite strongly.)

I could similarly go into the benefits of upvote/downvote or threading and notifications of replies. NoxAeternum (a username I had to scroll back up to find, and check the spelling of, because there was no way to simply indicate them) believes, or has forwarded on the externally sourced belief, that downvoting creates toxicity; I feel that it may create toxicity where none existed, however it will expose and punish toxicity that was organically expressed. It uses groupthink rather than quality or clarity as metric, but in subreddits that value quality and clarity, the groupthink scatterplot matches up fairly well with the quality/clarity trend lines.

I'm not a strong believer in free speech, I've tangled here with free speech fundamentalists in the past, people who have vehemently argued that free expression of dangerous ideas is essential so that those ideas can be argued with and driven out. I feel that viewpoint is naive, that spez is just as naive as the last dozen Internet Libertarians who expressed it before him, it's just that spez happened to be in the right place at the right time to attract funding from Internet Libertarians who themselves were in the right place at the right time for their ideas to work out and be blessed with billions upon billions of dollars to waste as they will. (Hey, we also got John Gilmore and Tom Steyer and Nick Hanauer - they're not all assholes, there's just a weird skewing towards assholes.)

On Reddit, shitty speech is generally downvoted to hell and gone, outside of shitty subreddits. Reddit's tolerance for shitty subreddits is not as high as its detractors claim, either. Eventually they get banned. /r/the_donald will, eventually, be banned. It may take some external political events, godspeed Robert Mueller, however it will happen.

/r/politics over the last two years has gradually shifted towards a position that I recall advocating here ten years ago, and being scolded for - that Republicans and Republicanism are cancer in the heart of the United States, the source of every evil thing, they are not morally or intellectually fit for government, and ought not be tolerated in any way, and that if you are fortunate enough to be in the position to actually vote to influence American policy, rather than being downstream of the results like the rest of us, then it is no less than your holy duty to vote them out. I don't get scolded for that on Reddit, not any more, except by a few idiots who I am pleased to see get downvoted to hell and gone.

Anyway, my point is that the quality of MeFi discussion is higher, however the quality of MeFi's tools with which to support discussion is not. I had to manually check back and refresh in order to see if discussion had continued; I received no little red envelope. There were a small number of comments posted after mine; had there been dozens, the conversation might have moved to the point where reintroducing it would seem inappropriate, which some may see as a desirable effect of unthreaded discussion, but I do not.

MeFi set the bar high in 1999 and hasn't moved it since.
posted by aeschenkarnos at 2:28 PM on April 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

MeFi is a private club, a writers' circle, a corner store; Reddit is the train station, the public library, the supermarket.

Actually, they're both websites. Specifically, websites owned by private legal entities. There's nothing "public" about Reddit except arguably in the civil rights sense of "public accommodation". Maybe it's also "public" in the sense of "publicly traded", but I can't be bothered to check and it doesn't matter anyway.

It doesn't really affect your point, but I feel obliged to point it out.
posted by tobascodagama at 3:07 PM on April 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

On Reddit, shitty speech is generally downvoted to hell and gone, outside of shitty subreddits.

I think the issue here, really, is one of definitions. Of what constitutes shitty speech. Because there's a lot of the lower-level problematic shit all over mainstream reddit, and it's not all downvoted to hell. Like, micro-aggression stuff. Boys' club things, like "Listen, sure you're bald but apparently you've gotten laid so stop complaining, u/i-make-babies" (net upvoted, in the top few comments on the top thread at default sort - best? - on the front page of Reddit as I type this. The thread is about a statue in Berlin. It has nothing to do with sex or gender in any way.) You know, the "I'd hit it" level stuff, or offhand references to deeply racist memes (less so right now than when Ebola Knuckles was at its peak, for example). This thread was in the top ten posts on the front page at time of writing, default sort. I think it comes down, in large part, to the extent to which you're sensitised to this stuff. As mentioned above:

Of course it's only lightly moderated, so every thread has some shitposting, and very occasionally some of that crap floats to the top. If reading a couple of those ruins your day, then yes, stay away and save your sanity.

And I think that's fundamentally it. To a lie of people, this shit is just unremarkable, and not worth getting in a tizzy about. To others, it's more than enough to keep us away.
posted by Dysk at 3:13 PM on April 18, 2018 [5 favorites]

However it ought to be at least possible in theory for users to indicate an interest in a topic and be able to see posts on that topic more clearly. But no.

It is actually possible. Check out the My Mefi feature.
posted by Dysk at 3:14 PM on April 18, 2018 [3 favorites]

Also, Ask definitely has defined categories.
posted by mosst at 3:53 PM on April 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

And there is a search function. And there are tags. They could be more robust, but they exist and at a scale that matches MetaFilter's style and pace. All of which is rather aside from the question of what ParisParamus getting banned from MetaFilter has to do with Reddit's CEO carrying water for hate speech.

Like, yes? MetaFilter is not Reddit. It's not attempting to be Reddit. I agree with you that MetaFilter and Reddit operate different mechanically in terms of interface and information structure, even if I don't particularly agree about one mechanic being inherently better than the other: there is more than one approach to all of these things, and these two different sites take different approaches. And we're operating at decidedly different scales and vastly different levels of resources.

All of that is aside from the fact that Reddit, specifically, would be a better place if Reddit were trying to be something different from what it is and has been; all of that is aside from any suggestion that Reddit would need to try to specifically be MetaFilter. I think it'd be great if Reddit just tried enormously harder—in whatever way they chose!—to not be a place where all kinds of gross and hateful and toxic shit was accommodated. Not saying "it has a place here" would be a very, very low bar to clear, and yet.

That's primary what folks are bothered by, re: the thing that kicked this off, Huffman making his argument for hate speech being something to respond to with other than "fuck no, that's awful, let's do better". That's the whole main thing. The rest, MeFites preferring MeFi and Redditors preferring Reddit and all the endless vi vs. emacs discussions about this or that detail of thread architecture and so on, is tertiary to the whole years-of-not-solving-that-horribleness issue.
posted by cortex at 4:06 PM on April 18, 2018 [12 favorites]

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