Reddit is still in turmoil

The problem, I think, is that we haven't figured out new norms and boundaries for online socialization, as we have for other forms of communication and other media. One of the things that makes online communication so potent is that it is not just easy but also near instantaneous with a global reach. But we have been slacking on building the tools to manage the problems inherent in that power. One of which is the concentration and distillation of harassment. A tiny group of people can generate a tremendous amount of harassment which, through the magic of modern communication technologies, automatically gets funneled to the receiver. Even, say, a million people worldwide is still a tiny fraction of all people in the world, let alone all people online (less than 0.1%), but if there were a million dedicated harassers online it would be a hellscape.

In reality it only takes a few assholes to spoil the "mood" and the "fun" of interacting online in public, from a few dozen up to tens to hundreds of thousands. A minute but vocal, abusive, and provocative sub-group can easily change the entire tone of a conversation or change someone's experience using social media from good to bad. How many people sending you death threats and rape threats regularly would it take to sour your experience with social media? The real answer is: a very tiny number.

Right now that very tiny number of agents provocateurs are having an outsized impact on online communities and communication platforms, because they are leveraging the power of vitriol, hate, and targeted harassment. And also precisely because the platform builders (whether it's facebook, twitter, or reddit) have been far behind in building tooling to help deal with these problems, and because the social norms haven't caught up with the behavior. Going back to the '90s and even the '80s it was common for, say, usenet newsreaders to have tools built in for ignoring posts from people you wanted to ignore, and the modern tools for such things are barely at that level, if they exist at all, despite the problem being even more difficult to tackle. Additionally, there were a lot more moderated communities back then, whereas today the norm is unmoderated communities.

Just like the security problems of the early internet days we've largely been surviving based on luck and absence of dedicated attacks, and partly just due to ignorance of the worst that was actually happening. There are a lot of people who still don't think that harassment on the internet is a serious problem because they don't actually understand it all, having never experienced it in its most potent forms.

The worst takeaway from this would be deciding that most people are garbage and socializing with other human beings is best avoided (online or off). That's a classic "stranger danger" overreaction. We need better tools on various platforms. We need more people speaking out about the badness of harassment online and for people to stop parroting the stupid line "oh, it's just online, you can ignore it, it's not real" or defending targeted personal harassment as any sort of defensible "free speech".

> I am continually astounded that people sort of trust corporations like they trust people. We can talk all day about how the current team is trustworthy and we're not in the business of screwing you, but I also have to say that you can never predict what happens. reddit could be subject to some kind of hostile takeover, or we go bankrupt (Please buy reddit gold) and our assets are sold to some creditor. The owners of corporations can change - look what happened to MySQL, who sold to Sun Microsystems, who they trusted to support its open source ethos - and then Sun failed and now it's all owned by Oracle. Or LiveJournal, which was very user-loyal but then sold itself to SixApart (still kinda loyal) which failed and then was bought by some Russian company. I am working hard to make sure that reddit is successful on its own and can protect its values and do right by its users but please, you should protect yourselves by being prudent. The terms of our User Agreement are written to be broad enough to give us flexibility because we don't know what mediums reddit may evolve on to, and they are sufficiently standard in the legal world in that way so that we can leverage legal precedents to protect our rights, but much of what happens in practice depends on the intentions of the parties involved.

> The User Agreement is intended to protect us by outlining what rights we claim. But it cannot protect you - you must protect yourself, by acting wisely.

1. We don't always want to express all our opinions and thoughts among people we know, because they carries significant social cost. So we end up saying a disproportionate amount of those things anonymously online.

2. It used to be that nobody had to listen to the outcasts and the lonely. People we don't enjoy being around. But now they can participate in online forums as much as anyone.

In part, it's a good thing that these voices can be heard, and that they can find likeminded to talk to. But a lot of them are outcasts because they're jerks, and online we do have to listen to them.