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Former Reddit CEO says the site's about to be purged

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Re: Former Reddit CEO says the site's about to be purged

#51

Post by rhema »

This whole fiasco is so strange. What kind of CEO claims a "moral authority" to do a purge and adds a trollface picture?

Also, look at the subreddits that u/spez is moderator of. For example, his subreddit r/Cannibals has a top post: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Cannibals/comments/3cxp5e/to_stop_w...] where a highly scored post from 3 days ago reads, "To stop world hunger we must simply eat all the poor people." While obviously satire, it begs the question of who decides what belongs and does not.

>We tried to let you govern yourselves and you failed.

On what metric?

Re: Former Reddit CEO says the site's about to be purged

#53

Post by clavalle »

I have a feeling that Reddit, with its focus on growth of the user base, is just going to play to the lowest common denominator. As soon as it is filled with what amounts to user curated network TV levels of content and the banal advertising mindset that goes with it, it will become Just Another News Aggregator and will not inspire the level of engagement it has enjoyed until now.

Reddit doesn't have a sticky network effect. The content decays. People can easily jump ship.

I don't understand why they are obsessed with raw 'ratings' numbers anyway. Part of what makes their user base valuable is that they are self-segmented -- it is the small, focused communities. Also that they are used to hopping off site then back again to re-engage. They are missing a huge opportunity, not to merely get more people in the door, but figure out how to serve the valuable communities that already exist there.

If they keep staring at that bone in the water and open their mouths to grab it, they will lose the tasty morsel they could currently be enjoying.

What they really need is some people that know how to target ads effectively to small valuable clients and some technologists with the chops to help them make a profit from that valuable connection making. Some deep experts from Google's Adwords team, for example. And they need to make the whole process above board and transparent so the userbase doesn't feel like they are being used secretly. Reddit and their commercial offerings should feel like a partner for users, a valuable available resource, not a slimy shill machine. I think that's possible to do but it is going to take a hell of a lot more finesse and openness than they've shown recently.

Re: Former Reddit CEO says the site's about to be purged

#54

Post by fixermark »

pavanky wrote: post #17
sharkweek wrote: post #8

Eh... it's their playground. While I don't like the idea of what's offensive being so subjective, there is A LOT of shit on Reddit that I would be happy to see gone. If Costco had a corner in every store where people were allowed to stand around yelling racist commentary all the time, and Costco laid out a policy to remove this from their stores, I think the majority of people would applaud this move, thus improving…

I do not think people would be pissed about reddit enforcing the bans if they did not market themselves as a bastion of free speech on the internet. It was not just Yishan who did it. Redditors even created a new sub[1] showing all instances where someone belonging to reddit has said or implied that they are for free speech on the internet. People who are pissed are angry because it looks and sounds like bait and swi…

This is going to sound very Animal Farm, but I'm going to lay it out there because it's the truth of the matter.

There's free speech and free speech. Reddit can advocate that it's in favor of free speech while simultaneously banning the sharing of child pornography, bestiality, death threats, and revenge porn. So does Twitter. So does Facebook. So does Google.

If there's an argument to be had here, it's an argument about where the line should be drawn between "acceptable" and "never acceptable." Reddit's in favor of moving the line to acquire more interest from the outside world---a world that has generally (read: "in the markets Reddit's funders care about") categorized revenge porn and overt racism to be never acceptable. The existence of the line itself is not in question, and entities that have such a line are not in general accused by reasonable people of standing against free speech.

Re: Former Reddit CEO says the site's about to be purged

#55

Post by shubhamjain »

sharkweek wrote: post #8

Eh... it's their playground. While I don't like the idea of what's offensive being so subjective, there is A LOT of shit on Reddit that I would be happy to see gone. If Costco had a corner in every store where people were allowed to stand around yelling racist commentary all the time, and Costco laid out a policy to remove this from their stores, I think the majority of people would applaud this move, thus improving…

Reddit is a decade old site. I can imagine what happened to Digg, horrified reddit team to do anything that might upset their users and they continued to operate without revenues / quality in mind but when they realized that something is wrong, the culture of doing anything got in-grained into reddit crowd really well.

Most of the reddit history tolerated even most ugliest form of sickness and suddenly they want to clean it up? I am not sure how successful this effort will be. Either it will be that a bunch of arrogant assholes who equate freedom of speech with saying BS would leave or the another Digg fiasco would happen.

Re: Former Reddit CEO says the site's about to be purged

#56

Post by baddox »

dragonwriter wrote: post #43
baddox wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you accidentally stumble onto it? You might make a typo, which is a fair point, but that is probably exceedingly rare. Or you might be linked, but you can already be linked anywhere from anywhere else on the web, so that's hardly a meaningful argument.

> Or you might be linked, but you can already be linked anywhere from anywhere else on the web, so that's hardly a meaningful argument. Its a meaningful argument from the POV of Reddit management, and their effort to build a profitable business, given that what people can be linked to that is tied to Reddit -- unlike what people can be linked to that is not tied to Reddit -- impacts the perception of Reddit and both…

> Its a meaningful argument from the POV of Reddit management, and their effort to build a profitable business

Oh absolutely. I'm not disputing that. Of course they are doing all of this in pursuit of profit (or at least in pursuit of pleasing their board). The trouble is that, in my view, there is a conflict between the goal of pleasing the reddit board and the goal of creating a vibrant community.

Re: Former Reddit CEO says the site's about to be purged

#58

Post by baddox »

austenallred wrote: post #35
baddox wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only rational argument people can make against the "purging" (of blatantly racist etc. subreddits) is the "slippery slope" argument, which is usually known as a fallacious logical device. Not at all true. I don't like any removal of content by reddit employees (as opposed to subreddit moderators) beyond what is required by law. Whether it leads to more and more removal in the future is irrelevant. I would like…

> I'm not saying reddit doesn't have the right to censor. I'm just saying I would prefer that they didn't. I'm genuinely curious as to why. Do you feel your experience on reddit is harmed if /r/coontown is gone? Or is it just the principle of the matter?

> Do you feel your experience on reddit is harmed if /r/coontown is gone?

Not directly, of course. My experience on reddit isn't directly harmed if any community I don't visit is removed. But it would be pretty obviously unrealistic for me to propose that reddit remove all subreddits except for the couple of dozen that I'm subscribed to.

Re: Former Reddit CEO says the site's about to be purged

#59

Post by dragonwriter »

rhema wrote: post #51

This whole fiasco is so strange. What kind of CEO claims a "moral authority" to do a purge and adds a trollface picture? Also, look at the subreddits that u/spez is moderator of. For example, his subreddit r/Cannibals has a top post: [ https://www.reddit.com/r/Cannibals/comments/3cxp5e/to_stop_w... ] where a highly scored post from 3 days ago reads, "To stop world hunger we must simply eat all the poor people." While…

> What kind of CEO claims a "moral authority" to do a purge and adds a trollface picture?

None. A former CEO claimed the current CEO had the "moral authority" for the predicted coming purge.

Re: Former Reddit CEO says the site's about to be purged

#60

Post by wnevets »

johrn wrote: post #38
wnevets wrote: post #25

If you find the content of a particular subreddit offensive, don't subscribe to that subreddit? Why must admins police legal content?

Maybe admins don't want their site to be somewhere that stormfront considers to be their biggest recruitment center. It's not like the users who subscribe to coontown etc keep their opinions to themselves when they are using other parts of the site.

Only users interested in /r/stormfront would visit tho. Its not like removing /r/stormfront somehow deletes racism or prevents stormfront from recruiting in the comments, news post, etc.
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