Reddit is great if you make an account and subscribe to subreddits that aren’t on the front page. If you have specific interests, like a TV show or board games, you can find a great community submitting relevant content and having interesting discussions (usually quite civil). If you leave the default subscriptions and only see /r/politics and /r/funny, you will be bombarded by garbage.
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If you find the individual communities you’re interested in, and treat those as small, focused message boards, then none of this other shit needs to ever appear on your radar.
I like seeing things on /r/diy, although if I have an actual question I’m better off on one of the smaller groups, like /r/metalworking or /r/woodworking. I like the other small communities I occasionally go to.
Just stick to communities you like and stay off the front page (unless you spend some time unsubscribing from all those other subreddits). Do that and it’s a genuinely useful platform.
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I know what you mean. I run a small message board where one particular user was being a pill. He got banned [by one of my backup mods] and appealed to me. I emailed back and forth for a few days, explaining why it happened and what he should do differently. He went from apoplectic rage to “yeah, OK, I disagree, but whatever”. As it was winding down, I sent him a note like, “OK, I’m going to reinstate you now, please be good.” and he responded out of the blue with the apoplectic rage again. OK, then stay banned. About a year later he sent me an email telling me again what an asshole I am. OK, so noted.
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The hives of scum and villainy may have shot themselves in the foot, which is delicious enough for me.
Yeah, it’s great until you get the first private message telling you that they know where you live and that they’re gonna kill you because you disagreed with their comment about yoga pants and happen to be not white/not straight/not male. /true story.
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The dickheads and neo-Nazis are basically one in the same, as the targets of the dickheads align rather well with the targets of the neo-Nazis. You can’t understand this stuff as only just people committed to causing chaos, because they don’t equally attack every target of opportunity, but mostly originate out of reactionary subreddits and disrupt others they consider political enemies. That reactionary subreddits moderate themselves says only that they won’t tolerate disruptive behavior in their spaces, not that they don’t do it elsewhere, because its an effective tactic to shut down opponents.
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The Actual Nazis were mostly just dickheads too. Very few gave a shit, in the abstract, about any of it. That’s not a defense, I’d think.
This is the Reddit defense: It’s mostly people having a good time, ignore the part where dickheads are being radicalized to think “Coon” is a reasonable way to describe black people.
No. This online shit has consequences: Mother Emmanuel AME Church.
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There’s a great analogy in this post to the basic situation:
I’ve used, managed and built online communities going back into the 1980s, many of them sports related, so it’s natural to look at those communities as sports bars. The thing I’ve always told people interested in community management is this: if you’re running a sports bar, and you have a gang of bikers move in, you have two choices. You can either eject the bikers, or you’re running a biker bar. I never set out intending to put my time and energy into a biker bar, so I always worked to prevent the rowdy elements from taking over my communities, because I knew that would cause the people I wanted to be around to leave and find some other place to be.
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Reddit is the same as pretty much every online community - there are literal Nazis and dickheads and assholes everywhere scattered amongst the people who just want to discuss dogs or barbecuing or Doctor Who. This is as true for Reddit as it is for Tumblr or Twitter or LiveJournal or even Facebook. All of those websites are merely platforms for the people using them and it’s the design of the platform that influences how the scum floats to the surface.
On Reddit you end up with these loud sub-forums, easily identifiable. On Tumblr those same people have made the global search and tag functions practically unusable because of all the malicious mid-tagging. and Twitter’s abuse problems are pretty well documented.
If this behaviour were only present on reddit, you may have a point. It’s not though. It’s found all over the internet. If you hold this kind of thing up as “typical redditor behaviour” then it is also typical facebooker behaviour, typical farker behaviour and even typical boingboing bbs behaviour.
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Sure, but that’s not a reddit-only phenomenon. It’s definitely an internet phenomenon and much broader than just Reddit.
For what it’s worth to me, I find the irony here delicious and the idea of future content management so appealing - I think it’s finally time for Reddit to say ‘bye /r/picsofdeadkids/ and other shit, go to voat and have fun’ and just make it clear that they have content policies. Then in ten years Voat can do the same thing. I don’t think they’re losing anything useful from it.
The fact that they basically ran their last shield out on a rail is just schadenfraude flavored icing on the cake.
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I disagree, there’s nothing like this on Facebook. Reddit has passed Stormfront as the most trafficked hub for far-right hate groups on the Web.
Here’s what it looks like (triggers!): Reddit - Dive into anything
Here’s the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups:
One section of the Web forum is dedicated to watching black men die, while another is called “CoonTown” and features users wondering if there are any states left that are “nigger free.” One conversation focuses on the state of being “Negro Free,” while another is about how best to bring attention to the assertion that black people are more prone to commit sexual assaults than whites.
But these discussions aren’t happening on Stormfront, which since its founding in 1995 by a former Alabama Klan leader has been the largest hate forum on the Web. They’re taking place on Reddit, a huge online bulletin board recently spun off into its own independent entity from Advance Publications, the parent company of Condé Nast. Reddit has been hailed as the last bastion of free speech on the Internet, an unregulated and vibrant community of users who post whatever they want and rely on the community around them to police their content.
The world of online hate, long dominated by website forums like Stormfront and its smaller neo-Nazi rival Vanguard News Network (VNN), has found a new — and wildly popular — home on the Internet. Reddit boasts the 9th highest Alexa Internet traffic ranking in the United States and the 36th worldwide. Many of Reddit’s racist subreddits are among its most popular.
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ok, coontown has 18,000 subscribers. Facebook’s EDL page has 180,000 likes.
The one thing that I find somewhat dissonant about that post (and its follow-up) is the strong scent of legalism throughout, which seems a bit curious when examining the functions of online community structures.
As an answer to the “Why did Reddit explode like a Michael Bay movie made of sociopathic man-babies when Reddit, Inc. tried to do something other than drift?” the thesis “Because the company doesn’t have enough of the important people contractually obligated to them.” is undeniably valid.
However(as the author notes is true of ‘community’ sites in general “I understand the attempt to build a business model to support Reddit, but if you think through the history of community sites, it’s very, very hard to find many where this has been done successfully.”) the factors that made it impossible for Reddit Inc. to touch Reddit, the site, without blunt force and drama are also the ones that allowed the (substantial) growth and activity of Reddit, the site, without nearly the expansion of payroll and directly costly activity on the part of the management that would have otherwise been needed. Keeping the servers on obviously costs money either way; but the fact that the main interface between the company and all the moderators was basically an employee, singular, is actually very handy during all the time you aren’t planning on touching anything.
As a ‘This is how not to run a company’ tale; I’d be hard pressed to argue with either the details of his thesis about how Reddit, Inc. screwed up or with the position that they really, really screwed up. As a ‘This is how not to build a community’ tale, it is certainly the case that Reddit has some truly ghastly neighborhoods; but the notion that they have failed because they don’t have contracts with all the local elders, strongmen, and feuding warlords; so attempts at establishing central government are problematic is simply false. They don’t have a tractable and well governed community; but they have a variety of large and robust communities, some of which are terrible people, others of which are not.
I certainly agree with the author on the fact that some subreddits are for abhuman scum; but it seems weird(and, as mentioned, rigidly legalistic) that the existence of these subreddits is sufficently abhorrent that he actively refuses to interact with any other part of the site; but his suggested replacement is a ‘make it modular, so the front page part doesn’t directly host any of the crap, which can go on hosts that specialize in holding their noses, problem solved!’
As a matter of business strategy; that seems like a fairly good plan, the existence of /r/coontown is a weeping sore of a PR problem; but as a matter of ethical difference I’m a bit bemused by the ‘I won’t touch the platform because some of the people they allow to use it are scum and even indirect connection is abhorrent’/‘the replacement should be a discovery portal, which I explicitly acknowledge will probably provide discovery/visibility to the same scum in much the same way; but the hosting will be decentralized so it’s all clean and dandy’ juxtaposition.
Given that absolutely nothing happens on ‘the internet’ without somebody’s machine shoving bits around, so there are no things without platforms, the sharp distinction between ‘indirect’ connection because of shared platform and ‘indirect but acceptable’ connection because of shared discovery interface seems strange.
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I know some may find this heavy handed, but I would seriously be tempted to do this if I was an admin. Pseudo code
select * from users in %coontown > aholes.txt;
curl -F “file=aholes.txt;filename=listOfAholes.txt” http://FBI.gov
If you publicly advertise you are a racist piece of shit, I feel obligated to help you.
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