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You applaud them on a PR strategy that is akin to dictatorships all over the world denouncing opposition as "terrorists" and criminals? The community is not a
by revelation 11y ago
You applaud them on a PR strategy that is akin to dictatorships all over the world denouncing opposition as "terrorists" and criminals?
The community is not a coherent block. To give the impression that the criticism stems from an organized group of people that applaud and tolerate death threats is the equivalent of binding it to a strawman and lighting it on fire with gasoline.
- oldmanjay 11y agoThe notion of group responsibility for individual actions is insidious, because it's too easy to mount a circular-logic based offense and also because it leads to humanity's favorite game, us v. them.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 11y agoHumans aren't really individuals, though they labor under the illusion of such. They're weak hiveminds. Individuals, if they exist at all, are rare and want nothing to do with the rest of you. When foreign hiveminds come into contact, one attempts to absorb the other, and failing that, to destroy the other. Memes are highly infectious, and so it's often important to police memes to make sure no foreign ones disrupt the hivemind's self. One or another hivemind sent off a few spurious signals, and a few highly excited human units acted on those. The hiveminds in question don't feel responsible because they didn't intend to send those signals (or want to pretend they didn't).
- oldmanjay 11y agoThat's fairly cynical, and I don't have that experience at all, and I do not agree with you, and I do not know of any evidence backing a single one of your statements.
- nhf 11y agoThis wasn't an accusation of group responsibility. In fact, they specifically state in their announcement that > Ellen asked me to point out that the sweeping majority of redditors didn’t do this, and many were incredibly supportive. Although the incredible power of the Internet is the amplification of voices, unfortunately sometimes those voices are hateful. Like any popular site, Reddit attracts everything from enlightened discussions to 4chan-level casual trolls (and worse). Pointing out the issues with threats and indicating that the community could be better without individuals who would publicly threaten the life of another person seems very reasonable to me.
- oldmanjay 11y agoI have no problem with the notion that those running reddit suffer from extreme cognitive dissonance over this issue. They've been acting in extremely odd ways for some time now. Actions like the banning of subreddits for the actions of a few bad actors belie the notion that this is how you and they describe it.
- CamperBob2 11y agoYou were modded down, but I don't know why. On what planet does it make sense to ban /r/fatpeoplehate while permitting /r/CoonTown? If you don't have a coherent content policy -- and no sane person could argue that Reddit does -- then you're better off with none at all.
- oldmanjay 11y agoI've been modded down rather interestingly in this thread. Clearly someone has a beef with my observations.
- mcphage 11y agoWhat? Clearly both should be banned, but banning one is much better than banning neither.
- CamperBob2 11y agoNo, it isn't. Given that there was no blatantly illegal content involved, there are only two possible reasons for not treating these two subreddits the same. Either the admins are a) clueless nitwits who don't know what's going on with their own site, or b) sympathetic to one but not the other. Which do you believe is the correct explanation? Can you see any other possibilities?
- mcphage 11y agoIf you're in my house, I'm going to hold you to a much higher standard than "not blatantly illegal". If you resent Reddit doing the same, well, the Internet isn't lacking for dank underbellies.
- techman9 11y agowut
- sharkweek 11y agoThe first rule of reddit is unsubscribing from all the default subs and searching for the ones most relevant to your interests. The day I discovered I could do that quickly made Reddit my favorite site on the web (/r/NFL, /r/homeimprovement, /r/television, etc). I'd love to see a discovery feature similar to that of Pinterest built into the signup process that algorithmically signs new users up for subreddits most related to their interests.
- justizin 11y agoAugh, seriously, I just followed a link from Google through Pinterest and they made me connect facebook and choose categories to read an actual link that I found in a search engine. I used Pinterest some in the early days, but I'll avoid like the plague, now. The worst part is all they did is intercept the search result for someone else's website and force me to give them all sort of marketing data they can sell in order to get it. Gross.
- Anjin 11y agoI hope you are subbed to /r/diy if you read /r/homeimprovement!
- haroldtootany 11y agoYou'd list 'television' as an interest? Yeesh...
- sharkweek 11y agoAbsolutely - television can be an art to enjoy, just like a great film, piece of music or painting. Sure there's plenty of trash, but the good stuff is so worth it.
- jessaustin 11y agoIt's kind of an odd question to ask someone whose nick is "sharkweek", isn't it?
- MBCook 11y ago
- dummy7953 11y agoWell, somebody frickin' wrote those threats. It did happen. And people who should have had the sense to see there were vile pighumpers in their midst did not moderate their nastiness.
- redthrowaway 11y ago>Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- danvayn 11y agothis comment and other comments you've posted make me believe that you're really ignorant. "I'm convinced that there is a highly vocal group (of young men, most likely) that are hell-bent on breaking Internet communities and even corporeal communities with their grotesqueries. And when they're challenged, they howl "but you're censoring my free speech!"" why do you think that internet communities need to be so heavily moderated?
- cma 11y agoFrom the "PR" that treats the community as "a coherent block": "Ellen asked me to point out that the sweeping majority of redditors didn’t do this, and many were incredibly supportive. Although the incredible power of the Internet is the amplification of voices, unfortunately sometimes those voices are hateful."
- comex 11y agoI don't think it gives the impression of organization at all. Rather the opposite: it gives the correct impression (unlike in the case of terrorists and criminals) that quite a large number of unconnected people were actively participating in attacks on Pao to some extent or other, rather than it being a smaller organized subgroup of the community, which frankly wouldn't be as bad.
- revelation 11y agoThere is always a large number of unconnected people participating in attacks. At any moment in time, there are paid chinese trolls appealing to unity and the party on topics from smog to foreign relations. Some of them, chance has it, are in active discussions with trolls from other governments. Simply put, you will find trolls and people writing death threats wherever you look. These people do not exactly discriminate.
- paulhodge 11y agoMost of the individuals that do death threats are doing it because they think that their peers would approve. The community effect is very powerful and sometimes the community deserves blame.
- TheOtherHobbes 11y agoAll of the individuals who do death threats are crazy. No matter how much you dislike someone, death threats are always the wrong side of the red line.
- spacehome 11y agoSpoken like someone who's never faced true evil.
- monksy 11y agoI don't think that the community at large supports those individuals who did those death threats.