3 ms·

SRS started as one guy who would post lists of quotes from Reddit (iirc, upvoted comments in mainstream subs) and Stormfront, with the object being to guess whi

by likpok 14y ago

SRS started as one guy who would post lists of quotes from Reddit (iirc, upvoted comments in mainstream subs) and Stormfront, with the object being to guess which quote came from which. It was harder than most Redditors would like to admit. Eventually, he quit the site entirely. At some point a bunch of SA goons took over the then-defunct subreddit, to use it as a platform to take down the highly active /r/jailbait. The effort continued to hold a mirror up to some of the more racist/misogynistic/etc comments of reddit. A lot of the criticism of SRS comes from the fact that people don't like being called racist. Nearly everyone agrees that racists are bad people who deserve terrible punishments for their actions. No one wants to accept culpability for the fact that by upvoting a racist comment they are supporting racism.

freehunter 14y ago
I would say a lot of the criticism comes from the fact that they commonly take quotes out of context, or take quotes meant as dark humor and use them to portray the poster as a horrible person. Combine that with their immature attitude and one-track mind and you're getting closer to understanding why even open-minded redditors don't support SRS. Sure, there's plenty of legitimate cases where reddit needs to be called out and have a community effort around fixing some of their problems. But no one takes SRS seriously because, for all the good they have the potential to do, they're publicly harming their own image by crying wolf (or as they might say, crying poop).
- likpok 14y ago
  There are two aspects to this. One one hand, you're right that there's only so much racist vitriol that gets upvoted on reddit; and some amount of dark "humor" (have you read /r/imgoingtohellforthis? half the jokes are lolnigger). I got sidetracked in my comment, and meant to mention the sort of inevitable decay in this sense. People want to participate, so find stuff that isn't as applicable. The circlejerky nature of reddit means that this stuff gets upvotes and content starts to degrade. On the other hand, you can pretty easily demonstrate that jokes of this nature have actual serious harm. I recall a study that interviewed rapists about what they did; a substantial portion of them thought that rape was something that everyone did, and they just had the misfortune of getting caught. Those dark jokes reinforce that idea, when you awkwardly laugh at (or upvote) the guy who says "What's the difference between a large pizza and a black man?", you're reinforcing his (potential) belief that people really believe the racist nonsense. You can see similar trends in violence, where the effect is more measurable. Suicides and suicidal ideation increase substantially in media markets that cover a recent suicide (or spate thereof) [0]. So in a real sense these "innocent edgy" jokes have a real harm. [0]: Cialdini: Influence, the Psychology of Persuasion
woah 14y ago
Much of the criticism of SRS is because they game the discussion forum by coordinating posting and downvote rings. In some ways, they have a laudable mission, but the way they go about it is without logic or regard for the rules of reddit. For SRS, it's not really about enforcing the standards of political correctness that they claim to stand for. It's more of a game where they choose someone to hate and then do whatever they can within the technical constraints of reddit to make life hard for that poster. At one point, they were going after a guy who had posted a candid account of caring for his mentally disabled adult brother, because they felt he was being ableist. I went into the thread where they were coordinating the downvote ring, asked if he might not have some relevant real world experience, and was banned from SRS within minutes. I think for most of them, its more about having an excuse to game the reddit commenting infrastructure, than any sort of moral cause. The reddit administration can't ban SRS like they do other voting rings, because of the negative publicity that would result.

by likpok 14y ago

freehunter 14y ago

I would say a lot of the criticism comes from the fact that they commonly take quotes out of context, or take quotes meant as dark humor and use them to portray the poster as a horrible person. Combine that with their immature attitude and one-track mind and you're getting closer to understanding why even open-minded redditors don't support SRS. Sure, there's plenty of legitimate cases where reddit needs to be called out and have a community effort around fixing some of their problems. But no one takes SRS seriously because, for all the good they have the potential to do, they're publicly harming their own image by crying wolf (or as they might say, crying poop).

likpok 14y ago
There are two aspects to this. One one hand, you're right that there's only so much racist vitriol that gets upvoted on reddit; and some amount of dark "humor" (have you read /r/imgoingtohellforthis? half the jokes are lolnigger). I got sidetracked in my comment, and meant to mention the sort of inevitable decay in this sense. People want to participate, so find stuff that isn't as applicable. The circlejerky nature of reddit means that this stuff gets upvotes and content starts to degrade. On the other hand, you can pretty easily demonstrate that jokes of this nature have actual serious harm. I recall a study that interviewed rapists about what they did; a substantial portion of them thought that rape was something that everyone did, and they just had the misfortune of getting caught. Those dark jokes reinforce that idea, when you awkwardly laugh at (or upvote) the guy who says "What's the difference between a large pizza and a black man?", you're reinforcing his (potential) belief that people really believe the racist nonsense. You can see similar trends in violence, where the effect is more measurable. Suicides and suicidal ideation increase substantially in media markets that cover a recent suicide (or spate thereof) [0]. So in a real sense these "innocent edgy" jokes have a real harm. [0]: Cialdini: Influence, the Psychology of Persuasion

woah 14y ago

Much of the criticism of SRS is because they game the discussion forum by coordinating posting and downvote rings. In some ways, they have a laudable mission, but the way they go about it is without logic or regard for the rules of reddit. For SRS, it's not really about enforcing the standards of political correctness that they claim to stand for. It's more of a game where they choose someone to hate and then do whatever they can within the technical constraints of reddit to make life hard for that poster. At one point, they were going after a guy who had posted a candid account of caring for his mentally disabled adult brother, because they felt he was being ableist. I went into the thread where they were coordinating the downvote ring, asked if he might not have some relevant real world experience, and was banned from SRS within minutes. I think for most of them, its more about having an excuse to game the reddit commenting infrastructure, than any sort of moral cause. The reddit administration can't ban SRS like they do other voting rings, because of the negative publicity that would result.