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> People talk about free speech like it's some goal, but in reality all people seem to do with it is make fun of fat people and post stolen naked pictures of ce

by frou_dh 10y ago

> People talk about free speech like it's some goal, but in reality all people seem to do with it is make fun of fat people and post stolen naked pictures of celebrities. All people do in reality ... if for some reason you choose to disregard the huge number of fairly autonomous communities on Reddit? If I used that ultra-broad brush for HN, I'd say that all commenters here seem to do is post links to xkcd 927 and the wiki page for ad-hom.

derefr 10y ago
The problem with Reddit (the company) is that it chooses to represent its service as a single community, and thus allows all of its communities to be tarred by the same brush. If Reddit was more like, say, StackExchange, or Wordpress.com, or Discourse—a hosting site for "communities" which happened to use the "Reddit engine"—then it wouldn't have nearly the PR problem it has now. Nobody blames Wordpress.com for the content of somebody's blog hosted there.
- andrewflnr 10y ago
  I think reddit accurately represents the fact that both factors are present, lots of specific communities and also a larger reddit-wide community. At least I was never confused about that.
  - derefr 10y ago
    Right, it's clear enough "from the inside" as an experienced user. But from the outside, people (e.g. journalists) just talk about "Reddit" as one place. Reddit Corp issues administrative policies for the site as if in complete ignorance of this public perception. There is a reason WordPress has the .com/.org split, and it's not just that large customers demand to self-host. That could have resulted in something more like GitHub Enterprise, but instead you see a well-supported FOSS offering. Why? Because this split allows WordPress.com to maintain a very strict TOS that disallows many types of content, while still allowing other people who don't want to adhere to those policies to "run on WordPress" easily by using the WordPress.org software either directly or through third-party hosts. If Reddit was smart, the "Reddit engine" would be a well-supported, easy to install FOSS offering like WordPress.org, and there would be a healthy ecosystem of third-party hosts running that software. Voat would just be "Yet Another Reddit-as-Service Provider", instead of a competitor and political statement. As it is, the Reddit engine is an effectively-unsupported blob of code that needs tons of other heavy dependencies to get it running. The only site I know running a copy of the Reddit engine is LessWrong—and they've heavily forked it for their own purposes.
intortus 10y ago
Autonomous public communities on Reddit do not exist because adequate protections against the male white supremacist hive mind do not exist.

by frou_dh 10y ago

derefr 10y ago

The problem with Reddit (the company) is that it chooses to represent its service as a single community, and thus allows all of its communities to be tarred by the same brush. If Reddit was more like, say, StackExchange, or Wordpress.com, or Discourse—a hosting site for "communities" which happened to use the "Reddit engine"—then it wouldn't have nearly the PR problem it has now. Nobody blames Wordpress.com for the content of somebody's blog hosted there.

andrewflnr 10y ago
I think reddit accurately represents the fact that both factors are present, lots of specific communities and also a larger reddit-wide community. At least I was never confused about that.
- derefr 10y ago
  Right, it's clear enough "from the inside" as an experienced user. But from the outside, people (e.g. journalists) just talk about "Reddit" as one place. Reddit Corp issues administrative policies for the site as if in complete ignorance of this public perception. There is a reason WordPress has the .com/.org split, and it's not just that large customers demand to self-host. That could have resulted in something more like GitHub Enterprise, but instead you see a well-supported FOSS offering. Why? Because this split allows WordPress.com to maintain a very strict TOS that disallows many types of content, while still allowing other people who don't want to adhere to those policies to "run on WordPress" easily by using the WordPress.org software either directly or through third-party hosts. If Reddit was smart, the "Reddit engine" would be a well-supported, easy to install FOSS offering like WordPress.org, and there would be a healthy ecosystem of third-party hosts running that software. Voat would just be "Yet Another Reddit-as-Service Provider", instead of a competitor and political statement. As it is, the Reddit engine is an effectively-unsupported blob of code that needs tons of other heavy dependencies to get it running. The only site I know running a copy of the Reddit engine is LessWrong—and they've heavily forked it for their own purposes.

intortus 10y ago

Autonomous public communities on Reddit do not exist because adequate protections against the male white supremacist hive mind do not exist.