Inside the Dramatic, Painful, and Hugely Successful Return of Reddit's Founders

Spending some time on Facebook makes it abundantly clear that identified use does not prevent people from acting like horribly.

> I now think identified use is on the up. It makes for better dialogue.

I haven't seen this at all. It oppresses ideas from surfacing that are currently seen as unpopular by whatever vitriolic group, which leads to a large misrepresentation in the public discourse because the only ones supporting it usually have "nothing to lose".

Identified use is great if you don't want any controversial discourse and just need a quick way to verify identity (reduce spam, coordinate local events, etc). Otherwise it's just a recipe for reflecting popular opinion given the online community's proclivity for reaching for pitchforks.

> I fully understand some people need anonymity and pseudonimity. But the general case

I think we often underestimate the need to have these spaces active and available just to leave room for such people.

If /b/ is where people post bizarre anonymous trash, and Facebook is where people have serious conversations about serious issues, what do the people who need anonymity do? Go on Facebook and tell their families "hey, you should go have some of this discussion in those weird anonymous forums you've heard are full of evil people, no reason, nothing to do with me having a trait you'd hate me for"?

I don't mean to be snarky, this is a genuinely hard problem. But "people who need anonymity" are by definition a group you can't wait to accommodate when they speak up and ask for it.

Facebook's real name policies regularly cause problems for everyone from American trans people to Bangladeshi atheists, and go far beyond that in silencing discussion on topics where a totally conventional opinion might offend an employer or family member. (Or perhaps Customs and Border Patrol, which can't prove how many Reddit accounts someone has but apparently challenges claims of not having a Facebook profile.)

I don't think anonymity has to be a descent to the bottom. Comparing different subreddits, or HN to 4chan, or any other pair of anonymous sites, demonstrates that. I do think anonymity and the need for moderation tend to trade against one another; anonymous fora without oversight quickly become toxic, or are simply eaten by spammers.

But I'm very concerned that real name policies look good because anonymity causes highly visible bad behavior, while identity silently pushes vulnerable people out of the discussion.

I worded that poorly. I mean filter bubbles are the right idea, but don't go far enough. A site should should hold specific enough values that its users can debate each other in good faith, and so that admins can stamp out (what they consider to be) toxic behavior without shocking half their users.

The toxic stuff is a relatively small percentage though. If you look at Reddit's top subreddits by subscribers (http://redditlist.com/all/), the biggest subs are by far dominated by general interest stuff -- humor, AMAs, gaming, cute, music, general knowledge stuff. From what I see, you have to go all the way down to #148 r/ImGoingToHellForThis -- a sub that has like, what, 3-4% of the subscribers that r/funny has -- to find the first sub that's in "that direction" (shock / tasteless / un-PC humor in this case, which occasionally veers into toxic territory). Many of the hate communities listed in r/AgainstHateSubreddits/ are very, very tiny, eg 1000-2000 people only.

I think Reddit is going to get more moderate over time, though. They are owned by a big mass media company after all (Advance Publications) and are advertiser driven in nature. I don't think many companies would want to advertise anywhere near a hate community -- most likely even r/ImGoingToHellForThis is too much. I'm sure Reddit also wants to avoid negative publicity, and hate communities and other toxic subreddits can generate oversized amounts of it (as happened during the 2015 "user revolt" where it seems like all you heard about Reddit in the news were communities like r/fatpeoplehate).

Currently Reddit tends to quarantine, delist, and de-advertise toxic communities that don't violate their rules. That might be enough -- the volume of news articles on toxic sub-reddits is nowhere near what they were during the 2015 "user revolt". But if it's not, I'm sure pressure will come to crack down further, as is happening on other big advertiser-driven social media platforms.

Explicitly racist subreddits have been disallowed for a long time. That one you just linked will likely be removed pretty soon. As you can tell, it's tiny and only has a few posts, so the admins may just not be aware.

I would disagree with many of the characterizations of hate speech according to /r/AgainstHateSubreddits, as they seem to consider /r/The_Donald and similar conservative subreddits as hate speech which needs to be banned (when in reality the issue usually tends to be a few racist or sexist posts out of millions, which usually end up getting very few upvotes and/or get removed by the mods of the subreddit; right-wingers could easily play the same game pointing out a few non-representative extremist comments in left-wing subreddits which, and they often do, but it's just as absurd)

Not to mention that subreddits that do get posted there seem to get removed by reddit admins pretty quickly. Reddit is even removing conspiracy theory subreddits like the QAnon ones, for supposedly inciting violence, though that seems a bit dubious and has not been demonstrated by reddit staff at all (yet).

The pro-censorship side is definitely winning on reddit and has been winning for the past few years; I really don't understand some of the criticisms of reddit as some kind of alt-right safe haven. I'm pretty liberal and reddit is easily the most liberal site I use, perhaps next to HN (though I think reddit is probably more liberal than HN). Huffman and Ohanian, and the previous two CEOs (Wong and Pao) are all pretty outspoken liberals who don't like Trump. Huffman, the current CEO and reddit founder, even abused his admin power to troll Trump supporters on a number of occasions (not that I can blame his frustration, but I think that was extremely unprofessional of him). reddit is derided as essentially a hyperleftist safe space by most people who would consider themselves even a little to the right (not even remotely to the extent of "far-right" or "alt-right" beliefs), and I don't think that's an unreasonable criticism.

Some years back when /r/jailbait and /r/FatPeopleHate were explicitly allowed by staff for free speech reasons, your side definitely had a point, but the pendulum has swung quite a bit within the past few years, so I'm not sure where all the criticism is coming from. I don't think reddit could be anymore pro-censorship when it comes to subreddits than they are right now.

Vetting subreddits before they're created sounds very unsustainable and kind of defeats the point of reddit, in my opinion. I think the default position for a common carrier-type platform like reddit or Facebook or Twitter should be to allow everything, and only censor when there is no other option. Again, I think people sometimes forget reddit is not like some big bulletin board. The point of the site is to allow as much user autonomy as possible when creating, managing, and posting in their own communities.

Ah but thats the beauty of liberty, your opinion as a private citizen ought not silence another citizen.

But the thing about liberty is that its more focus arouns the government, not citizen to citizen so you'd be in your right to purge toxicity if you hosted.