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It's just a victim of the times we live in. Reddit, like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, simply grew too much outside of its original intention. It was a place

It's just a victim of the times we live in. Reddit, like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, simply grew too much outside of its original intention. It was a place to form anonymous communities around niche interests, but these interests started to spread into the dark elements of hate speech, child pornography, etc. When profitability comes into question, as any company wants to strive for, it has to appease. Reddit was a nice idea, but it just got too big. Either it has to take responsibility for its users' content, and act as an editor/publisher, or it has to find a revenue stream outside of pursuing advertising revenue.

mindslight 8y ago
The four horsemen have always been on reddit, hence my reference to the AACS key. The only things that have changed is that the payment processors have decided to leverage their business in a play to control speech, and that there is a good contingent of users cheering on the resulting censorship push in a shortsighted fantasy of making people better. The latter is what I take issue with. Sure, it's really just that ignorant pop(ulist) culture has usurped the Internet. And yes that itself was unfortunately inevitable. But it's not Internet culture and there should be more uniform condemnation and outrage from the traditionally marginalized communities who took to the Internet earlier, rather than mental gymnastics justifying how censorship is great when it's deployed against today's undesirables.
- the_fonz 8y ago
  I think the bigger chilling effects (ie deplatforming of controversial figures) have been consequences of: 1. Depending on advertiser-model corporations for public commons during the analog to digital transition that should be nonprofit, independent and speech tolerant. 2. Fascist culture of safe spaces and coddled individuals enabled by academic faculties and admin who haven't lead by example and explained what civil debate entails: civilized disagreement and honest debate, not banning people and only inviting those we already agree with. 2b. A loss of decency, academic and civic rigor perpetuated by extended infantilism. 3. Cyberdisinhibitionism - combined with the previous, manufactured outrage/drama, out-of-line behavior, quips, ephemeral nonsense and anonymous popularity become the primary motivations for online discussion, rather than extending the physical world.
  - rocqua 8y ago
    Calling safe spaces 'fascist' offhandedly is rather extreme. such a statement should probably be explained or left out. Currently, it just looks hostile for the sake of being hostile.
  - rat87 8y ago
    It's funny you call safe spaces Fascistic while arguing against censorship. A lot of it doesn't have much to do with civilized disagreement and honest debate since many of the people deplatformed are neither interested nor capable of it
devoply 8y ago
ah yes 4chan lite was supposed to turn out completely differently.
- meko 8y ago
  You mean canv.as?
mxfh 8y ago
"Reddit, like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter," ... "It was a place to form anonymous communities around niche interests" Huh? None of these platforms got established as primarily long tail platforms. They were meant to be potentially big with lowest common denominators (news, aggregation, social connection in education communities) and grow into niches. Niche are topical forums and topical social networks.
- Quarrelsome 8y ago
  Facebook was for students, specifically one or two campuses to begin with. YouTube is in the name, it was a video platform for users to start personal channels of tubing themselves and idk wtf twitter was ever supposed to be.
  - dustindiamond 8y ago
    Twitter was started as any easy way to send group texts via SMS, before phones would widely support group texting.
- wongarsu 8y ago
  Reddit was a link aggregator for the lowest common denominator. But with the introduction of comments and subreddits they stumbled into the role of an aggregator of niche communities and mostly pivoted to fulfill that role better, until fairly recently (with the redesign, community containment and bans etc. in an effort to increase mass appeal)
yreg 8y ago
>or it has to find a revenue stream outside of pursuing advertising revenue hey what do we pay gold for then :(
- PeterisP 8y ago
  As far as I understand, the gold revenue is not really meaningful compared to advertising, it's something like a few percent of their total revenue.
_pmf_ 8y ago
> Reddit was a nice idea, but it just got too big. Funny how that wasn't a problem until the Bad Orange Man won. Surely just a coincidence.
- seszett 8y ago
  If you're suggesting that Donald Trump has some connection with the bans of controversial subreddits I think you're wrong, since the one big ban of fatpeoplehate, shitniggerssay and a few other controversial subreddits happened in 2015, a full year before Donald Trump's election.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    /r/jailbait and a few related subreddits were closed way back in 2011.
    - bloopernova 8y ago
      And while they are less popular, there definitely are still subreddits dedicated to "legal aged women who look like very young teenagers wink wink" content, with rules that are entirely designed to argue the letter of the law so they don't get banned.
  - zcid 8y ago
    But political subreddits didn't start seeing bans until 2016. Around the same time, the face of the major news subreddits drastically changed as well. I don't know if it was a result of the election, but the timing does seem to consider further consideration of motives.
    - ehrman 8y ago
      I think this is the result of anti-propaganda efforts after the election. https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/827zqc/in_response_to_recent_reports_about_the_integrity/ https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/827zqc/in_re...
  - 8y ago

mindslight 8y ago

The four horsemen have always been on reddit, hence my reference to the AACS key. The only things that have changed is that the payment processors have decided to leverage their business in a play to control speech, and that there is a good contingent of users cheering on the resulting censorship push in a shortsighted fantasy of making people better. The latter is what I take issue with. Sure, it's really just that ignorant pop(ulist) culture has usurped the Internet. And yes that itself was unfortunately inevitable. But it's not Internet culture and there should be more uniform condemnation and outrage from the traditionally marginalized communities who took to the Internet earlier, rather than mental gymnastics justifying how censorship is great when it's deployed against today's undesirables.

the_fonz 8y ago
I think the bigger chilling effects (ie deplatforming of controversial figures) have been consequences of: 1. Depending on advertiser-model corporations for public commons during the analog to digital transition that should be nonprofit, independent and speech tolerant. 2. Fascist culture of safe spaces and coddled individuals enabled by academic faculties and admin who haven't lead by example and explained what civil debate entails: civilized disagreement and honest debate, not banning people and only inviting those we already agree with. 2b. A loss of decency, academic and civic rigor perpetuated by extended infantilism. 3. Cyberdisinhibitionism - combined with the previous, manufactured outrage/drama, out-of-line behavior, quips, ephemeral nonsense and anonymous popularity become the primary motivations for online discussion, rather than extending the physical world.
- rocqua 8y ago
  Calling safe spaces 'fascist' offhandedly is rather extreme. such a statement should probably be explained or left out. Currently, it just looks hostile for the sake of being hostile.
- rat87 8y ago
  It's funny you call safe spaces Fascistic while arguing against censorship. A lot of it doesn't have much to do with civilized disagreement and honest debate since many of the people deplatformed are neither interested nor capable of it

devoply 8y ago

ah yes 4chan lite was supposed to turn out completely differently.

meko 8y ago
You mean canv.as?

mxfh 8y ago

"Reddit, like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter," ... "It was a place to form anonymous communities around niche interests" Huh? None of these platforms got established as primarily long tail platforms. They were meant to be potentially big with lowest common denominators (news, aggregation, social connection in education communities) and grow into niches. Niche are topical forums and topical social networks.

Quarrelsome 8y ago
Facebook was for students, specifically one or two campuses to begin with. YouTube is in the name, it was a video platform for users to start personal channels of tubing themselves and idk wtf twitter was ever supposed to be.
- dustindiamond 8y ago
  Twitter was started as any easy way to send group texts via SMS, before phones would widely support group texting.
wongarsu 8y ago
Reddit was a link aggregator for the lowest common denominator. But with the introduction of comments and subreddits they stumbled into the role of an aggregator of niche communities and mostly pivoted to fulfill that role better, until fairly recently (with the redesign, community containment and bans etc. in an effort to increase mass appeal)

yreg 8y ago

>or it has to find a revenue stream outside of pursuing advertising revenue hey what do we pay gold for then :(

PeterisP 8y ago
As far as I understand, the gold revenue is not really meaningful compared to advertising, it's something like a few percent of their total revenue.

_pmf_ 8y ago

> Reddit was a nice idea, but it just got too big. Funny how that wasn't a problem until the Bad Orange Man won. Surely just a coincidence.

seszett 8y ago
If you're suggesting that Donald Trump has some connection with the bans of controversial subreddits I think you're wrong, since the one big ban of fatpeoplehate, shitniggerssay and a few other controversial subreddits happened in 2015, a full year before Donald Trump's election.
- icebraining 8y ago
  /r/jailbait and a few related subreddits were closed way back in 2011.
  - bloopernova 8y ago
    And while they are less popular, there definitely are still subreddits dedicated to "legal aged women who look like very young teenagers wink wink" content, with rules that are entirely designed to argue the letter of the law so they don't get banned.
- zcid 8y ago
  But political subreddits didn't start seeing bans until 2016. Around the same time, the face of the major news subreddits drastically changed as well. I don't know if it was a result of the election, but the timing does seem to consider further consideration of motives.
  - ehrman 8y ago
    I think this is the result of anti-propaganda efforts after the election. https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/827zqc/in_response_to_recent_reports_about_the_integrity/ https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/827zqc/in_re...
- 8y ago