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> The early days were characterized by a feeling that anything goes as long as it wasn’t illegal or too extreme to defend. Q: Wouldn't most of us want to defen

> The early days were characterized by a feeling that anything goes as long as it wasn’t illegal or too extreme to defend. Q: Wouldn't most of us want to defend the right to publish content that's "not illegal"?

HeyImAlex 1y ago
Reddit’s eventual livelihood would be based on selling ads, so legality is not the line they were aiming for.
EGG_CREAM 1y ago
No. I think plenty of us recognize that the law has to have rigidly defined lines that don’t always line up neatly with morality. A great example is the “jailbait” subreddit that was talked about above. It makes sense that it’s technically legal, but I’d rather not be associated with the site that hosts it or the people who frequent it.
ratelimitsteve 1y ago
A right to publish it? Yes. An entitlement to a platform that will handle the publishing for you? Only if the owners of that platform freely agree to do so.
- commandlinefan 1y ago
  That's a popular equivocation when this topic comes up, but that's not quite what's going on (or at least not quite what happened). I'm sure that Reddit's current owners _do_ support censorship, and plenty of it, but the early Reddit owners, admins and even moderators did strongly oppose it. They were pushed into it by heavily implied threats of legal action if they didn't. Did you know that movie ratings aren't based on any law? There's no law on any book, anywhere, that prevents theaters from allowing children under 18 to view R-rated movies. Instead, the MPAA and the theaters enforce a fairly rigid soft-censorship regime to avoid what would definitely be a legally mandated, government-run censorship regime. So, while you are _strictly_ correct and Reddit is legally "allowed" to choose its current heavy handed censored approach, they were never really legally "allowed" to avoid it, either.
Aurornis 1y ago
On your own site or services? Of course. I don’t want to host that content, though. That’s also my right. As I discovered on the early days on Reddit, I don’t even want to be on a site where content is a free-for-all because you could go from scrolling through programming topics to encountering sexualized imagery of minors by scrolling if you weren’t careful. This is the problem with every hardcore free speech platform: They attract the people who only come to post that content, while everyone else who doesn’t want to see it starts leaving. Then after some time, the majority of your content is catering to those niches.
- BeFlatXIII 1y ago
  On the other hand, the presence of that kind of content in other subreddits functioned as a highly-effective anti-normie filter on the rest of the site. It kept the kind of people who shit up Twitter away.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - Aurornis 1y ago
    I was there and I couldn't disagree more. I see more parallels between the people who thrived in the early Reddit cesspool era and the same people who are spreading culture wars, misinfo, and other garbage on Twitter. The early days of Reddit were a haven for culture war and misinfo people.
    - wredcoll 1y ago
      That's what he said: anti-normie.
- mananaysiempre 1y ago
  This is a prisoner’s dilemma situation. You don’t want to host that content, which is your right. And neither does anyone else. So every place that does try ends up swamped with the undesirables and either stops trying, goes bust, or turns into a poisonous swamp. And thus all the “yes but not here” people collectively end up enforcing a degree of censorship beyond what the law actually requires, or (in other cases) effectively erasing opinions that a fair part of society does hold (thus effectively forcing that part of society to turn into a poisonous swamp). (Neutral example: at some point in the past the clinics around me started requiring appointments to come in for doctor-prescribed tests. Recently, the closest one did that too, saying that they were the only one remaining and ended up being overloaded with all the people who wouldn’t or couldn’t make an appointment. And thus we’re all worse off now.)
commandlinefan 1y ago
Sadly, no, not most of us. Not even a lot of us.

HeyImAlex 1y ago

Reddit’s eventual livelihood would be based on selling ads, so legality is not the line they were aiming for.

EGG_CREAM 1y ago

No. I think plenty of us recognize that the law has to have rigidly defined lines that don’t always line up neatly with morality. A great example is the “jailbait” subreddit that was talked about above. It makes sense that it’s technically legal, but I’d rather not be associated with the site that hosts it or the people who frequent it.

ratelimitsteve 1y ago

A right to publish it? Yes. An entitlement to a platform that will handle the publishing for you? Only if the owners of that platform freely agree to do so.

commandlinefan 1y ago
That's a popular equivocation when this topic comes up, but that's not quite what's going on (or at least not quite what happened). I'm sure that Reddit's current owners _do_ support censorship, and plenty of it, but the early Reddit owners, admins and even moderators did strongly oppose it. They were pushed into it by heavily implied threats of legal action if they didn't. Did you know that movie ratings aren't based on any law? There's no law on any book, anywhere, that prevents theaters from allowing children under 18 to view R-rated movies. Instead, the MPAA and the theaters enforce a fairly rigid soft-censorship regime to avoid what would definitely be a legally mandated, government-run censorship regime. So, while you are _strictly_ correct and Reddit is legally "allowed" to choose its current heavy handed censored approach, they were never really legally "allowed" to avoid it, either.

Aurornis 1y ago

On your own site or services? Of course. I don’t want to host that content, though. That’s also my right. As I discovered on the early days on Reddit, I don’t even want to be on a site where content is a free-for-all because you could go from scrolling through programming topics to encountering sexualized imagery of minors by scrolling if you weren’t careful. This is the problem with every hardcore free speech platform: They attract the people who only come to post that content, while everyone else who doesn’t want to see it starts leaving. Then after some time, the majority of your content is catering to those niches.

BeFlatXIII 1y ago
On the other hand, the presence of that kind of content in other subreddits functioned as a highly-effective anti-normie filter on the rest of the site. It kept the kind of people who shit up Twitter away.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- Aurornis 1y ago
  I was there and I couldn't disagree more. I see more parallels between the people who thrived in the early Reddit cesspool era and the same people who are spreading culture wars, misinfo, and other garbage on Twitter. The early days of Reddit were a haven for culture war and misinfo people.
  - wredcoll 1y ago
    That's what he said: anti-normie.
mananaysiempre 1y ago
This is a prisoner’s dilemma situation. You don’t want to host that content, which is your right. And neither does anyone else. So every place that does try ends up swamped with the undesirables and either stops trying, goes bust, or turns into a poisonous swamp. And thus all the “yes but not here” people collectively end up enforcing a degree of censorship beyond what the law actually requires, or (in other cases) effectively erasing opinions that a fair part of society does hold (thus effectively forcing that part of society to turn into a poisonous swamp). (Neutral example: at some point in the past the clinics around me started requiring appointments to come in for doctor-prescribed tests. Recently, the closest one did that too, saying that they were the only one remaining and ended up being overloaded with all the people who wouldn’t or couldn’t make an appointment. And thus we’re all worse off now.)

commandlinefan 1y ago

Sadly, no, not most of us. Not even a lot of us.