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How a Reddit forum has become a lifeline to opioid addicts in the US

theguardian.com

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Re: How a Reddit forum has become a lifeline to opioid addicts in the US

#91

Post by fav_collector »

BoratObama wrote: post #28
pat_space wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think of Reddit as a single entity, but as a platform for communities(subreddits). The differences between subreddit communities are vast, ranging from 100% toxic to 100% positive.

My view of reddit has changed similarly. I think of it as something similar to vBulletin or bbPress with r/all or r/popular as a flagship gateway to subreddits. And recently I purged all my subreddits and started from scratch to build a better reddit experience geared towards self improvement and a more wholesome experience. No more toxic communities. I look for niche communities with civil discourse and common inter…

How do you find these less popular subreddits?

Re: How a Reddit forum has become a lifeline to opioid addicts in the US

#92

Post by komali2 »

KekDemaga wrote: post #53
pcnix wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

/r/politics does not outright run itself as a safe space for a particular group though, unlike /r/the_donald. Any criticism on /r/the_donald gets you a ban, whereas any criticism on /r/politics just gets you downvotes, which are entirely consistent with how the sub should be run.

I'd argue that being forth right is a better approach. While they won't often ban on politics they do enforce a timeout when your comment gets down voted having a similar effect.

That's how the website works, that's not anything particular about the /r/politics mods.

Re: How a Reddit forum has become a lifeline to opioid addicts in the US

#93

Post by bittercynic »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #55
lsmarigo wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit has some fantastic and fascinating communities and really interesting cult-like ones (/r/nofap) However I'd like to point out the admin policy towards hate groups and speech on reddit is in my opinion incredibly dangerous and damaging to our society. They will take action against subreddits like FPH (fat people hate) because of "real life" actions, meawhile there are thousands of highly upvoted calls to violen…

Violent, hateful, disgusting speech has no place in civil discourse but it's irreplaceable in public discourse. That's kinda the problem. As a species, our entire communications spectrum can't be forced into either bucket. It has to exist in both. The kind of things I wouldn't tolerate at all around my family I'm fine tolerating around my friends. And the kind of things I wouldn't tolerate from a friend I'm fine tole…

It's a difficult spot because social networks try to maintain a fiction that they're a public forum where free speech must be respected. As far as I know there is no legal precedent that this is so, and they're free to ban users/cull posts from their web sites as they see fit. Additionally, I'd say they have a responsibility to prevent their site from being used for certain purposes, though the boundaries of what's acceptable are tough to define.

Reddit is not like an ISP, who can (until recently) claim that they're not responsible for traffic passing through their network, as reddit has no reasonable claim to be a "dumb pipe".

Re: How a Reddit forum has become a lifeline to opioid addicts in the US

#94

Post by vkou »

lsmarigo wrote: post #24
icpmacdo wrote: post #2

I think Reddit is interestingly a net social positive. For all the bad things that come out of it you can often see users helping others in a pretty significant way.

Reddit has some fantastic and fascinating communities and really interesting cult-like ones (/r/nofap) However I'd like to point out the admin policy towards hate groups and speech on reddit is in my opinion incredibly dangerous and damaging to our society. They will take action against subreddits like FPH (fat people hate) because of "real life" actions, meawhile there are thousands of highly upvoted calls to violen…

> meawhile there are thousands of highly upvoted calls to violence daily. Is this just a reflection of our society? Probably but I'm always interested to see which sites allow what.

Unfortunately, yes. Look at the comments for any news story about a protest. Half the commenters are shouting that the protest should be non-violent, while the other half are shouting that the police should beat and cripple the protestors. There is also intersection between these two groups.

Or the people posting copy-pasta about how violent the Religion of Peace is, all the while advocating for glassing the countries it is prevalent in.

Generally, calls to violence are taken quite seriously, but calls to the worst form of violence - war - are considered political.

Re: How a Reddit forum has become a lifeline to opioid addicts in the US

#95

Post by Karunamon »

24gttghh wrote: post #61
traverseda wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

/r/the_donald is a subreddit devoted to donald trump. Reddit didn't ban it. It follows the "safe-space" "you're not allowed to dissent" model pioneered by some "leftist" subs, and will ban people for having perfectly legitimate dissent. It managed to exploit some loopholes in how reddit works to take-over the front page. The most interesting one was "stickying" new posts so they were shown on their front page. They d…

Wouldn't the solution be to un-follow /r/all? I've never seen a post from the subreddits-which-shall-not-be-named...

/r/all isn't even a thing you can subscribe to or even see unless you explicitly link to or type reddit.com/r/all into the address bar.

It used to be the front page while logged out was /r/all, but that was replaced with /r/popular a while back (which has a completely non-transparent filter applied to it)

Re: How a Reddit forum has become a lifeline to opioid addicts in the US

#96

Post by komali2 »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #55
lsmarigo wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit has some fantastic and fascinating communities and really interesting cult-like ones (/r/nofap) However I'd like to point out the admin policy towards hate groups and speech on reddit is in my opinion incredibly dangerous and damaging to our society. They will take action against subreddits like FPH (fat people hate) because of "real life" actions, meawhile there are thousands of highly upvoted calls to violen…

Violent, hateful, disgusting speech has no place in civil discourse but it's irreplaceable in public discourse. That's kinda the problem. As a species, our entire communications spectrum can't be forced into either bucket. It has to exist in both. The kind of things I wouldn't tolerate at all around my family I'm fine tolerating around my friends. And the kind of things I wouldn't tolerate from a friend I'm fine tole…

I'm very frustrated that this is getting downvoted. If you are going to downvote, please at least post a counter-point or something!

Re: How a Reddit forum has become a lifeline to opioid addicts in the US

#97

Post by unabridged »

>The obvious counter-argument is silencing them strengthens their argument and makes them a martyr. I don't buy that argument at all, it's far more dangerous to allow them to indoctrinate and appeal to all the fringe disenfranchised youth which they've become frighteningly effective at. In any case it's clear reddit can be used for good like in this article, I'm just not so sure it's a net positive to society as another poster argued.

This is the road to censorship, burning books, and confiscating servers. Some people are fine with censorship, because they imagine people who think like them as the censors.

You can only fight ideas with better ideas. Kicking them out and silencing them, says to them you can't compete. You can't offer them an argument as to why they should tolerate foreigners, other races, etc. It seems obvious to you now, but the ideals of tolerance and equality took years and years of discourse to dominate public consciousness.

Re: How a Reddit forum has become a lifeline to opioid addicts in the US

#98

Post by pat_space »

bri3d wrote: post #42
pat_space wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think of Reddit as a single entity, but as a platform for communities(subreddits). The differences between subreddit communities are vast, ranging from 100% toxic to 100% positive.

I started thinking of Reddit that way, but once you start thinking about it that way, it's a pretty crappy software solution. A platform for diverse communities with a single SSO solution and frictionless cross-community posting combined with limited moderation features, poor ban capabilities, and easy discovery? That's not a good software recipe for a community to become empowered or build their own space at all.

Crappy it may be, it sure beats the hell out of setting up & hosting your own message board!

Re: How a Reddit forum has become a lifeline to opioid addicts in the US

#99

Post by komali2 »

rtx wrote: post #69
bri3d wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started thinking of Reddit that way, but once you start thinking about it that way, it's a pretty crappy software solution. A platform for diverse communities with a single SSO solution and frictionless cross-community posting combined with limited moderation features, poor ban capabilities, and easy discovery? That's not a good software recipe for a community to become empowered or build their own space at all.

User numbers don't agree with you.

>That's not a good software recipe for a community to become empowered or build their own space at all.

Keywords: become empowered or build their own space

The argument was not "that's not a good software recipe to cause high traffic."

Re: How a Reddit forum has become a lifeline to opioid addicts in the US

#100

Post by knowaveragejoe »

52-6F-62 wrote: post #12
quchen wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s /r/the_donald, and how did it »then happen«?

It's a safe dwelling for a mix of sycophant bots, Trump supporters/red-pillers, trolls, and possibly Russians (depending on who you ask). Warning: once you see it, you can't un-see it.

To add to this, the ecosystem around this is what really enables their commentary to spread into threads with only the slightest relation to their hot topics(immigration, black people, islam, etc). There's a variety of IRC channels, Discord servers and other sites(4chan, gab, twitter) that are participating and orchestrating their activities on Reddit. I think that's the larger effect the above person describes.

Even though they are generally heavily downvoted, I worry that their one-liner soundbites and gotchas will reach more people with weaker critical thinking skills.

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