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Reddit Founder Alexis Ohanian Resigns from the Board of Reddit

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Re: Reddit Founder Alexis Ohanian Resigns from the Board of Reddit

#351

Post by mwfunk »

at-fates-hands wrote: post #231
stronglikedan wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 24% of people killed by police are black > African Americans, however, account for 24 percent of those fatally shot and killed by the police despite being just 13 percent of the U.S. population. As The Post noted in a new analysis published last week, that means black Americans are 2.5 times as likely as white Americans to be shot and killed by police officers. [0] [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-natio…

The problem with any of these statistics is they lack context. How many of those incidents were justified? How many times did the suspect point a gun at the police? How many times did a suspect engage the police and attempt to assault the officer or grab his gun? Without context, its easy to sit her and say that black americans are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by cops than whites and just assume that NONE of th…

Don't those numbers need to be normalized to take into account the size of the populations? You posted absolute raw numbers for blacks and whites, without noting that depending on how the categories are defined, the white population of the US is 4-6x greater than the black population of the US. 4x is the absolute minimum, so if you were to weight them proportionately what you posted would show a very different story.

If the most conservative numbers are used (only 4x as many whites as blacks in the US), then it turns into this:

2017

Whites: 457

Blacks: 223->892

2018

Whites: 399

Blacks: 209->836

2019

Whites: 370

Blacks: 235->940

2020

Whites: 172

Blacks: 88->352

But practically speaking, without splitting hairs too much it's a heck of a lot closer to 5-6x than 4x.

EDIT: formatting

Re: Reddit Founder Alexis Ohanian Resigns from the Board of Reddit

#352

Post by redditadmin1499 »

ilikehurdles wrote: post #17
minimaxir wrote: post #3

Relevant context: recently, former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao called out Reddit for their policies after Reddit did a statement on Black Lives Matter: > I am obligated to call you out: You should have shut down the_donald instead of amplifying it and its hate, racism, and violence. So much of what is happening now lies at your feet. You don't get to say BLM when reddit nurtures and monetizes white supremacy and hate all da…

Here's a relevant totally hypothetical "long con" involving Ellen Pao's hiring-and-firing and re-hiring of the original founders: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cs78i/whats_the... The hypothesis is posed by Yishan Wong, an ex-CEO, with responses from Altman and Ohanian. edit: I made a mistake understanding this story. Please see the correct timeline in geofft's comment.

I used to work for reddit. I was talking with another former admin, and we both remember a post on reddit asking admins how they got their jobs at reddit. I was never able to find it, but Ellen Pao said something like "I invested in it and asked for a job."

Re: Reddit Founder Alexis Ohanian Resigns from the Board of Reddit

#353

Post by newsbinator »

MarcellusDrum wrote: post #32

Reddit got too mainstream for its own good. The company desperately wants to become the new social media (think Facebook or Twitter), but many users are standing in the way, making the change from a discussion website to a social media website slow. What made me and many others use Reddit in the first place is that it didn't really matter who you are and what's your political and religious background, the only thing…

I have no idea what the skin color or gender or sexual preferences of other users on HN are and you don't know mine. That's how I prefer it.

The other day I unsubscribed from a popular Javascript mailing list, after the writer switched from writing about Javascript to writing about how white people and black people should interact.

Or rather I didn't unsubscribe right away: I emailed the writer politely and mentioned how I prefer posts to be about the thing that unites us: Javascript.

Their response: "my platform, my voice", "all tech is political", "this mailing list isn't for you", and later on Twitter: people who unsubscribed are racist and should "eat shit".

I don't believe I'm racist. It's just that I signed up for Javascript tips and the writer switched to politics (in this case, the politics of a country and culture I don't live in).

I'm no more interested in their political views than they are in mine. On the internet, nobody needs to know I'm a dog.

Re: Reddit Founder Alexis Ohanian Resigns from the Board of Reddit

#354

Post by purephase »

hfourm wrote: post #191
WorkingDead wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BS. The only difference between the two discussion groups is that TD dropped all the pretense. I have seen the same kinds of things that are loosely defined as 'calls to violence' in both places.

People on the donald openly celebrated violence in top upvoted posts. Tons of open racism. Politics has turned into a bit of an echo chamber compared to 10 years ago, but it is in no way the same as T_D. That "dropping pretense" you describe carries a LOT more weight than you are giving it, in who it attracts, and the behaviors it promotes.

It's just a thinly veiled allusion to "dog whistling" which all of these supposed free speech zealots like to throw around whenever they feel that their safe space is being questioned.

I'm no fan of r/politics, but to actually believe that they're basically the same as TD is just wild.

Re: Reddit Founder Alexis Ohanian Resigns from the Board of Reddit

#355

Post by jayd16 »

throwmehaweh wrote: post #313
jayd16 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mods would ban opposing views and leave hateful, violent, and racist views. Its not complicated.

I've browsed TD since it's inception and haven't seen any violent, hateful, or racist posts. That's not to say that they haven't ever existed, but certainly not anything remotely close to how it's perceived. And definitely not any worse than you would see right now on r/politics.

I don't know what to tell you. I followed it during the election but it got too disgusting. Immigrants, and Muslims were large targets from what I remember. Lots of misogyny towards Hillary Clinton as well but I guess that doesn't count. It was certainly much worse than r/politics which is very biased but not racist.

Plenty of really gross Pepe memes. I mean, I don't know what to tell you.

538 did an interesting analysis into the kind of people on the sub at the time https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/dissecting-trumps-most-...

They always did a good job of some token news story as a "see we're good guys!" type post but if you scratched the surface and read the comments its was obvious.

The 538 article has some examples https://np.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/5ldfmg/red_pills...

Re: Reddit Founder Alexis Ohanian Resigns from the Board of Reddit

#356

Post by thedrbrian »

canada_dry wrote: post #316
asdff wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really doesn't take much to brigade. Write some scripts to get 100 accounts upvoting your posts while they are on new, and chances are after that initial hump you've surmounted with your bots it will catch exponential viewership over the course of the day and make it to the front page.

> It really doesn't take much to brigade What's frightening is that groups like politicians, unions, and extreme right-wing groups could very easily use this technique to quickly and pretty effectively promote or quell discussion. I just recently saw an example of where this might have happened. Very suddenly a comment in a discussion I was following - what initially was a popular up-voted opinion (i.e discussing pol…

How can it be that the right wing are simultaneously back woods idiots and also capable of out teching the coastal elite?

Re: Reddit Founder Alexis Ohanian Resigns from the Board of Reddit

#357

Post by jcims »

foldr wrote: post #337
jcims wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's hard to reconcile that theory with the facts of most of the cases that make the news. Why would you expect a uniform sampling of cases from the news? Police killed 1000 people last year. Almost 3 per day. How many of those did you hear about? Why would you hear about some vs. the others? > The first step everyone needs to take to resolve this problem is to stop blaming the victims of police violence. Who are yo…

I wouldn't, but I think it's important to be sensitive to what people are actually protesting about. It's mostly these outrageous cases and (in the case of black folks) lived experience that make people angry. People cite statistics to illustrate the fact that these cases are part of a bigger problem of systematic racism. Some people expend a lot of effort trying to explain the statistics away, but that largely misse…

The problem is that this emotionally charged state will lead directly to policies designed to defuse the situation rather than solve the underlying problem. This is how systemic issues persist (well, the main reason is 'doing nothing', but i digress)

Re: Reddit Founder Alexis Ohanian Resigns from the Board of Reddit

#358

Post by andreilys »

Avicebron wrote: post #335
tw000001 wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the group of angry young white men inhabiting r/the_donald not conservative voter The degree to which casual anti-white racism has been normalized on reddit is abhorrent. Even moreso when these people claim to champion anti-racism. Reddit can't die soon enough. It is a dangerous bastion of propaganda - the comments are designed to look authentic but none of the discourse is truly organic because of a combination of…

It's been normalized everywhere, it comes off to me as some sort of badge of honor for people to blame all the ills of the world on one race. Amazing how this doesn't fly for other groups.

Scapegoating is a wonderful thing

Re: Reddit Founder Alexis Ohanian Resigns from the Board of Reddit

#359

Post by purephase »

throwmehaweh wrote: post #313
jayd16 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mods would ban opposing views and leave hateful, violent, and racist views. Its not complicated.

I've browsed TD since it's inception and haven't seen any violent, hateful, or racist posts. That's not to say that they haven't ever existed, but certainly not anything remotely close to how it's perceived. And definitely not any worse than you would see right now on r/politics.

Oh give me a break. You're being willfully ignorant if you actually believe this to be the case. For months there were front page posts on reddit, manipulated by bots, from TD that were some of the worst content I've ever seen outside of 4chan.

I mean, reddit scrambled to implement a subreddit filtering feature just to provide a means for users to filter TD out due to the near constant complaints about the content of that sub.

Meanwhile, they banned other subreddits for much, much less. They actively fought to provide them their safe space and wrote actual features to support that subreddit.

Re: Reddit Founder Alexis Ohanian Resigns from the Board of Reddit

#360

Post by mantas »

CydeWeys wrote: post #35
cataphract wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I can see the_donald is effectively dead and theredpill is also quarantined so it might as well be, since quarantined subreddits are always eventually banned.

These are the first examples that come to mind. There are many more with similar userbases that has migrated from them. Don't forget all the Pizzagate/QAnon stuff, incels, etc. Here's a longer list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti... Also, quarantined != banned. It's still on reddit, and those users spread out onto other non-quarantined subreddits and spew the same kind of garbage.

Banning a subreddit doesn't ban it's users.
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