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Explicitly racist subreddits have been disallowed for a long time. That one you just linked will likely be removed pretty soon. As you can tell, it's tiny and o
by meowface 8y ago
Explicitly racist subreddits have been disallowed for a long time. That one you just linked will likely be removed pretty soon. As you can tell, it's tiny and only has a few posts, so the admins may just not be aware.
I would disagree with many of the characterizations of hate speech according to /r/AgainstHateSubreddits, as they seem to consider /r/The_Donald and similar conservative subreddits as hate speech which needs to be banned (when in reality the issue usually tends to be a few racist or sexist posts out of millions, which usually end up getting very few upvotes and/or get removed by the mods of the subreddit; right-wingers could easily play the same game pointing out a few non-representative extremist comments in left-wing subreddits which, and they often do, but it's just as absurd)
Not to mention that subreddits that do get posted there seem to get removed by reddit admins pretty quickly. Reddit is even removing conspiracy theory subreddits like the QAnon ones, for supposedly inciting violence, though that seems a bit dubious and has not been demonstrated by reddit staff at all (yet).
The pro-censorship side is definitely winning on reddit and has been winning for the past few years; I really don't understand some of the criticisms of reddit as some kind of alt-right safe haven. I'm pretty liberal and reddit is easily the most liberal site I use, perhaps next to HN (though I think reddit is probably more liberal than HN). Huffman and Ohanian, and the previous two CEOs (Wong and Pao) are all pretty outspoken liberals who don't like Trump. Huffman, the current CEO and reddit founder, even abused his admin power to troll Trump supporters on a number of occasions (not that I can blame his frustration, but I think that was extremely unprofessional of him). reddit is derided as essentially a hyperleftist safe space by most people who would consider themselves even a little to the right (not even remotely to the extent of "far-right" or "alt-right" beliefs), and I don't think that's an unreasonable criticism.
Some years back when /r/jailbait and /r/FatPeopleHate were explicitly allowed by staff for free speech reasons, your side definitely had a point, but the pendulum has swung quite a bit within the past few years, so I'm not sure where all the criticism is coming from. I don't think reddit could be anymore pro-censorship when it comes to subreddits than they are right now.
Vetting subreddits before they're created sounds very unsustainable and kind of defeats the point of reddit, in my opinion. I think the default position for a common carrier-type platform like reddit or Facebook or Twitter should be to allow everything, and only censor when there is no other option. Again, I think people sometimes forget reddit is not like some big bulletin board. The point of the site is to allow as much user autonomy as possible when creating, managing, and posting in their own communities.
- charlesism 8y agoFor a lot of people, none of this is nearly good enough (let's do the math here: it takes a month+ to respond to a racist sub, but a new sub can be created instantly). Reddit was designed to optimize for "free speech." A lot of people, including myself, don't care if the site they visit for light entertainment is a bastion of liberty. Reddit has its priorities, but they aren't super compatible with a growing number of their users.
- meowface 8y agoYes, the sub has been up for 4 months, but look how small it is. You can't expect that to easily get on their radar; as you say, anyone can make a new sub. Do you have any documented evidence of reddit admins acknowledging its existence and then doing nothing? Has it been posted in one of those /r/AgainstHateSubreddits things? I'm sure if they were made aware of it, they'd remove it.