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Reddit Is Tearing Itself Apart
21–30 of 130 posts
Re: Reddit Is Tearing Itself Apart
#22I'm no Trump supporter but this piece is brutal in its implicit bias. Essentially, "free speech should not be enjoyed by those that hold the wrong opinion!"
If Centipede Central is the chat Reddit is referring to — a chat room within the Slack-like Discord program, the one linked in the sidebar of The_Donald and one of the largest servers on Discord — its users have encouraged the harassment of other moderators, artificially inflated the vote count on posts, rigged off-Reddit polls, and posted John Podesta’s personal Netflix login information for the chat’s 1000+ members to use at will.
It reads to me like they're critiquing the behavior of the people running the subreddit, as opposed to their opinions. As I don't use Reddit much, could you add some context? For example, are the objectionable behaviors described int he article actually common across the political spectrum, or common in every election season? I would certainly accept your claim if bias if I knew that such behavior was widespread but only one flavor of it were being called out.
Re: Reddit Is Tearing Itself Apart
#23As someone who reads reddit fairly frequently, this doesn't reflect my experience on the site. In reality there is no unified reddit. I've taken a gander at /r/The_Donald a couple of times (mostly out of morbid curiosity) but other than those few times I've experienced very little impact of whatever it is they are doing. I read some sports subredits. I read some culture subredits. I read some of the bigger basic ente…
Looks like it's a bigger problem for moderators than for users:
>“There have been unquestionably instances [where] moderators of other subreddits were targeted by users in The_Donald,” Reddit told Gizmodo, and the leaked chatlogs reveal the extent.
>Some moderators had been flooded with constant harassing messages. “One threatened to kill my fucking dog,” a moderator pleaded in the leaked Slack chat. A The_Donald user hacked r/politics and booted half of the moderation team, another told Gizmodo in an email.
>“We have had multiple moderators doxxed and sent death threats, we had one moderator who had his truck broken into and vandalized,” an r/politics mod told Gizmodo over Reddit private message.
Re: Reddit Is Tearing Itself Apart
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not at all how this is going down. There are rules about mobbing other subs with garbage. No one would care If they kept to their own sub.
Every sub is allowed to moderate itself how it chooses. Plus, there wasn't a similar outcry when Correct The Record, swamped the site with its paid advocacy before the election. Either you believe in free speech, that sunlight is the best disinfectant, and that good ideas will prevail in the end -- or you don't.
It was stuff like idiots accusing everyone that didn't support trump of working for CTR that has lead to such a backlash.
> sunlight is the best disinfectant
What do you think that disinfectant looks like? It is rarely people changing ideas it is more often society excluding people. Which is what is happening here. You don't have to give every idiot a platform to believe in free speech. You don't have to give them anything but the right to speech which they can use on their own sites.
Re: Reddit Is Tearing Itself Apart
#25[deleted]
Re: Reddit Is Tearing Itself Apart
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not at all how this is going down. There are rules about mobbing other subs with garbage. No one would care If they kept to their own sub.
Every sub is allowed to moderate itself how it chooses. Plus, there wasn't a similar outcry when Correct The Record, swamped the site with its paid advocacy before the election. Either you believe in free speech, that sunlight is the best disinfectant, and that good ideas will prevail in the end -- or you don't.
> Every sub is allowed to moderate itself how it chooses.
But they cross over into other subs and start interfering there. A small enough sub with a small team of moderators can find it difficult to deal with someone crashing their party.
> Plus, there wasn't a similar outcry when Correct The Record, swamped the site with its paid advocacy before the election.
I didn't see that, but I mostly visit non-political subs. And in any case, Person B doing something bad doesn't excuse Person A doing it.
> Either you believe in free speech, that sunlight is the best disinfectant, and that good ideas will prevail in the end -- or you don't.
But it can be hard to filter out the good ideas when they're buried under a hundred good ones; and an artificial UV light being beamed into your eyes isn't sunlight.
Re: Reddit Is Tearing Itself Apart
#27This appears to have been flagbombed.
Because the article is, quite frankly, bullsh*t.
Re: Reddit Is Tearing Itself Apart
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not at all how this is going down. There are rules about mobbing other subs with garbage. No one would care If they kept to their own sub.
Every sub is allowed to moderate itself how it chooses. Plus, there wasn't a similar outcry when Correct The Record, swamped the site with its paid advocacy before the election. Either you believe in free speech, that sunlight is the best disinfectant, and that good ideas will prevail in the end -- or you don't.
I don't believe correct the record was ever as pervasive as the_donald.
I don't believe the_donald constant spam (pre and post election) is based on legitimate interest.
I am very confident, and slightly embarrassed that Reddit hasn't been able to stop this, that the_Donald has been able to maintain it's presence with technical vote manipulation. I can detect it's effects, and I am shitty data scientist.
To associate this issue with free speech is a gross over statement of the problem. This is one of the most effective trolls in social media history.
Re: Reddit Is Tearing Itself Apart
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
you're right, its not even coded hate speech.
I took a look at their sub. I couldn't find any hate speech (though I ignored heavily downvoted comments). I'm also suspicious of "coded hate speech" since that concept grants license to attach racist connotations to just about any sentence. Is there a post on r/The_Donald that stands out to you as being hate speech?
I was curious. So I looked. This was the top non-stickied post I saw:
https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/5fltt9/amy_schu...
To save others the trouble, the title of the post is "Amy Schumer And Lena Dunham Are Finally Leaving The Country" and the image is of two orca whales being prepared for transport. The very non-coded message is that these two women are "as fat as whales" and furthermore that they deserve to be derided based on physical appearance because of their expressed political opinions.
I'm no lawyer, but I think that's treading awfully close to "hate speech".
Re: Reddit Is Tearing Itself Apart
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
the entire internet is composed of private entities. following that logic there is practically no free speech on the internet.
Another possible comparison: cities are composed of mostly private entities. The free speech limitations in private businesses are comparable to those on line. How does that play out? Is the comparison faulty? Honest question. I'd like to figure out a more real-world comparison that matches our intuitions.
There are lots of public spaces available, maintained by the government.
Some plazas are larger than all but the largest private gathering places.