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This is a bit like studying crime in one neighborhood in isolation. Putting cops in neighborhood A may reduce crime there, but it may just increase crime in ne

This is a bit like studying crime in one neighborhood in isolation. Putting cops in neighborhood A may reduce crime there, but it may just increase crime in neighborhood B. I actually liked having offensive subreddits on Reddit because there were so many people that devoted themselves to arguing with the people that posted there. Now those people are gone and are off to internet spaces where nobody disagrees with them. This will reinforce their opinions, not change them for the better.

jackmott 9y ago
After spending ~15 years arguing with the same, repeating dissenting opinions, with no evolution or change in those arguments, I'm ready to retire to my echo chamber, where evolution and global warming are real, and the earth isn't 10,000 years old. Welcome to join me.
tptacek 9y ago
That's the point of the study. The concern was that by banning particular subreddits, they'd simple disperse the activity on those groups across the site. But that's not what happened, if you study the data site-wide.
bad_user 9y ago
> This will reinforce their opinions, not change them for the better. I see this argument made a lot, however I'd like to see proof that giving such people arguments can change them. I personally don't think that's the case. It's like giving a Christian arguments that God doesn't exist.
- KGIII 9y ago
  I know quite a few folks who are no longer Christian because someone did just that.
- HarryHirsch 9y ago
  It's the other way around: the radicals have a need to engage the rest of society to convert them to their cause. That forces some degree of moderation, they know that if they are too far out no one will listen to them. A better metaphor would be that if you confine the Christians to their ghettoes soon someone will take up arms against the infidels.
- dionidium 9y ago
  Significant changes in my life primarily attributable to arguments with friends and online: 1. Moved from a vague agnosticism to atheism 2. Maintained a vegetarian diet for 10 years 3. Shifted my politics from the far-left toward the center-right Who are these people who think minds never change? That's what I see repeated over and over without evidence. Minds never change in the moment. That's not how beliefs or the stubborn humans who hold them work. But beliefs can -- and do! -- change over time.
  - bad_user 9y ago
    We are having a conversation on Hacker News. Any sampling from HN's user base, including your sample of 1, is biased. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but there's a high probability that: 1. you have at least average intelligence 2. you can entertain logical arguments, since software development involves a lot of mathematical logic 3. you are heavily exposed to American culture and San Francisco's progressiveness, even those of us that are not even living in the US ;-) 4. you have a good education, either from an Ivy league school, or because you are an efficient autodidact 5. you are middle class and have your basic needs satisfied by your salary Don't get me wrong, but there's a high probability that you're living in a bubble, just like most of us here and you're really not representative of the average population.
    - dionidium 9y ago
      Right, but the mods here don't allow heated debates on controversial subjects. They view them as pointless or even harmful. Further, they seem to have accepted a sort of broken windows theory of moderation that says that any such discussion has to be stopped, lest it leak out into other threads. I think that's disastrously wrong on all counts.
      - tepe1 9y ago
        The goal of such "controversial discussions" is always to silence the minorities. The goal is not discussion or debate but normalization of extreme views. The mechanism here is very simple. A "controversial subject" is proposed like, say, "Women are inferior to men when it comes to X." The content of this discussion is not relevant. Its existence is enough to fulfill the true purpose: drive women away from the forum. It is abundantly clear that women, or any other minority, will rightly avoid any community that entertains their inferiority. What's amusing about this debate is that all the heroic defenders of "free speech" have a very limited and very self-serving definition of free speech. You will never see these people argue for making a particular forum more welcoming or hospitable to minorities. You will never see arguments for diversity. This would introduce real diversity of opinion which is very much not wanted. But even though they despise real diversity, by defending free speech of the most extreme ilk they do at least get the nice virtue points in their mind with the benefit of ensuring everbody in the forum is pretty much exactly like them.
- MrZongle2 9y ago
  How about http://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convinced-200-ku-klux-klan-members-to-give-up-their-robes http://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convince... ?
LMYahooTFY 9y ago
The point of the study was to determine if it was good for Reddit, not good for the internet or society. I think your point is not invalid, this study was simply confined to the community of Reddit.
showerst 9y ago
I think that there's a cohort of people (mostly teenagers and early 20s?) who won't actively seek out hate based sites, but if they're available might check them out, especially if it's not just direct hate, but focused on jokes at <group that is easy to attack>'s expense. At first for fun, but eventually it normalizes the behavior for them, and a small percent get radicalized for real. The alt-right/theDonald overlap with hate movements is a great example of this. What percent of those Charlottesville marchers and their supporters started doing it just for the memes, or just to light up smarmy internet liberals? In that sense, removing the most radical groups from a giant forum like Reddit off to silos like stormfront can have a net positive effect.
- MrZongle2 9y ago
  "I think that there's a cohort of people (mostly teenagers and early 20s?) who won't actively seek out hate based sites, but if they're available might check them out, especially if it's not just direct hate, but focused on jokes at <group that is easy to attack>'s expense. At first for fun, but eventually it normalizes the behavior for them, and a small percent get radicalized for real." I see it as a form of inoculation: on Reddit, a casual visitor has a better chance of seeing counterpoints and ridicule. Now those groups have scattered like roaches into safer spaces that are less likely to tolerate dissenting opinions, and can claim persecution.
  - showerst 9y ago
    <personal bias, no time to research this for sure> The extremists weren't going to be swayed anyway by people arguing with them, or even ridiculing them on the internet. If anything, the focused subreddit with its own moderation team can create extra legitimacy by voting down arguments and dissent, or deleting them entirely. Spend some time on thedonald, and see how much actual useful debate there is on the posts attacking Hillary's body. It's the large, non-participatory cohort of people who may have never read the comments that are being helped by banning these groups, because these behaviors seem less 'normal' and 'legitimate' if you don't see them, especially if you're not exposed to them as jokes and pithy quotes. Some of the coontown people will slink off to the KKK blogosphere and private message boards, but my point is that many of those with only mild biases won't, and so will lose the chance to be radicalized.
rxhernandez 9y ago
You genuinely think the type of people who subscribe to subreddits like coontown and fatpeoplehate are going to have their mind changed by people on the internet? I've had no success changing the minds of people who think that being trans is a mental illness despite citing numerous peer reviewed articles. Maybe I'm going about it wrong, but I'm not sure it gets more clear than pointing to a bunch of scientists that directly contradict their understanding.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- alkonaut 9y ago
  It was never about changing opinions. It's about - making a statement to new users and new forums about what is acceptable and what isn't. Some times it's warranted to take some action even if only symbolic. - making it inconvenient to be an ass. People are lazy and habitual. With luck, their preferred forum for hate disappearing mess they pick up knitting instead of looking for another forum (in the same way that preventing crime in one area doesn't move it but actually reduces overall crime.)
- anon2936 9y ago
  I post on /pol/ without agreeing with most of their views. You're unlikely to immediately convince anyone of a diametrically opposed point of view at any given time. But you can bring nuance to a very one-sided, memed and stereotyped "discussion". For example there is a large overlap between pro-fossil fuel and nationalist attitudes. It is fairly easy to get some concessions about renewables from them once you point out that renewables mean energy-independence and not giving money to the middle east. If you have no scruples of adopting their arguments for the sake or arguing you can also make your argument explicitly anti-jewish by pointing out that israel would be a far less important strategically if the US did not depend on oil as much. It seems like people have trouble applying logic of this kind because they fear being seen endorsing the arguments that they use but in the end it's just a form of playing devil's advocate. If you have a thread where the general tone is that all blacks should be killed then maybe an admission that this would not be a smart move and better solutions can be found is already progress. Small progress, but still important, nudging things in a better direction bit by bit. And yes, board culture does change over time, imperceptibly to most, but it does change.
badlucklottery 9y ago
>Now those people are gone and are off to internet spaces where nobody disagrees with them. This will reinforce their opinions, not change them for the better. I agree that 'curing' them should be a goal but stopping the spread via quarantine is useful on its own. Forcing them off into their own corner is disrupting their recruitment channels which means there's less to cure tomorrow.
bandrami 9y ago
Ironically, for years and years criminologists made exactly the argument you did: preventing crime in one place just moves it somewhere else. So, police largely didn't bother, throughout the largest crime wave in history (1970-1995 or so). Then in the mid-90s, some new research suggested that making crime more difficult to commit in one place actually prevents crime everywhere; criminals, like most people, are fundamentally lazy, and putting up inconveniences makes them more likely to just not commit any crime at all. In the 20 years or so since, crime rates have fallen by more than half. Some redditors probably did go off somewhere else where they could spew invective. Most just went back to looking at gifs of dogs falling down stairs or whatever.
- dionidium 9y ago
  Caution: this is presented as a validated theory, but there are many competing explanations for the drop in crime in the 90s.
  - mfoy_ 9y ago
    Valid or not, it was a Nirvana fallacy-- just like the idea that there was no point in banning the subreddit because they would move platforms. Just because you can't achieve an idealized scenario doesn't mean you should not try for some improvement.
amrrs 9y ago
In the book Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell discusses about Epidemic Suicide in Minnesota. Just like that, Minds that are volatile would read things on hate speech and then believe them. I know a lot of people hate Trump just because a lot others they know hate him. A lot of people call themselves atheist because a lot of educated people they have spoke to claim to be atheist. Of course, this is just correlation and not equal to causation.
otakucode 9y ago
It seems most people are terrified that the bigots might be right. That's the only thing that makes any sense. It's the only situation in which censorship makes more sense than discussion. If the bigots are wrong, you just correct them, lampoon them, etc. There must be many people who suppose the bigots cannot be corrected, that the truth is horrible and must be hidden for the good of all. Those people are wrong. And they will do radically more harm than good. Good intentions are the opposite of good actions. (An old German saying I quite like.)
- mcguire 9y ago
  Out of curiosity, have you ever tried "correcting" bigots? In one of the forums under discussion?
  - memeCrasher 9y ago
    I Absolutely have. Though with rampant censorship these days, few people have to build up any kind of argument to counter these bigots. It's a lot easier to hit a downvote button, or a ban button, than to present a reasoned argument at all. What a fantastic place the internet is evolving into. A haven for, well, some kind of speech. Not free of course. Restricted and safe speech. Perhaps speech licenses and internet ID's soon? If you say something bigoted we can throw you in jail and fire you. Harass your friends and family too. It's the only way to protect a free and open society.
- sean2 9y ago
  No, we are arguing opinions here. FPH was not conducting double blind scientific studies on the efficacy of shaming as a weight loss intervention for the obese (AFAIK). And, in fact, if that study does show promising results, I may admit they are right and help them in their noble effort to solve the obesity crisis. But what I hear them saying is, "Hey it's cool to hate and harass half of the US population based on appearance!" I am one of the people you reference who thinks that that "cannot be corrected," but that's because it's not a falsifiable hypothesis! Neither is it "the truth," it's just their opinion. And it is something that I think bored, mostly teenage, people may buy into due to "digital peer pressure," which is admittedly a somewhat hair brained new concept, but based on real effects.
eighthnate 9y ago
> I actually liked having offensive subreddits on Reddit because there were so many people that devoted themselves to arguing with the people that posted there. The real problem with having "offensive" subs removed is that now they are going to target the next layer of speech. You see this on reddit. Now that they succeeded in banning coontown, fph, etc, they are now targeting political subreddit. Hell during the election, there was a push to have the_donald banned. Then what? Christian subs? Food subs that advocate meat consumption? It is encouraging a culture of outrage and censorship. Which is very scary.
memeCrasher 9y ago
I disagree with any conclusions drawn that censorship has solved any kind of problem here. Let's take the fat people hate subreddit. Okay, you ban every user and the subreddit itself. Some people make new accounts, and a new subreddit about hating fat people, so you ban all those too. Did that convince anyone that their opinions were wrong? Absolutely not. If anything, convinced them, in their eyes, that they were onto something and had to be silenced. All it's done is driven people with those bigoted opinions away from Reddit. These people still exist (until we start exterminating them I guess) and will continue to speak their bigotry wherever it is they do end up. All that's really accomplished is just cleaning the website of speech you don't want anyone to see. Kind of like sweeping dust under a rug - still there, can't see it though. Out of sight, out of mind. Someone else's pest-problem.
- acdha 9y ago
  You're leaving out a major argument for enforcing general community standards: does being part of a larger group make discovery enough easier to help recruit new members? In the case of Reddit this argument is especially worth consideration given how common it is for people to promote bigotry with memes & other jokes or selective filtering (remember the guys who only post negative news stories featuring black criminals?). It's very plausible to believe that many users, especially younger ones, hit something like /r/news or /r/funny and end up on a hate subreddit without realizing how far off of the mainstream it is. That seems especially worth studying given the common anecdotal accounts from parents who found their kid managed to start out in a Nintendo forum an end up in pretty dark places.

jackmott 9y ago

After spending ~15 years arguing with the same, repeating dissenting opinions, with no evolution or change in those arguments, I'm ready to retire to my echo chamber, where evolution and global warming are real, and the earth isn't 10,000 years old. Welcome to join me.

tptacek 9y ago

That's the point of the study. The concern was that by banning particular subreddits, they'd simple disperse the activity on those groups across the site. But that's not what happened, if you study the data site-wide.

bad_user 9y ago

> This will reinforce their opinions, not change them for the better. I see this argument made a lot, however I'd like to see proof that giving such people arguments can change them. I personally don't think that's the case. It's like giving a Christian arguments that God doesn't exist.

KGIII 9y ago
I know quite a few folks who are no longer Christian because someone did just that.
HarryHirsch 9y ago
It's the other way around: the radicals have a need to engage the rest of society to convert them to their cause. That forces some degree of moderation, they know that if they are too far out no one will listen to them. A better metaphor would be that if you confine the Christians to their ghettoes soon someone will take up arms against the infidels.
dionidium 9y ago
Significant changes in my life primarily attributable to arguments with friends and online: 1. Moved from a vague agnosticism to atheism 2. Maintained a vegetarian diet for 10 years 3. Shifted my politics from the far-left toward the center-right Who are these people who think minds never change? That's what I see repeated over and over without evidence. Minds never change in the moment. That's not how beliefs or the stubborn humans who hold them work. But beliefs can -- and do! -- change over time.
- bad_user 9y ago
  We are having a conversation on Hacker News. Any sampling from HN's user base, including your sample of 1, is biased. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but there's a high probability that: 1. you have at least average intelligence 2. you can entertain logical arguments, since software development involves a lot of mathematical logic 3. you are heavily exposed to American culture and San Francisco's progressiveness, even those of us that are not even living in the US ;-) 4. you have a good education, either from an Ivy league school, or because you are an efficient autodidact 5. you are middle class and have your basic needs satisfied by your salary Don't get me wrong, but there's a high probability that you're living in a bubble, just like most of us here and you're really not representative of the average population.
  - dionidium 9y ago
    Right, but the mods here don't allow heated debates on controversial subjects. They view them as pointless or even harmful. Further, they seem to have accepted a sort of broken windows theory of moderation that says that any such discussion has to be stopped, lest it leak out into other threads. I think that's disastrously wrong on all counts.
    - tepe1 9y ago
      The goal of such "controversial discussions" is always to silence the minorities. The goal is not discussion or debate but normalization of extreme views. The mechanism here is very simple. A "controversial subject" is proposed like, say, "Women are inferior to men when it comes to X." The content of this discussion is not relevant. Its existence is enough to fulfill the true purpose: drive women away from the forum. It is abundantly clear that women, or any other minority, will rightly avoid any community that entertains their inferiority. What's amusing about this debate is that all the heroic defenders of "free speech" have a very limited and very self-serving definition of free speech. You will never see these people argue for making a particular forum more welcoming or hospitable to minorities. You will never see arguments for diversity. This would introduce real diversity of opinion which is very much not wanted. But even though they despise real diversity, by defending free speech of the most extreme ilk they do at least get the nice virtue points in their mind with the benefit of ensuring everbody in the forum is pretty much exactly like them.
MrZongle2 9y ago
How about http://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convinced-200-ku-klux-klan-members-to-give-up-their-robes http://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convince... ?

LMYahooTFY 9y ago

The point of the study was to determine if it was good for Reddit, not good for the internet or society. I think your point is not invalid, this study was simply confined to the community of Reddit.

showerst 9y ago

I think that there's a cohort of people (mostly teenagers and early 20s?) who won't actively seek out hate based sites, but if they're available might check them out, especially if it's not just direct hate, but focused on jokes at <group that is easy to attack>'s expense. At first for fun, but eventually it normalizes the behavior for them, and a small percent get radicalized for real. The alt-right/theDonald overlap with hate movements is a great example of this. What percent of those Charlottesville marchers and their supporters started doing it just for the memes, or just to light up smarmy internet liberals? In that sense, removing the most radical groups from a giant forum like Reddit off to silos like stormfront can have a net positive effect.

MrZongle2 9y ago
"I think that there's a cohort of people (mostly teenagers and early 20s?) who won't actively seek out hate based sites, but if they're available might check them out, especially if it's not just direct hate, but focused on jokes at <group that is easy to attack>'s expense. At first for fun, but eventually it normalizes the behavior for them, and a small percent get radicalized for real." I see it as a form of inoculation: on Reddit, a casual visitor has a better chance of seeing counterpoints and ridicule. Now those groups have scattered like roaches into safer spaces that are less likely to tolerate dissenting opinions, and can claim persecution.
- showerst 9y ago
  <personal bias, no time to research this for sure> The extremists weren't going to be swayed anyway by people arguing with them, or even ridiculing them on the internet. If anything, the focused subreddit with its own moderation team can create extra legitimacy by voting down arguments and dissent, or deleting them entirely. Spend some time on thedonald, and see how much actual useful debate there is on the posts attacking Hillary's body. It's the large, non-participatory cohort of people who may have never read the comments that are being helped by banning these groups, because these behaviors seem less 'normal' and 'legitimate' if you don't see them, especially if you're not exposed to them as jokes and pithy quotes. Some of the coontown people will slink off to the KKK blogosphere and private message boards, but my point is that many of those with only mild biases won't, and so will lose the chance to be radicalized.

rxhernandez 9y ago

You genuinely think the type of people who subscribe to subreddits like coontown and fatpeoplehate are going to have their mind changed by people on the internet? I've had no success changing the minds of people who think that being trans is a mental illness despite citing numerous peer reviewed articles. Maybe I'm going about it wrong, but I'm not sure it gets more clear than pointing to a bunch of scientists that directly contradict their understanding.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
alkonaut 9y ago
It was never about changing opinions. It's about - making a statement to new users and new forums about what is acceptable and what isn't. Some times it's warranted to take some action even if only symbolic. - making it inconvenient to be an ass. People are lazy and habitual. With luck, their preferred forum for hate disappearing mess they pick up knitting instead of looking for another forum (in the same way that preventing crime in one area doesn't move it but actually reduces overall crime.)
anon2936 9y ago
I post on /pol/ without agreeing with most of their views. You're unlikely to immediately convince anyone of a diametrically opposed point of view at any given time. But you can bring nuance to a very one-sided, memed and stereotyped "discussion". For example there is a large overlap between pro-fossil fuel and nationalist attitudes. It is fairly easy to get some concessions about renewables from them once you point out that renewables mean energy-independence and not giving money to the middle east. If you have no scruples of adopting their arguments for the sake or arguing you can also make your argument explicitly anti-jewish by pointing out that israel would be a far less important strategically if the US did not depend on oil as much. It seems like people have trouble applying logic of this kind because they fear being seen endorsing the arguments that they use but in the end it's just a form of playing devil's advocate. If you have a thread where the general tone is that all blacks should be killed then maybe an admission that this would not be a smart move and better solutions can be found is already progress. Small progress, but still important, nudging things in a better direction bit by bit. And yes, board culture does change over time, imperceptibly to most, but it does change.

badlucklottery 9y ago

>Now those people are gone and are off to internet spaces where nobody disagrees with them. This will reinforce their opinions, not change them for the better. I agree that 'curing' them should be a goal but stopping the spread via quarantine is useful on its own. Forcing them off into their own corner is disrupting their recruitment channels which means there's less to cure tomorrow.

bandrami 9y ago

Ironically, for years and years criminologists made exactly the argument you did: preventing crime in one place just moves it somewhere else. So, police largely didn't bother, throughout the largest crime wave in history (1970-1995 or so). Then in the mid-90s, some new research suggested that making crime more difficult to commit in one place actually prevents crime everywhere; criminals, like most people, are fundamentally lazy, and putting up inconveniences makes them more likely to just not commit any crime at all. In the 20 years or so since, crime rates have fallen by more than half. Some redditors probably did go off somewhere else where they could spew invective. Most just went back to looking at gifs of dogs falling down stairs or whatever.

dionidium 9y ago
Caution: this is presented as a validated theory, but there are many competing explanations for the drop in crime in the 90s.
- mfoy_ 9y ago
  Valid or not, it was a Nirvana fallacy-- just like the idea that there was no point in banning the subreddit because they would move platforms. Just because you can't achieve an idealized scenario doesn't mean you should not try for some improvement.

amrrs 9y ago

In the book Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell discusses about Epidemic Suicide in Minnesota. Just like that, Minds that are volatile would read things on hate speech and then believe them. I know a lot of people hate Trump just because a lot others they know hate him. A lot of people call themselves atheist because a lot of educated people they have spoke to claim to be atheist. Of course, this is just correlation and not equal to causation.

otakucode 9y ago

It seems most people are terrified that the bigots might be right. That's the only thing that makes any sense. It's the only situation in which censorship makes more sense than discussion. If the bigots are wrong, you just correct them, lampoon them, etc. There must be many people who suppose the bigots cannot be corrected, that the truth is horrible and must be hidden for the good of all. Those people are wrong. And they will do radically more harm than good. Good intentions are the opposite of good actions. (An old German saying I quite like.)

mcguire 9y ago
Out of curiosity, have you ever tried "correcting" bigots? In one of the forums under discussion?
- memeCrasher 9y ago
  I Absolutely have. Though with rampant censorship these days, few people have to build up any kind of argument to counter these bigots. It's a lot easier to hit a downvote button, or a ban button, than to present a reasoned argument at all. What a fantastic place the internet is evolving into. A haven for, well, some kind of speech. Not free of course. Restricted and safe speech. Perhaps speech licenses and internet ID's soon? If you say something bigoted we can throw you in jail and fire you. Harass your friends and family too. It's the only way to protect a free and open society.
sean2 9y ago
No, we are arguing opinions here. FPH was not conducting double blind scientific studies on the efficacy of shaming as a weight loss intervention for the obese (AFAIK). And, in fact, if that study does show promising results, I may admit they are right and help them in their noble effort to solve the obesity crisis. But what I hear them saying is, "Hey it's cool to hate and harass half of the US population based on appearance!" I am one of the people you reference who thinks that that "cannot be corrected," but that's because it's not a falsifiable hypothesis! Neither is it "the truth," it's just their opinion. And it is something that I think bored, mostly teenage, people may buy into due to "digital peer pressure," which is admittedly a somewhat hair brained new concept, but based on real effects.

eighthnate 9y ago

> I actually liked having offensive subreddits on Reddit because there were so many people that devoted themselves to arguing with the people that posted there. The real problem with having "offensive" subs removed is that now they are going to target the next layer of speech. You see this on reddit. Now that they succeeded in banning coontown, fph, etc, they are now targeting political subreddit. Hell during the election, there was a push to have the_donald banned. Then what? Christian subs? Food subs that advocate meat consumption? It is encouraging a culture of outrage and censorship. Which is very scary.

memeCrasher 9y ago

I disagree with any conclusions drawn that censorship has solved any kind of problem here. Let's take the fat people hate subreddit. Okay, you ban every user and the subreddit itself. Some people make new accounts, and a new subreddit about hating fat people, so you ban all those too. Did that convince anyone that their opinions were wrong? Absolutely not. If anything, convinced them, in their eyes, that they were onto something and had to be silenced. All it's done is driven people with those bigoted opinions away from Reddit. These people still exist (until we start exterminating them I guess) and will continue to speak their bigotry wherever it is they do end up. All that's really accomplished is just cleaning the website of speech you don't want anyone to see. Kind of like sweeping dust under a rug - still there, can't see it though. Out of sight, out of mind. Someone else's pest-problem.

acdha 9y ago
You're leaving out a major argument for enforcing general community standards: does being part of a larger group make discovery enough easier to help recruit new members? In the case of Reddit this argument is especially worth consideration given how common it is for people to promote bigotry with memes & other jokes or selective filtering (remember the guys who only post negative news stories featuring black criminals?). It's very plausible to believe that many users, especially younger ones, hit something like /r/news or /r/funny and end up on a hate subreddit without realizing how far off of the mainstream it is. That seems especially worth studying given the common anecdotal accounts from parents who found their kid managed to start out in a Nintendo forum an end up in pretty dark places.