Reddit's user revolt is the best thing for Reddit and the internet | Hacker News Reader

Reddit's user revolt is the best thing for Reddit and the internet

engadget.com

8 pointsdrew-y9 comments

What a terribly written, poorly researched, ignorance laden article. Not that any of the other similar articles about this issue have been any better.

Yes, free speech is exactly about saying and hearing from others that which one may find "offensive" or "tasteless" or "cruel", etc.

The real issue here is that while the reddit admins and owners are completely within their right to mold the website and the community it contains to take a shape of their choosing, there are better ways to go about this than the hamfisted and juvenile methods they've used up to now.

The real question is this: is their poorly thought out and even more poorly executed plan actually accomplishing their goal?

Obviously not.

As the admins, you don't create a higher quality community by poking users in the eye and dancing gleefully at their howls and ignoring any and all legitimate concerns they bring up in their attempt to engage you.

Here I'm referring to the /r/announcement comments where the admins go to great lengths to avoid any real dialogue to the many polite and well informed questions and comments that brought up the painfully obvious issues they won't or can't address.

It is very very difficult to mold and moderate an online community but it can be done. There are great examples out there. Go and study them and see what they did. Each experience is unique but they all have at least one lesson for reddit admins, should they care to listen and learn from them.

Bringing down the ban hammer indiscriminately on a 'fat hate' subreddit while allowing hundreds of others even worse (/r/coontown for example or /r/gasthekikes or many others) may be easier in the short term but it will accomplish nothing but worsening an already bad situation.

Here's just one example of a community doing it right:

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/apr/03/monster-hu...

Want more examples? Metafilter, hackernews, etc.

>The real question is this: is their poorly thought out and even more poorly executed plan actually accomplishing their goal?

You're assuming that the politically convenient goal of "improving the community" is the primary motivation behind the decision. Banning those subs makes a hell of a lot more sense if it's viewed as a political favor. Imgur staff recently had a tiff with the admins of FPH, /r/neofag criticizes a specific forum that's popular with the social-justice crowd.

That's certainly a possibility. I wanted to give the admins the benefit of the doubt. Even in such a best case scenario they come across as grossly incompetent. In your case scenario they come across as corrupt.

"All too often cries of "free speech!" are about not being able to say something that legitimately hurts or offends someone else"

This is exactly what free speech is. The freedom to say things that are wrong, hateful, misinformed, misleading, vicious, cruel and hurtful as long as no actual violent or criminal acts are incited.

As I've said over and over, the key problem with freedom-of-speech on the internet and harassment is how to handle people using the point-to-point facilities to antagonize others in volumes beyond what they could filter reasonably.

Having ten thousand people on twitter continually tweet at one person, or email them, or whatever, is kind of like a psychic DDoS. This is a thorny problem for freedom-of-speech absolutists who can recognize the harms such things may allow.

However, shitty subreddits? There's nothing there to offend anyone until they go to the subreddit and become offended. People in those cases are basically autoharassing themselves.

It's just so shitty to see a few crybabies and a few shitheads drum up enough drama to cause everyone to forget just how awesome it is that we had this nice, open platform for idea exchange--even the ones the majority dislikes.

EDIT:

And lest we forget, the newsgroups and BBSs and everything were more than happy to allow people with nonstandard gender configurations and sexual tastes to merrily congregate, as they did other weird and sometimes hostile subcultures.

That people want to remove the facilities to support such formations, now that $PREFERRED_CULTURE is mainstream enough, is pretty harmful.

> However, shitty subreddits? There's nothing there to offend anyone until they go to the subreddit and become offended. People in those cases are basically autoharassing themselves.

Fatpeoplehate would often brigade other subs and other sites.

Sure, you can maybe get a brief respite by cracking down on the forums where the chat with each other--but that hardly fixes the problem.

"These people we don't like used this coffeeshop to organize their protests. Therefore, let's shut down this coffeeshop."

I agree with you. I think that was a poor way for engadget to end the article. It was probably meant to be more along the lines of this quote from earlier in the article "It was all because they thought Reddit was restricting their free speech, something they have no actual right to on the site in the first place."

Well, a while back, Reddit picked up a bunch of users that used to be on Digg.com. Maybe it's just time to let certain users go.

It think it's a bit humorous these people complaining about their "free speech rights being curtailed" when what they have to say follows some specific subjects. How come the free speech activists haven't created /r/HowISISShouldCreateItsFirstAtomBomb ?

I think the real issue here isn't censorship, it's legitimacy. These free speech types want the legitimacy that Reddit has. And Reddit is not allowing that to happen on their site. But the world isn't coming to an end, people can type another address in their browser and go to whatever little place they want to.

And perhaps if the free speechers are concerned that their legitimate arguments are falling on deaf ears, perhaps they should re-examine the legitimacy of their hate speech. Reddit doesn't have a responsibility to share their legitimacy with hate speech. The managers of Reddit have been trying to build brand equity, why should they sacrifice their efforts to appease people who spend their free time explaining how awful they are?

Yeah, go to Voat. Or wherever you're welcome. Or make your own web site. But you can't freeload on the legitimacy that Reddit's brand name provides. If you're going to make a site about hating fat people, then you're responsible for making it wildly popular.

Good luck.

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