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> it’s also a cesspool or horrible people sharing horrible ideas. I tend to follow Voltaire's ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death you

> it’s also a cesspool or horrible people sharing horrible ideas. I tend to follow Voltaire's ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.' I agree with your assessment of the quality of ideas thrown around there, but I'd prefer a world where the internet allowed sites like that to exist, rather than one that's increasingly owned & distributed by giant corporate conglomerates with significant oversight into the discussion of its members, lest you get assigned to "re-education camps" or some BS like that. And let's not pretend that Reddit doesn't want to be one of those giant conglomerates...

cthalupa 6y ago
There's nothing wrong with Reddit not wanting to facilitate and provide a platform for that sort of content, though. It's a massively popular site with mainstream appeal. They don't want to let that popularity and audience be taken advantage of to spread ideas that are hateful and likely to incite violence. Quarantined subreddits are dumb, but it's a sign that their afraid of the backlash of outright banning them - they are already getting accused of heavy handed censorship. If people want to talk about that stuff, then yeah, go to gab and voat and ruqqus or 8chan or other sites that allow for it. There's no shortage of places on the internet to talk about anything you want. Reddit doesn't have to be one of them.
- deleted 6y ago
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- ryankemper 6y ago
  To the extent that a site like Reddit tries to police content and decide what's "hateful" content versus just mildly offensive, etc, the platform becomes less valuable to me. These policy changes have driven me off of Reddit. Not because I was part of any quarantined "communities" but just because I see where things are going. Reddit used to actually believe in the ideal of free speech, full stop. That stopped being true quite some time ago. > I hope most people on HN don't agree with the train of thought that websites have no duty to their fellow man to not normalize hate speech. I suspect that most agree with your statement, but to speak for myself, I am very skeptical of labelling something as hate speech. It starts out with banning "legitimate" hate speech ("ethnic group X is secretly controlling everything and must be purged") and quickly morphs into something like "you said all lives matter which is associated with opposition to black lives matter which over the long-run is part of a system of oppression and therefore we're going to ban you". If it's not clear, these are arbitrary examples that I just made up but I think the way Reddit is going it's quite clear that we're moving towards that.
  - fwip 6y ago
    They didn't believe in the ideals of free speech, they just didn't want to pay employees to kick users off their site. All ad clicks are good clicks.
  - cthalupa 6y ago
    So, I might be anthropomorphizing a website and drawing too many parallels to my own experience, but having shifted my own stances here over the past 7-8 years, I can't say I blame Reddit. I used to be completely against de-platforming people. And I still think sometimes it goes too far - people should be exposed to diverse ideas, and disagreeing with someone doesn't instantly make you a nazi. I won't mention names here, but there are a lot of people that I've vehemently disagreed with on major issues, but still followed along with 'sunlight is the best disinfectant.' I thought that they were ultimately exposing themselves as bigots and hatemongers when going on TV shows, writing op eds, showing up at college campuses. That they would end up taking care of themselves. But then I realized that I was seeing more and more people quote them, quote their rhetoric. And I'm not even talking about stuff along the lines of 'Black Lives Matter' vs 'Blue/All Lives Matter' type stuff - people being blatantly anti-semetic, people glorifying pedophilia because "it happened to them and they turned out OK", all sorts of very cut and dry "bad things." When we give these large public platforms to people peddling this, we're directly increasing the spread of the rhetoric. Reddit doesn't want to be involved in spreading this sort of rhetoric, even in it's milder forms, because people get radicalized slowly - you start with the softer sound bites, the ones where they have a lot more wiggle room to claim you don't mean this other thing. And as people start to agree with that idea, you move in with one that pushes the boundaries a bit farther. Keep repeating this process, and someone ends up embedded in the extreme forms of hate. Reddit wants to cut that off at the start and not play a part in spreading these ideologies and helping radicalize people into them. They've realized that sunlight isn't enough to disinfect things that are fundamentally rotten, especially when these subreddits are largely monocultures without outside influence coming in. If they don't want to be a party to the radicalization of people into buying in on extremist hateful ideologies, they have to do this, and they can't stand by doing nothing in the name of "free speech" On most of the internet, you don't win arguments by being right. You don't convince people by providing a well research, well sourced, informative argument. You win by beating people into submission. You win by having the better sound bites, the pithier quotes, the most upvotes and most people agreeing with you. And since these subreddits are so self selecting, when you wander in as an outsider, you only see the "winners" - the dissenting voices got downvoted, the bad arguments that appeal to the population of the reddit get upvoted. Is this a lot of responsibility to put in the hands of people? Yes. Can it lead to the same sort of problem I'm describing here? Yes. Is there any other choice? Not that I can see. You can stand by and let something that you know is harmful and dangerous to human lives happen on your watch because you're afraid you might someday end up doing the same thing, and know that there will be bad results. Or you can risk it, try to take steps to prevent yourself from falling into the same trap, and move forward with something that is necessary with knowledge that if you are not careful you can become part of the problem.
- cgiles 6y ago
  Quarantined subreddits are analogous to downweighting a particular Facebook post in the FB algorithm: both are a form of "soft" moderation stopping short of outright censorship. Banning users who vote for Reddit's arbitrarily-defined objectionable content is a bridge even further than mere censorship. Particularly because the users are voting for the content before they know Reddit has defined it as objectionable, by definition, because once Reddit has made that determination, the original post is removed. > There's nothing wrong with Reddit not wanting to facilitate and provide a platform for that sort of content, though. The counterarguments to this have been presented so many times on HN. The most fundamental problem is that there is a motte-and-bailey going on with these defenses of censorship: in theory, Reddit and others are censoring far-right hateful domestic terrorists. In reality, they are also censoring qualified medical professionals from opining on COVID in a manner contrary to the WHO, or people who are not actual climate denialists, but who merely question the precision of particular climate models. Exactly as any defender of free speech would have predicted, these mechanisms are enacted on the pretext of defending against a bogeyman, but are actually used in practice to impose ideological uniformity and suppress legitimate dissent.
yardie 6y ago
> I'd prefer a world where the internet allowed sites like that to exist So these alt sites spring up all the time (8chan, 4chan, ruqqus, voat). No one has taken those sites off the night. And the public is free to vote with their time, clicks, and money on whether they support these sites.

cthalupa 6y ago

There's nothing wrong with Reddit not wanting to facilitate and provide a platform for that sort of content, though. It's a massively popular site with mainstream appeal. They don't want to let that popularity and audience be taken advantage of to spread ideas that are hateful and likely to incite violence. Quarantined subreddits are dumb, but it's a sign that their afraid of the backlash of outright banning them - they are already getting accused of heavy handed censorship. If people want to talk about that stuff, then yeah, go to gab and voat and ruqqus or 8chan or other sites that allow for it. There's no shortage of places on the internet to talk about anything you want. Reddit doesn't have to be one of them.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ryankemper 6y ago
To the extent that a site like Reddit tries to police content and decide what's "hateful" content versus just mildly offensive, etc, the platform becomes less valuable to me. These policy changes have driven me off of Reddit. Not because I was part of any quarantined "communities" but just because I see where things are going. Reddit used to actually believe in the ideal of free speech, full stop. That stopped being true quite some time ago. > I hope most people on HN don't agree with the train of thought that websites have no duty to their fellow man to not normalize hate speech. I suspect that most agree with your statement, but to speak for myself, I am very skeptical of labelling something as hate speech. It starts out with banning "legitimate" hate speech ("ethnic group X is secretly controlling everything and must be purged") and quickly morphs into something like "you said all lives matter which is associated with opposition to black lives matter which over the long-run is part of a system of oppression and therefore we're going to ban you". If it's not clear, these are arbitrary examples that I just made up but I think the way Reddit is going it's quite clear that we're moving towards that.
- fwip 6y ago
  They didn't believe in the ideals of free speech, they just didn't want to pay employees to kick users off their site. All ad clicks are good clicks.
- cthalupa 6y ago
  So, I might be anthropomorphizing a website and drawing too many parallels to my own experience, but having shifted my own stances here over the past 7-8 years, I can't say I blame Reddit. I used to be completely against de-platforming people. And I still think sometimes it goes too far - people should be exposed to diverse ideas, and disagreeing with someone doesn't instantly make you a nazi. I won't mention names here, but there are a lot of people that I've vehemently disagreed with on major issues, but still followed along with 'sunlight is the best disinfectant.' I thought that they were ultimately exposing themselves as bigots and hatemongers when going on TV shows, writing op eds, showing up at college campuses. That they would end up taking care of themselves. But then I realized that I was seeing more and more people quote them, quote their rhetoric. And I'm not even talking about stuff along the lines of 'Black Lives Matter' vs 'Blue/All Lives Matter' type stuff - people being blatantly anti-semetic, people glorifying pedophilia because "it happened to them and they turned out OK", all sorts of very cut and dry "bad things." When we give these large public platforms to people peddling this, we're directly increasing the spread of the rhetoric. Reddit doesn't want to be involved in spreading this sort of rhetoric, even in it's milder forms, because people get radicalized slowly - you start with the softer sound bites, the ones where they have a lot more wiggle room to claim you don't mean this other thing. And as people start to agree with that idea, you move in with one that pushes the boundaries a bit farther. Keep repeating this process, and someone ends up embedded in the extreme forms of hate. Reddit wants to cut that off at the start and not play a part in spreading these ideologies and helping radicalize people into them. They've realized that sunlight isn't enough to disinfect things that are fundamentally rotten, especially when these subreddits are largely monocultures without outside influence coming in. If they don't want to be a party to the radicalization of people into buying in on extremist hateful ideologies, they have to do this, and they can't stand by doing nothing in the name of "free speech" On most of the internet, you don't win arguments by being right. You don't convince people by providing a well research, well sourced, informative argument. You win by beating people into submission. You win by having the better sound bites, the pithier quotes, the most upvotes and most people agreeing with you. And since these subreddits are so self selecting, when you wander in as an outsider, you only see the "winners" - the dissenting voices got downvoted, the bad arguments that appeal to the population of the reddit get upvoted. Is this a lot of responsibility to put in the hands of people? Yes. Can it lead to the same sort of problem I'm describing here? Yes. Is there any other choice? Not that I can see. You can stand by and let something that you know is harmful and dangerous to human lives happen on your watch because you're afraid you might someday end up doing the same thing, and know that there will be bad results. Or you can risk it, try to take steps to prevent yourself from falling into the same trap, and move forward with something that is necessary with knowledge that if you are not careful you can become part of the problem.
cgiles 6y ago
Quarantined subreddits are analogous to downweighting a particular Facebook post in the FB algorithm: both are a form of "soft" moderation stopping short of outright censorship. Banning users who vote for Reddit's arbitrarily-defined objectionable content is a bridge even further than mere censorship. Particularly because the users are voting for the content before they know Reddit has defined it as objectionable, by definition, because once Reddit has made that determination, the original post is removed. > There's nothing wrong with Reddit not wanting to facilitate and provide a platform for that sort of content, though. The counterarguments to this have been presented so many times on HN. The most fundamental problem is that there is a motte-and-bailey going on with these defenses of censorship: in theory, Reddit and others are censoring far-right hateful domestic terrorists. In reality, they are also censoring qualified medical professionals from opining on COVID in a manner contrary to the WHO, or people who are not actual climate denialists, but who merely question the precision of particular climate models. Exactly as any defender of free speech would have predicted, these mechanisms are enacted on the pretext of defending against a bogeyman, but are actually used in practice to impose ideological uniformity and suppress legitimate dissent.

yardie 6y ago

> I'd prefer a world where the internet allowed sites like that to exist So these alt sites spring up all the time (8chan, 4chan, ruqqus, voat). No one has taken those sites off the night. And the public is free to vote with their time, clicks, and money on whether they support these sites.