It’s always only been second to YouTube in the abysmal quality of its comments, and it’s intentionally structured to promote the worst behavior in its community.
In practice, the ability of anyone to spawn their own subreddit plus the upvoting/downvoting mechanism leads to each subreddit being an angry little fiefdom fiercely dedicated to its own idea of consensus where dissenting opinions get downvoted into oblivion. A community that’s seen to have a particularly obnoxious bias, say, r/Android supposedly being in the tank for Google Nexus devices, will develop a community focused on attacking the first community for being a “circlejerk” (r/Androidcirclejerk) that has the exact opposite bias and exists to post memes mocking Google Nexus devices for how they’re overrated trash. Eventually one community will lose its patience and “brigade” another community, flooding it with hostile posts in order to show the other side how wrong they are, and mods are forced to stay up all night banning people until everything settles down again (and several users, usually female, have quit Reddit for good after being blasted with death threats).
I know what that’s like. If I leave this site for a few days, either because of travel or illness, it’s pretty much guaranteed that some troll somewhere (and we all know where they come from) will decide to “brigade” Pharyngula. Thanks, Reddit (and 4chan and 8chan) for normalizing that kind of entitled behavior! And we all know what kind of people enjoy that kind of activity.
This is exactly as petty and stupid as it sounds. It’s also as alienating to ordinary, non-basement-dwelling troll users as it sounds. It’s the reason Reddit has gotten a reputation for being attractive to creepy, obsessive people for whom the inherently toxic environment is a reasonable price to pay to be around people like them. These are often people who have very strong opinions that polite society, for obvious reasons, disapproves of—pedophiles, white supremacists, conspiracy theorists, and unrepentant sex criminals.
It’s going to get more disgusting. After a brief and minimal attempt to purge Reddit of the worst of its hateful subreddits, the CEO, Ellen Pao, resigned. This is not a good thing. Pao herself has acknowledged that the trolls are winning.
The Internet started as a bastion for free expression. It encouraged broad engagement and a diversity of ideas. Over time, however, that openness has enabled the harassment of people for their views, experiences, appearances or demographic backgrounds. Balancing free expression with privacy and the protection of participants has always been a challenge for open-content platforms on the Internet. But that balancing act is getting harder. The trolls are winning.
Fully 40 percent of online users have experienced bullying, harassment and intimidation, according to Pew Research. Some 70 percent of users between age 18 and 24 say they’ve been the target of harassers. Not surprisingly, women and minorities have it worst. We were naive in our initial expectations for the Internet, an early Internet pioneer told me recently. We focused on the huge opportunity for positive interaction and information sharing. We did not understand how people could use it to harm others.
She says that balancing freedom and responsibility on the internet is an extremely hard problem, and I agree. The evidence says that the current balance is all wrong, and skewed in favor of obnoxious assholes using the tools of the internet to harass and harm people they don’t like; they’re also fanatical about “free speech”, not because they actually believe in the principle, but because they’ve adopted “free speech” as a high-minded label to attach to harassment specifically intended to silence other people’s speech.
Unfortunately, now that she’s gone, the current board of Reddit has made decisions to reinforce the worst of Reddit. They’ve decided that the rotten, repugnant hate subreddits will not be removed from the site, but instead, will be “hidden” — if you know about them, you can find them, but they’ll still be sponsored and allowed to thrive with their nasty subscribers. It’s like having a suppurating abscess, and rather than treating it, slapping a bandage over it. The rot continues, and spawns more hidden viciousness, but no one except the perpetrators and contributors get to see it. That is, until the hate grows enough that it’s sponsored forums can erupt elsewhere.
Adding to the repugnance of this “hide the hate, but keep hosting it” policy is the fact that, in the wake of the #RedditRevolt against now ex-CEO Ellen Pao, and Dylan Roof’s racist murders in Charlestown, South Carolina, /coontown and other blatantly racist subreddits have seen a giant boost in traffic, with more than 18,000 subscribers and roughly 200,000 page views a day.
If you want confirmation that Reddit’s new policy is a catastrophic disaster that is completely wrong, all you have to is look at one of the most prominent racist subreddits, r/coontown. They are overjoyed, and celebrating their ability to be supported by Reddit in saying the most disgusting, evil racist shit, with the benign tolerance of the CEO.
According to CEO Steve Huffman, /r/CoonTown is not a community that “harasses, bullies, or abuses an individual or group of people,” despite existing only to denigrate, belittle, and discuss the genetic worthlessness of the entire black race. “The content there is offensive to many,” Huffman punted, “but does not violate our current rules for banning.” Instead subreddit will be “reclassified,” which means nothing.
Reddit is now offically the “front page of the internet” for white racists and misogynists. The trolls really have won the battle, and have successfully occupied one of the bigger, more popular sites on the internet — but what they’ve won is now widely known as a racist hellhole. Victory!
If “denigrating, belittling and discussing the genetic worthlessness of the entire black race” does not violate your current rules for banning, then there is something seriously wrong with your current rules for banning. How about growing a spine and taking a stance?
FWIW, the whole of Reddit admins don’t seem to be in favor of letting the trolls be trolls:
http://gawker.com/former-reddit-ceo-youre-all-screwed-1717901652
Well the protest against Pao and her resignation illustrates the nature of Reddit rather well (and explains why the old founders who came back to replace her are letting the worst elements remain and simmer)
Reminds me of Gamergate, and oh so many other things. Please note a detail I left out: of all of the odious subreddits and reddit users/trolls alluded to above, the article mentions that users from r/Books and r/Science were corralled into protesting Ellen Pao as well. The power of intelligent useful idiots. By fucking god.
Reddit’s previous CEO, Yishan Wong, commented about the change on Reddit and, if accurate, his story makes this the most hilarious comeuppance I have seen in *years*.
Commence the sweet, sweet wails of the Freeze Peach crew.
You know, I’ve seen a few post-singularity bits of sci-fi that suggest that in a world with no scarcity, people would stop using money as currency, instead using ‘reputation’ or ‘popularity’ as a gauge of worth.
It almost seems like Reddit’s ruling cabal believes this to already be the case, and therefore, the only thing that matters is getting in as many users as possible, rather than needing to focus on users whose presence brings in income.
It’s sort of an interesting problem. Websites make money by attracting eyeballs, but the best way to have hate speech die is to either delete it or ignore it… which is to say, fewer eyeballs. The ‘free speech warfare’ economic model is almost a required condition: you want to feed the war to get more eyeballs, not make one side slink away. It doesn’t even matter if one side has an extreme minority view, if that view is odious enough to get people mad about it to want to write back.
Heck, I found myself just now wanting to click on the r/coontown link just to see how bad it is. That’s exactly how they make their money.
So, how do we develop a website that allows free speech, free-form communities, but discourages baiting and hatred? I’m stumped.
Why are you being so dishonest PZ? The new policies mean that “reclassified” subreddits will never appear on the front page, you have to log in and agree to a disclaimer to access them, and that Reddit won’t sell ad space on them. All these changes serve to make these subreddits less accessible and make it much less likely someone will be unknowingly exposed to that type of content. In your mind, how is that “reinforcing the worst of Reddit”? If your answer is that these subreddits should be axed altogether, then you’re just a censorious asshole. I know you people have some dumb meme about “freeze peach” here, but if you value free speech as an ideal (as Reddit apparently does) then yes, that does include tolerating speech that many find abhorrent.
You are (willfully?) misunderstanding what is meant by this. This is a prohibition on brigading other subreddits, doxxing, raiding, or harassing specific individuals or groups of specific individuals. It’s not a prohibition against saying bad things about a general group. /r/CoonTown apparently doesn’t engage in this behavior. Several other subreddits have in fact been recently banned because they do.
Nope. Just because you wish a thing to be true doesn’t make it so. Most people don’t even pay attention to things like this. And of those who do, most aren’t so ideologically driven that they’ll abandon a website because it contains a small percentage of distasteful content. Reddit will continue to be widely known for memes, science fetishism, advice, news, hobbyist groups and the like, because that type of content makes up the vast majority of Reddit. Take a look at http://redditmetrics.com/. Do you see /r/CoonTown or the like on there anywhere?
nathanieltagg:
The problem is that odious statements/people aren’t solely attractive and intriguing. They are also repulsive. Yes, people might be morbidly curious, might see the arguments and be entertained, might feel compelled to get involve to either tackle the troll or become a troll themselves. And other people will be repelled, not wanting to see any of it. Other people will go, see the shit, and not come back, when they otherwise might have frequented the site if it was more pleasant. Others who like the arguments and get involved might still find the nature of the argument too repulsive and likewise go elsewhere when they might have stuck around if things were just slightly less bad.
It is very compelling to think of “internet drama” as a compelling and attractive little sideshow that draws in many people. Because it sounds intuitive to us, that controversy gets attention. And it does. It also burns people out and I am sure you aware of plenty of people who are averse to “controversy” or “drama” or what have you, whether due to high-minded principles, aversion to conflict, too much prior experience with Tempests in Teacups, general apathy and any other variety of reasons. These things do generate attention to some extent but it is highly randomized and there is no clear indication that is an effective and reliable way to get loyal readers or even a steady flow of new readers.
By discouraging baiting and hatred and not buying into the argument that they are entitled to defy those standards in the holy name of free speech. Free Speech is not an absolute and you can still value it and provide it while still placing reasonable limitations on people. Freedom of religion does not mean that you can sacrifice children to Cthulhu. Freedom of press doesn’t trump libel laws. Right to privacy does not mean that the IRS isn’t allowed to audit you. The right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. And so on.
I’ve never been there; not even by accident.
… it’s intentionally structured to promote the worst behavior in its community.
The net effect of reddit’s structure does bring out the worst, but nothing cited by our esteemed host supports the case for intentionality of same (though nathanieltagg @ # 6 makes a good case in that regard).
Having never set virtual foot in r/anything, I don’t know how it works. Does the money come from membership subscriptions, or advertisers, who might be persuaded by boycotts to take their funding elsewhere, or ???
Heh. Username’s argument on behalf of Reddit is essentially the one that PZ posted about here: https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2014/10/02/reddit-its-like-a-delicious-bowl-of-ice-cream-with-only-a-few-flecks-of-shit-poison-in-it/
And some edifying comments on the subject:
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2014/10/02/reddit-its-like-a-delicious-bowl-of-ice-cream-with-only-a-few-flecks-of-shit-poison-in-it/comment-page-1/#comment-860419
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2014/10/02/reddit-its-like-a-delicious-bowl-of-ice-cream-with-only-a-few-flecks-of-shit-poison-in-it/comment-page-1/#comment-860441
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2014/10/02/reddit-its-like-a-delicious-bowl-of-ice-cream-with-only-a-few-flecks-of-shit-poison-in-it/comment-page-1/#comment-860460
And for this one, see Pterryx’s comment as well right after it: https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2014/10/02/reddit-its-like-a-delicious-bowl-of-ice-cream-with-only-a-few-flecks-of-shit-poison-in-it/comment-page-1/#comment-860469
(Pterryx also follows up on their comment at 67, which is also rather illustrative of the problem)
As someone who uses and enjoys Reddit, it definitely has a harassment problem. Like a lot of open platforms, Reddit lacks the resources to effectively ban even those users engaging in criminal threats. I get a little frustrated when PZ equates Reddit with its worst users (“a racist hellhole”), when I haven’t see that same criticism of other open platforms with harassment problems and bigoted users.
Edit: Well, that’s probably unfair given similar criticism of facebook or twitter. I still feel that PZ’s criticism of Reddit implies no one should use it in a way that the criticism of other platforms does not.
Compare “Twitter management is incomeptent (2014)” (attacking twitter for faiing to ban serial harassers) or “Someday, maybe social media will apply their rules consistently (2011)”
I am just left wondering how to reconcile these two items from username:
1. I know you people have some dumb meme about “freeze peach” here, but if you value free speech as an ideal (as Reddit apparently does) then yes, that does include tolerating speech that many find abhorrent.
2.
So free speech is tolerating abhorrent speech, but, dare I say, “censoring” people for “brigading” or “doxxing”? That does sound consistent with the myriad troll apologists out there on the interwebs, so I guess this is the new conception of free speech that people are working with. Strange days.
——————————————————————————-
Regarding redditmetrics, here are some growing/top subreddits that I found:
r/GentlemanBoners (only the finest and classiest eye candy)
r/CasualJiggles (about “unintentional sexiness”)
r/Blackout2015, related to the topic of this post.
r/UNBGBBIIVCHIDCTIICBG , “A subreddit for all things that you upvoted not because of the girl in it, but because it is very cool – however, you do concede that you initially clicked because of the girl in the thumbnail.”
r/4chan.
And porn stuff, like JusttheJewels, SmutBuddy, ScarletGolightly, RealGirls, XXXVideos, and so on.
So yeah, mainstream and super-popular parts of Reddit aren’t overtly and blatantly racist in name and purpose. Just sexist. Color me surprised.
Sweet fucking Christ, I made the mistake of clicking the link. The scum over at r/coontown have actually shocked me to my core. One fucking moron actually has the nerve to describe its content as “intelligent discussion”, apparently without any irony. Fuck these people.
Pierce R. Butler #10
Money comes for gold subscribers, but the founders get more money from multi-million dollar investments . For example, by keeping the r/creepshots alive for a week after the media scandal began Reddit was able to attract record traffic and get an additional investment of 50m$.
Combine that with the removal of Pao, which to my mind looks very much like a clever manipulation of the users by the dudebro in charge to promote his plan, and you’ll see that catering to trolls is a viable business plan for Reddit.
______________________
To Alexander #4 and anyone else relying on Wong’s words – this is the man who made sure to keep the nude celeb pics for as long as possible to generate additional income. He is not trustworthy and he is definitely not on our side.
Reddit and guns:
Link
I keep getting baffled by the comparisons of Reddit to other social media sites. It has always reminded me of either a giant internet forum or a more news-site looking version of 4chan.
@nathanieltagg #6:
I suggest: operate it as a public sector enterprise, removing profit motives and allowing for collective funding to pay whatever size staff of moderators is necessary to enforce the social contract. Just like the actual, physical public square.
@anteprepro #17: Ditto.
nathanieltagg @ 8
This is a little bit of received wisdom that needs to die. Places like reddit take this hands off approach to moderation because they think they’re being neutral. They think they’re giving everyone the same chance to participate. That’s an illusion. If you don’t moderate, the assholes will rise to the top. They’ll say what they want and they won’t care who it hurts or whose experience it ruins. Because they’re assholes. And, over time, everyone else will drift away for an infinity of reasons. Some will tolerate it for a while but everyone has their breaking point. I’d bet very large sums of money that the people driven away by reddit’s assholes vastly outnumber the assholes.
I’ve moderated chat for Twitch TV channels which can draw upwards of 20k viewers (about 10% of whom will actually chat) depending on the game being played. You’d think it would be chaos but it’s not. Because we ban assholes as soon as they out themselves. You can even watch it happen. When a troll rears its head, the number of active chatters will drop noticeably. The instant they’re gone, chat returns to normal. You may even get some new people talking, having been encouraged by the troll being dealt with.
Anyone who thinks they need to allow anything and everything in order to maximize their traffic is more likely shooting themselves in the foot, in my opinion.
username @ 7
Because, by virtue of not selling ad space on them, reddit is fucking subsidizing them. They said, “Hey, virulent bigots, abusers and harassers! Not only have we decided to let you stay, we’re also willing to eat the cost of keeping you here!”
username @7:
Are you under the impression that Reddit is required to provide a platform for people to express any view they want? If you are, you’re sadly mistaken. Reddit has the right to regulate they type of commentary they want on their site.
if reddit hate trolls did not equate to more money they would not be tolerated on reddit let alone be coddled with a hidden walled garden.
If some branch, division of our all prying security/law enforcement apparatus were not monitoring these sites I would be amazed. Not that they would be doing anything about it or getting the information out to any others with a need to know!
uncle frogy
I’m surprised that anyone thinks this is a point in Reddit’s favor.
So coontown is so fucking important to Reddit that they’ll make a space just for them that will bring no profit at all to Reddit? It costs them to keep the rapey/racist subreddits, but they provide such a tremendous service that they must be retained?
Get outta here.
I find it amazing that reddit has scads of people scouring the web for any mention of it so they can go “Um, actually…” at people in the hope… they’ll die from boredom and stop saying mean things about it?
My thoughts regarding reddit and social media: The key aspect of social media such as Twitter, Facebook, myspace, or instagram is that each person has their own private area. Twitter has a personal twitter feed that people can go to see your tweets, retweets, profile, followers, who you follow, etc.. Facebook has your wall, including tabs for personal information and your posts and posts of other people who tagged you or specifically made a comment on it. Facebook has groups, but for the most part all publicly visible interaction on facebook is on the personal walls of people that are only accessible if you mutually add each other as friends. Twitter does not have groups that I am aware of and the closest thing it has are hashtags that you can glance at to see random people’s tweets. Aside from that, you will mostly see tweets from people that you specifically choose to follow, or people who found you and respond to you. All of the interaction is in the form of tweets again originating off of personal pages. On reddit, people create threads within subreddits. People comment on these threads. And people reply to the comments. You can check the commenters personal profile, but it is simply links to the comments made on the relevant threads. By default, on traditional social media, all of the comments and interactions are occurring on the personal pages of people and the only people involved are those people who are “friends” of the people interacting (though Twitter is a step or three away from this approach). On reddit, the comments and interactions are occurring in specific common, public commenting area, divided up by thread topic and by subcategorization of the website itself, that anyone can see or, as long as they have a log in and aren’t banned, participate in. In other words, it is exactly like forums, blogs, etc.
unclefroggy @ 23
U wot m8? I mean I’m sure they think that’s what’s going on. You’ve got a lot of work ahead of you to show that it’s borne out by reality, though.
On the subject of Reddit apologia more broadly, we have not only seen it before, but we have seen strikingly similar apologetics for 4chan:
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2014/09/24/you-mean-it-actually-was-a-false-flag-operation/comment-page-1/#comment-857023
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2014/09/24/you-mean-it-actually-was-a-false-flag-operation/comment-page-1/#comment-857066
(Granted, I only remember this one person doing it, but the similarity of the arguments was entertaining to me)
What is really insane is the amount of redditors who think it is the feminists and SJWs who are the real harassers. There was a top comment saying this under every question in the recent AMA about the content rules. /r/shitredditsays has become the boogeyman for pointing out racist and sexist comments that are voted up. Any time a racist gets voted down, they are sure it is SRS with an agenda, they can’t even imagine that regular people are fed up and offended.
That content AMA was a cluster of sea lions and JAQoffs who never saw a slope that wasn’t slippery. Which is a whole other issue, it just isn’t true that any moderation leads to anything questionable being banned. Even if it is hard to put into words, it is easy for a person to make a judgement between a hateful group and a consentual forum for BDSM. Which is why I think /r/coontown wasn’t banned: they couldn’t come up with a mathematical rule of logic to ban them that wouldn’t ban other groups they wanted to keep. And heaven forbid the juvenile personalities aren’t allowed to walk right up to the line of what is harmful and hateful and consider themselves freeze peach. The reddit admins even used the phrase “know it when you see it” but was too afraid to act on what they know and see.
To see the best and worst, I suggest /r/creepypms. People can post messages they get on Reddit, dating or chat sites. But it is a very well moderated safe space with terrific rules against victim blaming and unsolicited advice. It is my best example of how important active moderation is.
People need to understand that active moderation is in favor of free speech. You will get to hear more people who were silenced by fear of harassment and afraid to speak freely.
Seven of Mine #27
Please see the link in my comment #15.
Trolls, by themselves, don’t bring that much money (though they do pay very well for their upkeep). People looking for the things that those trolls have done bring lots of traffic, which translates multi-million dollar investments.
In the low-probability hope that username @ 7 will actually read any replies…
See, that’s the thing. Reddit’s policies apparently serve free speech as an ideal, but not as a reality. Reddit’s policies, based on experience from the Really Real World of Reality Which is Real, tend to create situations where a comparatively small group of dedicated (if that’s the word) people, all repeating essentially the same message, can drown out a larger number of people with a diversity of opinions. That’s not actually enhancing free speech.
Once someone online tells me they hate black people, I’ve pretty much got that bit, I don’t need to hear it again and again. I certainly don’t need to hear it to the exclusion of other points of view. That’s not actually, in the Real World, enhancing free speech.
Tolerating abhorrent speech is one thing.
Hosting it is another thing of course, and if you want to, I guess that’s your call.
Hosting it in a way that apparently allows it to suppress other types of speech, abhorrent or not, isn’t enhancing free speech.
This seems pretty much typical of Libertarian ideals: sounds great in theory, somewhere between utterly useless and completely counterproductive in practice.
anteprepro
I guess I don’t see why the distinction between forums/blogs/Reddit and social media/Facebook/Twitter matters. For me, the key distinction is between open platforms (unless you’re banned you can publish stuff) and closed platforms (unless you’re approved you can’t publish stuff). I’m okay using open platforms even though people use them to criminally harass others or to publicly post bigoted or other harmful material. I think I hear people here saying people have a moral obligation to stop using Reddit, but I just don’t follow the reasoning.
What the ‘free speech’ advocates (as in, the people who post egregiously vile and disgustingly racist/sexist/whatever content, then defend that as ‘exercising free speech’) don’t seem to realise is that, by doing what they’re doing, and utterly failing to self-police, they’re actually endangering the free speech they supposedly care so much about. The reason I say that is, whenever any government of any country in the world considers passing any kind of internet censorship laws, all they have to do is point to this content, and they get support for those laws.
Whatever helps you sleep at night, qwints.
AlexanderZ @ 30
Any time you’re ready to demonstrate that trolls bring more traffic than they drive away, do let us know.
Seven of Mine #35
I did. Scroll up and click on my link.
AlexanderZ @36:
Your comment @15 didn’t demonstrate that trolls bring in more traffic than they drive away. It demonstrated that they bring in lots of traffic.
I often visit reddit as a time waster, but I don’t care enough to have an account in order to comment. I’ve read tens of thousands of items over the past few years and scanned 10x that many comments at least. Often people in one group will have comments to some other group. In all this time I’ve never heard of /r/coontown. This isn’t to dismiss the worries that crap like that exists, but PZ seems to be saying that this is representative of reddit.
Want to read up on what dashcam has good bang/$? /r/dashcam is great, and not racist/homophobic/etc comments. Interested in hobby electronics? /r/electronics is a good start, or the dozen related subs mentioned in its sidebar. Each group is moderated by its own set of people. That a white power group would have “moderators” that allow the infection to grow is no surprise. Try posting comments like that in one of the other groups and it will disappear.
Tony! #37
1. That extra traffic resulted in a large (10% of total company’s worth at the time) investment. That investment is not refundable, so from Reddit’s point of view it’s a huge net profit.
2. We can use Alexa. It’s not a perfect tool, but it’s the best I’ve got. TheFappenning (celebrity nude pics scandal) happened in late August-early September. Note that the Alexa ranking for those months is pretty flat, but it begins to rise after October. To get an idea why scroll down and look at the percentage of visits from search engines. During TheFappenning it peaked at 10% of all visits, then dropped, and gradually began to rise in later months. This means that new visitors curious about the scandal became redditors, which caused the Alexa rating to rise.
3. You’ll notice that the Alexa rating starts to drop at about the same time when Pao started to clean the house.
This all means that even if Reddit is losing some people, it obviously profits from it financially and those people are replaced by a larger quantity of new ones attracted by the scandals. Furthermore, an attempt to combat the trolls by Pao decreased Reddit’s ranking, despite somewhat increased interest from the public (see the last months on the search traffic graph).
Not a fan of Reddit but paradoxically quite a fan of the bits of Reddit that concentrate on how terrible the rest of the site is like Shit Reddit Says and Gamer Ghazi. They do quite the public service in documenting the racist, sexist, sexually predatory, mean spirited shenanigans of the rest of the flaming garbage pile that is Reddit.
Just saw this on the We Hunted the Mammoth article:
It may be small in comparison to the rest of reddit, but it isn’t something you can just glibly ignore either.
Speaking of which, regarding Reddit policies: https://np.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3djjxw/lets_talk_content_ama/
Reddit bans spam.
Reddit bans copyrighted material and doxxing.
Reddit bans “sexually explicit material involving minors”.
Reddit ensures that NSFW content is segregated.
Reddit is now ensuring that “content that violates a sense of common decency” will also be segregated, opt-in material, instead of actually banning it like its other restrictions of teh freeze peach.
My question is: why the fuck do the people talking about how good 99% of Reddit is apparently not give a shit about the fact that Reddit is explicitly setting up policies to allow for the continued existence of the obviously bigoted communities that they claim aren’t a big part of what Reddit is? I know they don’t like nuking whole subreddits, but for fuck’s sake, if they can ensure that porn is properly tagged and that no one is using copyrighted material or disclosing someone else’s personal information, they can at very least somewhat try to make a policy against overt bigotry, rather than just making the policy “hide it under the rug”. And nary an eyelash was batted. Surreal.
Every time people talk about Reddit, I feel like such an old fogey. I have been there a million times, but I will never understand its culture or how it works. The whole system of upvotes and downvotes and people have reputations but the accounts are throwaway and just basically all of it makes me feel like my parents must feel when they watch me fix their smartphones. 4chan is terrible, but at least it’s easy to understand.
And frankly, based on what’s apparently going on over at Reddit, I’m not sure 4chan is that much worse anymore.
Capitulating to ideologies known to do considerable harm is in effect a promulgation of those ideologies. It warrants a censorious attitude by all decent people. Reddit is not for decent people.
(continuing the thought I had in 43) At least, not any longer. When you are aware that your gold account, that the ads shown on /r/kittens, that every visit to /r/SRS, props up and allows the festering pustules under the bandage to continue doing harm then it’s time to amputate. Burn the crops and salt the fields.
AlexanderZ @ 39
Any time you’re ready to show that the quantity of new people who show up briefly to gawp at the latest scandals is greater than the quantity of additional people who would already/still be frequent and ongoing users if reddit had never been a complete shit-heap in the first place, do let us know. Likewise, be sure to give us a shout any time you’re ready to show that the investments prompted by the scandals are more than the investments they’d get by not being a shit-heap. I’ll give you a hint: unless you have access to statistics from some alternate reality in which reddit never became a shit-heap, you can’t do it.
seven the point is that regardless weather you are right and they lose some net number of users they apparently still seem to think it is making them money because they sure as heck ain’t in it for free speech alone or some other altruistic ideals of providing some forum for the development of culture alone.
As has been noted the result is investment money pouring in. Are you trying to say that they are not in it for the money and are purposely letting some people drive their business in to the ground because of freeze peach?
uncle frogy
unclefrogy @ 46
Hey, unclefrogy, see this?
This is me at # 27 responding to you at #23 saying this:
Yes, I fucking understand that the people at reddit think they’re doing the best thing they can for the health of their web site. I fucking understand that they think they’re following the path that will make them the most money. I’m saying I think they’re incorrect.
Yes. I’m saying they’re letting some people drive their business into the ground because of freeze peach. I don’t think they realize that’s what they’re doing, but I think that’s what they’re doing. I really have no fucking clue why you think an occasional burst of traffic/investment is necessarily going to be more profitable than simply maintaining consistently higher traffic/investments by virtue of not being a haven for the world’s worst people. I mean the whole point of this post was that reddit is offering to hide the most objectionable subreddits from public view and not put ads on them precisely because those subreddits drive away advertisers and investors. Because they apparently can’t fucking make a connection between “advertisers and investors are driven away by this content” to “maybe untold quantities of potential regular and frequent users are also being driven away by that content.” I think that, just like many people at the top of the privilege food chain, it just doesn’t fucking occur to these douchebags that more than a handful of unreasonably sensitive people are bothered by this shit because they personally aren’t bothered by it.
seven I would like to agree with you that they are in fact acting in a self destructive way and will end up paying dearly for it. How ever, I have been wrong before about how businesses work and it appears that it is working for them at least that is what it looks like from their actions. There have been many good businesses that have been destroyed by bad management decisions they happen all the time some times quickly some time a long and slow painful slide into oblivion having missed opportunities to turn the slide around.
Time will tell in any case.
I am content to spend my reading and commenting time here and a few other select places and am not likely ever to go to reddit any way.
uncle frogy
Oh for fuck’s sake unclefrogy. I’m not saying that they necessarily are going to “pay dearly” for the way they run their shit. They’re clearly just fine with the way it currently works as evidenced by the fact that they’re trying their damnedest to keep it working the way it’s working. All I’m saying is I’m not convinced that pandering to the lowest common denominator of humanity is better or more profitable for them than having some fucking standards about what content they host. For at least the third time, I believe they think it is. I remain unconvinced that it actually is.
unclefrogy
We’re wasting our time. As Seven #45 said:
In other words, she pulls the same logical fallacy that most believers pull (and is equally condescending as the believers are) – you can’t prove that gods don’t exist unless you know absolutely everything there is to know. Showing that Reddit’s policy has profited it and that a reversal of that policy (by Pao) had done some damage is merely evidence and will be rejected, because Seven isn’t interested in evidence, she wants a Proof. Which is, as she herself says, is impossible. Of course, that impossibility works both ways – just as there is no Proof for Reddit’s profitable assholery, there is no Proof that not being an asshole won’t destroy your business. After all, neither of us has a time/trans-dimensional machine.
I’d ask her how she can reconcile this approach with the scientific method and her apparent Atheism, but I’ve had enough of her pleasant conversation for a while.
PZ—I’ve always been pretty fascinated with disagreements, and how people almost inherently talk past each other in any discussion or debate, informal or not. But with regards to the phenomenon you describe—how, in short, Reddit users gravitate into increasingly polarized echo chambers to the point where conflict is inevitable—it can be applied to just about every community, and even the one I’m currently writing a comment on, can’t it?
I think that Pharyngula, and even FtB as a whole, has this “mob effect” to a lesser extent than most communities do. But (and I promise I don’t have an implied motive for asking this question) how significant do *you* think that the previously described phenomenon is among viewers of your blog?
Except with Reddit, they take the conflict elsewhere, and use bullying tactics to silence their foes. They have tried that here, to no avail.
Show where we go over and bully those on reddit. Or you have no case.
I guess I don’t have a case then. But your parameters make it hard to have one. Just as it’s hard to show that anti-feminist users who post here are from Reddit, it’s it’s just as hard to show that pro-feminist users who post on Reddit are there from Pharyngula.
Anyway, my question was not posed so as to make a point, but to ask a question. I’m actually genuinely interested here. As I said, I’ve always been fascinated by how disagreements form (like the one we have now), and at this moment I’m pondering the generalization (and I don’t use it in a bad way) PZ applies to Reddit as a whole. After all, Reddit doesn’t inherently contain this phenomenon; it’s the users (which admittedly could be influenced by what Reddit permits). And I’m wondering what PZ thinks of his own community.
No, not if you really had a case, and weren’t just wanking.
Actually it does. It’s called lack of ethics.
Until you provide evidence, you don’t deserve another post from me. That is also called ethics.
You’re not answering the prompt,
InquiringLaurence @51:
While that may or may not be true, I think you’re glossing over the problems PZ has with Reddit, which are significantly worse than ‘polarized echo chambers that inevitably lead to conflict’:
He’s not saying he’s opposed to a polarized environment at Reddit. He’s saying he’s opposed to Reddit hosting forums for racists. And here:
he adds that they’re providing a forum for misogynists. Can you see the difference between
hosting polarized forums that inevitably lead to polarized conflict
and
hosting forums that provide places for racists and misogynists to express their views?
Where is your link to evidence? YOU FIRST.
(Damn, I didn’t finish posting the comment.)
Here’s the rest of it:
You’re not answering the prompt. Are you interested in engaging, or not? You showed that you at least were, at least when you provided the parameters to make a counterargument (originally, it was a question).
No, you’re not addressing the point why can’t
(I’m sorry for my unfinished comments, some of the admins can delete it. If I could explain in a sentence the reason for posting them at seemingly random moments in time, I would.)
Nevertheless, thanks for the reply, Ton
Nerd:
I’m having a hard time understanding what you’re asking of InquiringLaurence. Can you clarify please?
What point needs addressing? The point that pharyngula is just as bad as r/coontown. That needs addressing with evidence from IL. Until such evidence is provided, IL should stand down from their claims.
Q
InquiringLaurence:
Is there any way you can compose your comments elsewhere and then copy/paste them here? Perhaps that would solve the problems you seem to be having.
Acting CEO Ellen Pao has written a very dramatic piece defending herself, blaming her resignation on trolls. Claiming the trolls won. She’s not telling the whole truth. The reason Reddit was up in arms was because Acting CEO Ellen Pao fired a well-liked female employee (I mention female, specifically, because Ms. Pao sued and lost a gender discrimination lawsuit to her last employer so I’m betting this will be her next trick) named Victoria Taylor. THAT was the final straw. You can look this up online but the moderators all over Reddit felt that they were taken advantage of and basically treated poorly and the firing was the final straw. “The Fattening,” as it was called was not the reason hundreds of thousands of people demanded her resignation. What you’re arguing is Ellen Pao’s version, not the facts.
Cinnamonbite on zazzle @64: Oh look, here’s a reddit board all about how apparently co-founder Alexis Ohanian is behind the actual firing of Victoria Taylor.
https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cucye/an_old_team_at_reddit/csz2p3i
Cinnamonbite on Zazzle @64:
According to Ellen Pao’s predecessor, Yishan Wong, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian fired Victoria Taylor, not Ellen Pao. Although it doesn’t look like he wanted to take full responsibility for it:
I’m not sure how Ohanian-one of the co-founders of Reddit and executive chairman-reported to Pao.
Here is Yishan Wong’s full post on the matter:
Cinnamonbite, the article PZ cites already addressed your version of.events and spelled out why it does not hold water. I quoted many relevant bits way up at comment three but not all. Regardless your simple declaration that it was truly and obviously about Taylor is going to need more than your simply asserting it to make it credible. Apologies for the inconvenience
Cinnamonbite on Zazzle (#64)
What the others have said. But also, fuck your stupid non sequitur plus ad hominem parenthetical, too.
On the other hand, the sheer AMOUNT of traffic means there’s basically nothing that can actually be done about it. Either there are sites where horrible hate pages get hosted (everyone’s distant relatives on Facebook, for example), or you get rid of “mass aggregate” sites altogether.
I really do get the impression that there’s basically nothing that can be done about it. There’s no algorythm smart enough to get context either, so the best one can hope for is a system that blanket bans key words and phrases, which will alienate groups meant to house those talking about being victims of said hatred. It’s lose/lose on the internet sometimes.