> I don't think the net's changed that much. You can still find places to be pro racism and the like. Check out r/coontown for example. Yeah that's wholly disi

> I don't think the net's changed that much. You can still find places to be pro racism and the like. Check out r/coontown for example. Yeah that's wholly disinteresting to me. Firstly, because that is a trolling subreddit. If it was a serious racism subreddit it would be more interesting, because I could debate with people who actually feel that way and hear their arguments, instead of angsty 15 year olds posting unfunny images. I guess I shouldn't be arguing that fringe opinions are not available on the internet-- they are. What I should be arguing is that fringe opinions are much easier to ignore on the internet now. We've created a lot of information and ways to filter it, and now we can effectively ignore them. I think downvoting and upvoting and hiveminds are what really has killed meaningful discourse. That's why I like the 4chan model so much-- every post gets to take up space and can't be ignored. For an extra dose of tin-foil-hat, I think reddit could be doing some vote manipulation in the larger subreddits. No one has really challenged the fact that they stopped including upvotes and downvotes in their JSON as of a few years ago. Without them it's really difficult to collect information and do analysis on certain users and keywords that anything is happening. (That's a fun idea, reddit should stream metadata about what's going on in the site to interested people.)