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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

#81
post #79
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

But there's obviously some middle ground between 'free-for-all' and 'only your subreddits' that allows for moderation of the subreddits that are literally evil.

Sure, there is plenty of middle ground. It's a continuum. I just personally prefer the free end of the continuum.

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

#82
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Child porn, beastiality, death threats, ande revenge porn are illegal, being racist or hating fat people isn't.

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

#83
post #23

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 an anarchist experiment. No centralized filtering except where external laws are clearly being broken, and even then only in the most extreme cases of violence or exploitation (e.g. child pornography). Whether that is a good thing or a bad thing is worth debating. But it absolutely must be said that the anarchy defines what Reddit is . With active moderation, it won't be Reddit, it'll be something else. May…

If it were anarchy, the users could do something against the censoring, monetizing and shadow banning. Reddit is far more authoritarian than most people realize.

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

#84
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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. If you can't run a business that brings in the money to keep the lights on, you can't maintain a vibrant community, either. I think a lot of the issue is that lots of people are attached to conditions that are only made possible by the willingness of investors to tolerate…

I suspect that reddit's goals are much more aggressive than just keeping the lights on. I do think that reddit could quite easily pay for their servers with their current level of monetization.

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

#85
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As with the FPH debacle, when you take down the walls, you aren't destroying the community, you are destroying the containment.

There is no containment. There is a comfy room that the FPHers or the stormfronters can hang out in and pat each other on the backs, and then there are open doors to everyone else's room that they can just walk through and spew their garbage. Removing the walls just makes them less comfortable, it doesn't suddenly release them from a prison.

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

#86

I honestly wouldn't mind a "purge." I don't necessarily agree that drawing the line as to what is appropriate on a website is necessarily the destruction of people being able to express themselves. HackerNews doesn't allow racism, but I don't feel my right to express my opinion (for the most part - the hivemind that is caused by upvoting comments is troubling, but another issue altogether). If people want to be blata…

Not really. It seems like the Internet equivalent of burning books. Just because I think the content of the book is awful doesn't mean I'm in favor of book-burning. You might say, "Oh, we'll only burn books that are offensive" — but that is just as true for everyone who has ever burned books. There are many books that actually are awful and not worthy of any respect, but we still look askance at book-burning as a practice.

Dwight Eisenhower initially supported purging communist books. But later, he had a change of heart, telling students:

> Don't join the book burners. Don't think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book, as long as that document does not offend our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship.

> How will we defeat communism unless we know what it is, and what it teaches, and why does it have such an appeal for men, why are so many people swearing allegiance to it? It is almost a religion, albeit one of the nether regions.

> And we have got to fight it with something better, not try to conceal the thinking of our own people. They are part of America. And even if they think ideas that are contrary to ours, their right to say them, their right to record them, and their right to have them at places where they are accessible to others is unquestioned, or it isn't America.

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

#88
post #80
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would like reddit to be a place for completely free, uncensored expression. This is nice in theory, but it basically requires defending the rights of hate groups to silence those they hate. It's hard to freely express yourself when there are people calling for your extermination, or treating everything you say as if it came from the mouth of a five year old.

Why would the targets of hate speech be in subreddits dedicated to that hate speech?

They wouldn't be, but neither is that hate speech limited to the subreddits that are dedicated for it.

I am 100% certain that I could go to the comments of any top post on pics, videos, funny, games and probably a dozen other default subs and find some hate speech with a positive score.

Remove the subreddits that these people call home, and they automatically feel less welcomed on the site.

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

#89
post #16

Anyone remember Tribe.net? They were once San Francisco's coolest social network. Then they had a purge of sex-related topics. Read "No sex please, we're 2.0" by Violet Blue.[1] Tribe went into a screaming dive and is down to one or two employees. [1] http://www.sfgate.com/living/article/No-sex-please-we-re-2-0...

So how do you separate out how much they fucked up and how much they got eaten alive by Facebook?

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

#90
post #60
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's true, but it does make it clearer that they aren't welcome on the site. If Reddit deleted the subs that I visit and care about, I'd definitely feel less like giving them pageviews.
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