I really don’t get this “anti-reddit” opinion that I see on other sites. Yes, I’m sure there are a few subreddits that are racist, sexist, or whatever, but the whole point of reddit is that you choose which reddits to subscribe to. There are subreddits about the city I live in where people discuss new restaurants and stores to check out. There are subreddits about various programming languages I use. There are subreddits about the various fields of science I work in. Reddit is the most informative and useful site on the Internet. It is sort of like the return of what USENET newsgroups were in their prime.
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I think this is a great discussion here on the issue of corporate sponsorship. And bravo for your hard work getting Limbaugh defunded… of course, his fan base likely only saw this as shoring up their world views, but still. It matters that advertisers pulled out of his show.
But the KEY here is an informed and motivated consumer movement to get this moving. The Hobby Lobby decision not withstanding, corporations have no ethics, other than the ethics of earning a profit for their investors. In a consumer society, WE have to MAKE corporations reflect our values, as you’ve done with Limbaugh and his ilk. They didn’t pull sponsorship because they uphold the values of anti-racism and anti-sexism… they did it because they were financially threatened because consumers who hold those values.
The only other option is finding some other economic system that values human beings over corporate entities…
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It can eat the trolls.
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Except Usenet wasn’t owned by a for profit entity that refuses to police itself.
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Seriously, if you ever do work for us and want to be paid in ground troll, no problemo
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That doesn’t mean the whole thing should be burned to the ground. It just means that Reddit should actually start policing itself so that the non-asshole content (of which there is much) can shine through.
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Hi Mindy, Thanks for the compliment. However I do want to make a distinction. While there might be advertisers who did DID have values of anti-racism and anti-sexism. They say they do in their corporate value statements. They codify them in their vendor ethics guidelines. They include them in their HR policies. They refer to them in their financial documents on governance.
They are also composed of people. Women and men who hold those values personally, not just write them into the corp mission statement. And while it is true that they might have people who do NOT believe those things, who say, “We don’t care what Rush says, he sells product.” there are many (over 3,000 now) who believe otherwise.
When I went to the station advertisers about the hosts, I wrote to the head of marketing, the head of HR and the head of PR. Often times one or all three were women. They may or may not have listened to the station hosts, so I sent them the audio clips. Then I sent them the clip of their ad running after the hosts comment and the time.
They pulled their ads because they didn’t know. They also had other opportunities that could also sell the product. They didn’t care if the people who never listened to Rush boycotted because usually they didn’t know that was why people stopped buying.
My goal was for the company to look at INTERNAL reasons as much as external reasons. Because external reasons can get them to harden their resolve.
I said, “Look, I’m not telling you what to do, YOU have already said what you believe in. I’m just pointing out that what you are doing by sponsoring this host, is NOT in line with how you see yourself. If that is okay with you, fine, but YOU wrote those mission statements. YOU were the ones who decided not to be sexists and bigots and not support it. You have a choice. You can support this and go against your stated values OR you can pull your support and let someone else pay to support those sick values.”
That is the message that I get to the advertisers and what I taught everyone. Be polite, educate the advertisers, don’t threaten them, ask them to choose.
It was (and IS) a very powerful strategy because it recognizes that not everyone thinks the same way, and that humans run corporations and they don’t only have a single value (make money) even though that value often seems to be the only one that matters.
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I’m happy for them to start doing that. Let’s revisit after they start.
A list of decent sub-reddits… including ask a historian, which I’ve heard is pretty great:
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Reddit is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.
It is bizarre to hear people talking about it as if it were a monolith of bad taste and internet id run amuck. But, then again, all Americans dress in their flag clothes, shoot rifles at the moon and hate their gummint.
The reality is more nuanced. For instance, I like to visit the Prog Rock Music subreddit so I can dork out on forgotten Zeuhl and Italian bands. The breadth of obscure knowledge on display is humbling. At the same time, the jocks are allowed to drone on about “Yes” and “Rush” albums. And the kids are allowed to worship at the temple of Neal Morse. While all this is going on, someone can post a “Toto” song without getting flamed.
Try that in an actual record store with a Prog Rock section (they do exist, still). Go in and complain that you can’t find a “Toto” record in Prog Rock. You’ll be lucky to leave the shop with your dignity intact.
Reddit is wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it’s not for the timid.
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Props for the Q quote. Yeah, I visit reddit every day, and actually caught very little of the Pao/Victoria mess, because one of the first things that I did was unsubscribe from a lot of the popular subreddits, except for /r/IAMA, ironically (and that wasn’t even that big of a mess by the time I heard about it, because the mods had locked it, of course), and the subreddits I do subscribe to tend to avoid/eradicate drama. Every now and then, I’d unsub from one because of some drama or because the shitbirds had infested it; for example, /r/breakingbad got more or less taken over by Team Walt in the last season, with one of the more popular posts from someone who made up some fanfic about Walt curing cancer and getting both Grey Matter and Gretchen back. FFS. And it’s not as if even the good subs don’t get their share of shitposts and threadshitters, but that’s the internet for you.
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But should we just shrug off some of the worst of the site, though? I think that’s the big question, really. To be fair, some of this is the news media doing what it does best, which is honing in on the worst, making the world seem worse than it might actually be. But at the same time, at what point do we say that there is a problem with reddit and ask the corporation that runs it to do something about it, especially when much of the worst has indeed spilled over into what we could call criminal activity, which has caused real world damage.
TL;DR - I get your point, but what about the damaged caused by some on reddit?
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You could get your USENET provider to delist horrible newsgroups, though. Hopefully reddit will evolve in that direction.
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Well, you should be proud of your work. LImbaugh is a blight and should be scrubbed from the airwaves… 
I think there are plenty of corporations who might very well have language in their charters about being good citizens… but the purpose, the reason that corporations exists is to make a profit. The fact that there is language in their does indeed come from the people who wrote them. Yet the nature of the corporate structure means that human beings, especially those further down the chain have much less say in the running of the corporation. Institutionalization is a major problem that leads to a more bureaucratic, less human mode of operating, and that’s true in just about any large organization (a state, a college or university, a corporation, even a non-profit, or what have you). That’s my problem with corporate structures.
I’d still argue that it was you bringing the problems with Limbaugh to their attention that is the real work that needs to get done. Certainly some corporations are going to act immediately, but that likely depends on the leadership and their perceived consumers.
But I do take your point that corporations are run by people, and people bring their values with them into their jobs, they also can find their values subverted in weird ways, thanks to the atomizing nature of the corporate structure.
Either way, keep up the good work! It’s heartening to see!
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Falcor runs Bartertown!
Forget Bartertown. There’s enough shit around here to power a whole continent.
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How can such a mainstream site appear to be so fringe? …
Easy! Because “mainstream” is a bogus concept. Populist structures encourage people towards greater similarity, but this only helps broadcast media and technocrats. The real feature of mainstream would be redundancy - there is simply no need for people to be so similar to each other - somebody is already doing that…
Another question is: Why should Reddit be obligated to police the discussions there? Doesn’t this diminish the responsibility of the individual users? What is the user’s obligation? I see it as being like when MPAA and other such groups sue ISPs instead of the individual users who they claim are the true infringing party. People assume a hierarchy not because it is more just, but because it would be easier.
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Are these payments single cattle-sized bucks or 100 duck-sized bills?
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The thing is: reddit has monetized hate. Sure, they may change someday or maybe have already changed or whatever. But the Reddit Gold system means that those hate groups that you’re ignoring are paying reddit’s bills.
At the end of the day: I’m not cool with that.
More on this here: http://braythwayt.com/2015/07/11/so-long-reddit
Which succinctly covered something that I’ve been wrestling with for a while. So now: I don’t read reddit anymore, not even for /r/node
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