"Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

[Cleinhun]

Yesterday morning I saw that the subreddit r/fatpeoplehate was banned, which seemed like a reasonable move to me. But I wasn't surprised that there were a couple posts on or near the front page complaining about how this was censorship or something, since reddit is usually kinda shitty like that. I assumed it would blow over by the end of the day like usual.

 

Then when I got home from work at the end of the day, I saw that 23 of the 25 posts on the front page were complaining about the ban. And by that I mostly mean posting pictures of reddit ceo ellen pao and saying how much they hate her and how she is ruining everything, or sometimes pictures of fat people and complaining about how much they hate fat people and how they are ruining everything. The most common argument seemed to be "but there are subreddits about hating black people, therefore we should be allowed to make subreddits about hating fat people" which is a fucking crazy argument on it's own, but the thing that was most distressing to me was that this is the basically most organized reddit has ever been. The thing that caused the largest number of reddit users I've seen to unite under a single cause was taking away their ability to make fun of fat people.

 

I don't think I'm going to be reading reddit anymore

[Twig]

I basically hate reddit. There are occasional pockets of goodness but then I see some real bullshit poke its head into there and everybody just accepts it and I can't. I can't.

[Mangela Lansbury]

The only thing I read on reddit anymore is the Ask Historians subreddit. There are weird overlaps there with nerd rage, but mostly it's just a highly moderated board with interesting history facts.

The rest of reddit usually just makes me sad or mad or is bad, so I don't go there.

[Cleinhun]

I basically hate reddit.

 

The rest of reddit usually just makes me sad or mad or is bad, so I don't go there.

 

Yeah, I've been considering abandoning it for a while, and the current shameful display is pretty clear confirmation that I should.

[Apple Cider]

I have never wanted to "be" there in general because even if they just started banning bad subreddits, they've let people generally be horrifically abusive for really long periods of time. Reddit has long functioned under this idea of libertarian free speech where literally everything is allowed because filtering out stuff that is legitimately harmful is akin to being fascists or something.

[Markson]

Here's an admin's comment on where "the line" is and what these subs did to make them worthy of banning while others were left alone: https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/39bpam/removing_harassing_subreddits/cs25u4n

 

It sounds like these subs were places where organized harrassment was taking place. I'm not terribly surprised to learn that.

 

I've heard rumors that this began on Imgur. Imgur began deleting posts with the tag "fatpeoplehate," and when the sub r/fatpeoplehate found out about it they looked up the real-life identities of the Imgur people and began sending them death threats and generally being assholes to them. Imgur recently began removing a lot of pictures that were either NSFW, harrassing, or considered hate speech from its database and won't be hosting certain stuff again in the future, so the whole "twisted libertarian version of free speech" issue was a hot button topic at the time. So that probably boiled over into this. Reddit and imgur are almost the same place to me, they're so closely tied. But, I'll stress, that's just hearsay to me so far.

 

It's weird, because based on those admin's comments... a sub which is devoted purely to hating certain types of people would be perfectly ok as long as the hate never leaves Reddit. Or maybe I'm not understanding that correctly.

 

Anyway...Reddit is ok for skimming sometimes. But also for every beautiful flower you find, you're bound to step in two or three heaps of dog muck.

[Merus]

I basically just use the Guild Wars 2 subreddit because every other subreddit occasionally leaks bullshit. As soon as it leaks bullshit too, I'm gone.

 

Re: The Verge - it didn't have that disclaimer when I posted it, and I agreed that it seemed to be painting all efforts at building robust anti-harassment tools as 'unreliable', apparently because Chris Plante used one and it didn't quite work for him, despite it not being necessarily tuned for the kind of harassment he was getting.

 

 

Does anybody know to what extent exactly Twitter has been working with Harper and other folk over this? I saw some anger going around that they built something of their own instead of just hiring either her or whoever is behind BlockTogether, but I don't know how accurate that is.

 

Apparently they've done some consulting, but Twitter's solution doesn't update blocklists like Blocktogether does. Harper mentioned that Twitter reached out to her and gave her access to an early version, which she's using for her most recent tool, a dogpile defence toll named ShieldsUp.

[Bjorn]

I basically just use the Guild Wars 2 subreddit because every other subreddit occasionally leaks bullshit. As soon as it leaks bullshit too, I'm gone.

 

Re: The Verge - it didn't have that disclaimer when I posted it, and I agreed that it seemed to be painting all efforts at building robust anti-harassment tools as 'unreliable', apparently because Chris Plante used one and it didn't quite work for him, despite it not being necessarily tuned for the kind of harassment he was getting.

 

I use the Dark Souls subreddits almost exclusively, and still remain relatively uncomfortable even with that much use.  But it's also one of (if not the) most organized central Souls community. 

 

The disclaimer wasn't there the first time I read it, but popped up when I went back to quote the "unreliable" sentence. 

[tegan]

I feel like I realized pretty early on that Reddit is 4chan. Like, that is a venn diagram that's just a circle. They're exactly the same audience, exactly the same signal to noise ratio, everything.

[syntheticgerbil]

I always felt like when people who used 4chan grew up some, they migrated to Reddit. I think what tipped me off was all the jailbait messageboards they gloated about early on.

[tabacco]

I feel like I realized pretty early on that Reddit is 4chan. Like, that is a venn diagram that's just a circle. They're exactly the same audience, exactly the same signal to noise ratio, everything.

 

Depends what subreddits you follow. For example, I'm almost entirely in cooking or programming ones, and those're pretty alright. Especially the cooking ones.

[natellite]

Yeah, I think part of the problem with reddit is just that it's huge, and every subreddit is this weird insular self-perpetuating echo chamber. The cooking and diet subreddits I follow are just fine, but I wouldn't dream of heading outside of that bubble.

[syntheticgerbil]

It is also where you can maybe ask Jeff Goldblum anything.

[Merus]

Reddit can be thought of as thousands of sites, with a similar framework and a shared login. They have different moderators, and that makes a big difference.

 

Where this falls down is that Reddit actively tries to encourage users to go between sites, something that, say, Wordpress or Livefyre doesn't do.

[Akidu]

The whole free speech say what you want argument is such bullshit. If you remove a moderatoring authority (so called "Censorship") you just open a power vacume that quickly gets filled with the loudest members of the comunity. Its like replacing a police officer with a mob who will throw stones at anyone who dissagrees with them.

Places on the internet that purport to be the most free are actuallly the most oppressed. Go to one 4chans "we can say anything" threads and dissagree with the community. You will get abused intensly.. They will try and force you down.

On a lesser scale you see the same thing on reddit with its voting system. If I posted this exact post in some sections of reddit I think I would prove my point as I would get down voted to hell as the comunity decides I have wronged them.

Its funny. These places still practice censorship, its just harder to see because it comes from the community rather than a single authority.

 

Reddits a huge place, its hard to make any generalizations given the huge varience from subreddit to subreddit. I'm glad they are trying to fix these problems, I hope it works.

[Gormongous]

The whole free speech say what you want argument is such bullshit. If you remove a moderatoring authority (so called "Censorship") you just open a power vacume that quickly gets filled with the loudest members of the comunity. Its like replacing a police officer with a mob who will throw stones at anyone who dissagrees with them.

Places on the internet that purport to be the most free are actuallly the most oppressed. Go to one 4chans "we can say anything" threads and dissagree with the community. You will get abused intensly.. They will try and force you down.

On a lesser scale you see the same thing on reddit with its voting system. If I posted this exact post in some sections of reddit I think I would prove my point as I would get down voted to hell as the comunity decides I have wronged them.

Its funny. These places still practice censorship, its just harder to see because it comes from the community rather than a single authority.

 

The thing with that, just like it is with people who wish intensely for anarchic or post-apocalyptic scenarios, is that a lot of the proponents of such extreme "free speech" are self-centered and unaware enough to think that i) the group will never disagree with or turn against them, and even if they did, then ii) they would have the loudest voices and would be able to fight back against such ostracism. Generally speaking, by which I mean apart from the untold numbers of people who are harassed and abused under the auspices of such systems, it's a self-correcting scenario over the long term, because eventually they will disagree with the wrong person, find out how it is to be on the outside, and drift away from the community. That said, I prefer being proactive with moderation infinitely more, because such a huge, distributed, and amoral system of "moderation" as peer ratings is capable of incredible and inadvertent wrongdoing.

[Tanukitsune]

I guess I'm glad I never joined Reddit now. 

[deleted user]

_

[Vorlonesque]

Reddit can be thought of as thousands of sites, with a similar framework and a shared login. They have different moderators, and that makes a big difference.

Where this falls down is that Reddit actively tries to encourage users to go between sites, something that, say, Wordpress or Livefyre doesn't do.

Yeah I had a discussion at work with a coworker who mentioned that his impressions of reddit, imgur, tumblr, and others seemed completely different from the Internet's characterizations of them. He mentioned cooking subreddits and single-game specific subreddits, that he generally used imgur for image hosting, and that until recently he thought of tumblr as that placec with walls of porn or puppies and kittens.

I think the huge user bases and varied uses of these platforms means that people's experiences can be so very different that people can end up confused by the popular impressions of said places.

His individual impressions on reddit and imgur were very close to mine (I mostly use reddit for the Star Citizen, Tribes, and other game or genre specific stuff with some occasional hardware subreddits, and imgur is just where I host images that I link to here and elsewhere). I actually never had a specific impression of tumblr beyond it being the home of amazing Time Belt stuff with Justin McElroy which amused me greatly and also reminded me of the mandatory West Virginia history classes we had in Junior High/Middle School.

I think that what other people have said about reddit's size is true...it makes it into a sort of many faced amorphous beast that I imagine is hard as hell to manage at a high level...and I wish them luck with trying to do so. I sort of use it like I use the something awful forums where I generally stick to specific subforums and threads and stay out of GBS.

[Apple Cider]

I know there's good subreddits but Reddit is just so overall terrible that I feel like going there feels like complicity on my part given how they make money, etc. It sucks but that's how I feel about it. I wish Reddit didn't provide a useful service for a collated way to have a community but then did a piss-poor job on oversight. It could have been a great place on the internet. It's why I eventually left SA and 4Chan too. The very niche needs that they were meeting just were still contributing to a place that -as a site- did nothing but make people miserable.

[SuperBiasedMan]

The difference with reddit is that the most popular subreddits are still harassment hot spots that are unfriendly to different opinions. The only way to get a good opinion of reddit without being blind to harassment is to ignore the main subreddits that they have you follow by default.

 

The entire set up of the site is one that encourages mass consensus and mob behaviour. So though there can be upsides, built into its' core is a strong culture of othering anyone who is different. That makes counterracting harassment and antisocial behaviour hard because popular opinion dictates what's good and what's bad. Of course a select moderation time can take care of that, but they've not made much of an effort to moderate it previous to this so it has been well entrenched in the problems the system encourages.

[Apple Cider]

When I heard that there were specifically MRA plant mods that ran the r/feminism subreddit, I knew that there was some problems with that site. Heh.

[SuperBiasedMan]

Woof. Whether it's maliciousness or negligence that allows that to happen, your site has serious problems.

[Mangela Lansbury]

When I heard that there were specifically MRA plant mods that ran the r/feminism subreddit, I knew that there was some problems with that site. Heh.

There are also literal Nazis moderating /r/Holocaust

[tegan]

Depends what subreddits you follow. For example, I'm almost entirely in cooking or programming ones, and those're pretty alright. Especially the cooking ones.

 

I specifically think of 4chan because there are definitely okay boards or threads on there that are okay, but it's not worth it for the overwhelming amount of shit on the rest of the site.