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The irony is that it was much less a cesspool back when it had virtually no limits on speech. Reducing speech limits won't reverse the clock, but it does make

The irony is that it was much less a cesspool back when it had virtually no limits on speech. Reducing speech limits won't reverse the clock, but it does make me think that speech limits and cesspool-ness are largely independent of each other.

Kapura 5y ago
It was less of a cesspool because it was significantly smaller. This is a well-understood feature of online communities: scale changes them, and not for the better.
IgorPartola 5y ago
It was also much smaller and news agencies used it a lot less as a source of news.
- StevePerkins 5y ago
  Eternal September rolls onward. People love to ponder how to improve social networking, and what the best model might be. The truth is that the best forum is simply the new one that the masses haven't caught onto yet.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
jrochkind1 5y ago
Well, the obvious/naive connection/correlation would be that the increased limits were a response to it becoming a "cess pool". And haven't totally succeeded at reversing that, but may or may not have kept it from being even worse than it would have been without them.
cedilla 5y ago
It's not completely independent - after Reddit started banning subreddits like "Fat People Hate" and anti-trans hategroups, the amount of hate posts decreased on the whole platform, even in completely unrelated groups. This might point to a perception of decreased tolerance of such posts, or be simply a function of the banned subreddits being used to coordinate attacks. Either way, reddit is unlike twitter and more like a network of networks, so the same result might not occur there.
- superkuh 5y ago
  You mean when reddit stopped being reddit, pushed out their original techy userbase, and invited in the flood of Facebook refugees becoming Facebook 2.0? Yeah, entirely changing your platform's userbase will do that.
  - cedilla 5y ago
    I don't know if and when reddit stopped being reddit, but I can guarantee that the "techy userbase", whoever that was, did not leave because a few thousand people where told to fantasize about mass-murdering minorities elsewhere.
    - superkuh 5y ago
      I don't have to guess. I was there since 2008. The 2013-2015 time on reddit there was huge uproar and discontent due to the corporate VC money being accepted and immediate changes in policy thereafter. If you don't remember this I'm not sure anything you say about reddit can be taken at face value. The CEO literally resigned after weeks of protest. > At the same time, Reddit has been trying to increase monetization. In the aftermath of Taylor's firing, reports surfaced that the company was planning to add more video interviews and other sponsored content to generate more money with popular features on the site, something that Taylor apparently advised against. You're talking about the obvious in your face censorship and bans that were going on at the same time as these other changes to become attractive to advertisers (and their target demographic) fleeing facebook. But these changes all happened at once and they came from the same source. They cannot be separated.
      - cedilla 5y ago
        I was also there. I belonged to the group of people who begged the reddit admins to do something about all the hate posts, because I didn't want to read about Donald Trump and how bad fat people and Ellen Pao are all day. I wanted to get back to the tech discussion. We could fix /r/theDonald hogging all space on /r/all by not using /r/all, but the people advocating the murder of obese people, trans people and jews were a constant nuisance and invaded every subreddit, and that certainly didn't help to attract or retain a techy audience for the subs I frequented. My perspective isn't more valid than yours, but I think you might underestimate how many people literally fled reddit due to the deluge of hate and highly antagonistic posts about US politics.
horsawlarway 5y ago
I think cesspool-ness is almost entirely dependent on community age and cohesion. The longer a service is around, and the more broad (less cohesive) its userbase, the more likely it is garbage. Focused communities can last a long time. Broad communities flame out, particularly when user-interaction becomes the gauge of what's shown by default.
triceratops 5y ago
> The irony is that it was much less a cesspool back when it had virtually no limits on speech. The irony is that there were far fewer mice running around when we didn't set out mousetraps.

Kapura 5y ago

It was less of a cesspool because it was significantly smaller. This is a well-understood feature of online communities: scale changes them, and not for the better.

IgorPartola 5y ago

It was also much smaller and news agencies used it a lot less as a source of news.

StevePerkins 5y ago
Eternal September rolls onward. People love to ponder how to improve social networking, and what the best model might be. The truth is that the best forum is simply the new one that the masses haven't caught onto yet.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

jrochkind1 5y ago

Well, the obvious/naive connection/correlation would be that the increased limits were a response to it becoming a "cess pool". And haven't totally succeeded at reversing that, but may or may not have kept it from being even worse than it would have been without them.

cedilla 5y ago

It's not completely independent - after Reddit started banning subreddits like "Fat People Hate" and anti-trans hategroups, the amount of hate posts decreased on the whole platform, even in completely unrelated groups. This might point to a perception of decreased tolerance of such posts, or be simply a function of the banned subreddits being used to coordinate attacks. Either way, reddit is unlike twitter and more like a network of networks, so the same result might not occur there.

superkuh 5y ago
You mean when reddit stopped being reddit, pushed out their original techy userbase, and invited in the flood of Facebook refugees becoming Facebook 2.0? Yeah, entirely changing your platform's userbase will do that.
- cedilla 5y ago
  I don't know if and when reddit stopped being reddit, but I can guarantee that the "techy userbase", whoever that was, did not leave because a few thousand people where told to fantasize about mass-murdering minorities elsewhere.
  - superkuh 5y ago
    I don't have to guess. I was there since 2008. The 2013-2015 time on reddit there was huge uproar and discontent due to the corporate VC money being accepted and immediate changes in policy thereafter. If you don't remember this I'm not sure anything you say about reddit can be taken at face value. The CEO literally resigned after weeks of protest. > At the same time, Reddit has been trying to increase monetization. In the aftermath of Taylor's firing, reports surfaced that the company was planning to add more video interviews and other sponsored content to generate more money with popular features on the site, something that Taylor apparently advised against. You're talking about the obvious in your face censorship and bans that were going on at the same time as these other changes to become attractive to advertisers (and their target demographic) fleeing facebook. But these changes all happened at once and they came from the same source. They cannot be separated.
    - cedilla 5y ago
      I was also there. I belonged to the group of people who begged the reddit admins to do something about all the hate posts, because I didn't want to read about Donald Trump and how bad fat people and Ellen Pao are all day. I wanted to get back to the tech discussion. We could fix /r/theDonald hogging all space on /r/all by not using /r/all, but the people advocating the murder of obese people, trans people and jews were a constant nuisance and invaded every subreddit, and that certainly didn't help to attract or retain a techy audience for the subs I frequented. My perspective isn't more valid than yours, but I think you might underestimate how many people literally fled reddit due to the deluge of hate and highly antagonistic posts about US politics.

horsawlarway 5y ago

I think cesspool-ness is almost entirely dependent on community age and cohesion. The longer a service is around, and the more broad (less cohesive) its userbase, the more likely it is garbage. Focused communities can last a long time. Broad communities flame out, particularly when user-interaction becomes the gauge of what's shown by default.

triceratops 5y ago

> The irony is that it was much less a cesspool back when it had virtually no limits on speech. The irony is that there were far fewer mice running around when we didn't set out mousetraps.