How Reddit Became a Worse Black Hole of Violent Racism than Stormfront
March 10, 2015 2:28 PM   Subscribe

Have I ever expressed how much I appreciate the mods here?
posted by Golden Eternity at 2:32 PM on March 10 [156 favorites]

Heads up for readers, there are disturbing very explicit racist language/ideas quoted in full in this article.
posted by LobsterMitten at 2:33 PM on March 10 [6 favorites]

How Reddit Became a Worse Black Hole of Violent Racism than Stormfront

Lack of moderation. I'd like my cheque please, Gawker.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 2:33 PM on March 10 [9 favorites]

Is perhaps a Conde Nast boycott worthy of discussion at this point?
posted by jonp72 at 2:33 PM on March 10 [2 favorites]

Sometimes I wonder if I should even visit Reddit. I don't have an account, but I lurk some fascinating subreddits, like /unresolvedmysteries and /badhistory, where everybody has their head screwed on straight, and there are rules. And yet: this.
posted by Countess Elena at 2:33 PM on March 10 [16 favorites]

Could that maybe be on the front of the box, LobsterMitten?
posted by corb at 2:34 PM on March 10 [1 favorite]

Good on SPLC for giving this more exposure. I'm usually on the front page or r/programming, occasionally hit 'Random' and about one time out a hundred my jaw drops. It's vile, vile shit.
posted by benito.strauss at 2:36 PM on March 10 [7 favorites]

It's really weird how people complaining about "free speech on the internet" always seem to mean "freedom to display a level of mindblowing bigotry hitherto unknown amongst human beings".
posted by selfnoise at 2:36 PM on March 10 [27 favorites]

How Reddit Became a Worse Black Hole of Violent Racism than Stormfront

1. Anyone can create a new reddit.
2. The rules about allowed speech are very broad.

That's all it takes.
posted by smackfu at 2:36 PM on March 10 [21 favorites]

jonp72: I'd bet we probably couldn't even manage a week without a link to Reddit on MetaFilter. A boycott of Conde Nast as a whole sounds like pure fantasy.
posted by ODiV at 2:36 PM on March 10 [1 favorite]

This depresses the hell out of me, as I use reddit and find some of the site really useful.

Ugh, people suck.
posted by jeff-o-matic at 2:37 PM on March 10 [3 favorites]

They host GamerGate, for fucks sake, when not even 4chan will put up with those fuckers.
posted by Artw at 2:37 PM on March 10 [23 favorites]

Wow, yeah, sorry for not putting a NSFW language tag on this.
I think the article does a good job discussing a lot of awfulness, but it is actually all still pretty awful.
posted by lkc at 2:40 PM on March 10

although users are asked to "remember the human,"

REMEMBER THE HUMAN THEY PROVIDE UPSKIRT SHOTS
posted by benzenedream at 2:42 PM on March 10

Neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer advises readers to "recruit" on Reddit (archive.today copy of article)
posted by CarolynG at 2:44 PM on March 10 [1 favorite]

The reddiquette is pretty explicitly NOT the rules, which are very limited:

Don't spam.
Don't ask for votes or engage in vote manipulation.
Don't post personal information.
No child pornography or sexually suggestive content featuring minors.
Don't break the site or do anything that interferes with normal use of the site.

That's it.
posted by smackfu at 2:44 PM on March 10 [1 favorite]

That's all it takes.

It really isn't, though, and despite its title this article doesn't provide that much of the broader answer to the "how" question either. It's a matter of the dominant values of Reddit culture (that is, on the whole, allowing for the variation of subreddits) as it has evolved. Though it's often denied, it seems to me incontrovertible that there is, more or less, a Reddit culture and that it's a culture with an ingrained friendliness to many right-wing values (misogyny, homophobia, racism, class prejudice, anti-social/anti-tax politics, etc.), which friendliness is sometimes cloaked under the guise of a commitment to "free speech" and other times not. We've talked about this here before in the realm of gender politics.
posted by RogerB at 2:47 PM on March 10 [17 favorites]

Is perhaps a Conde Nast boycott worthy of discussion at this point?

No, Conde Nast doesn't own reddit. Advance Publications does; reddit and Conde Nast are siblings in terms of corporate structure.
posted by Jpfed at 2:49 PM on March 10 [3 favorites]

I find this to be a complicated subject. I think it may not be inherently morally wrong for companies to provide a forum for all kinds of legal speech, even abhorrent speech. Would people consider Reddit management's approach more acceptable if they removed ads from offensive subreddits? If not, is there anywhere on the internet where such offensive but legal speech could acceptably be hosted? Does Stormfront's hosting company have a moral obligation to shut the site down, or alternately, do they have a moral obligation to provide their customers with equal treatment and an equal platform regardless of their offensive viewpoints?
posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 2:49 PM on March 10 [10 favorites]

No child pornography or sexually suggestive content featuring minors.

Well that one comes with a huge wink, given how whiney and footdraggy they've been about removing up shots and other non-consensual photography which has absolutely included underage subjects.
posted by Artw at 2:50 PM on March 10 [8 favorites]

Meanwhile, Reddit CEO Ellen Pao took the stand the other day against her former employers in "Silicon Valley’s most high-profile gender discrimination suit in memory"
posted by Going To Maine at 2:51 PM on March 10 [2 favorites]

smackfu: Thanks, I appreciate it as sometimes I just ... would rather not read about extreme POVs online. The thing is a lot of the mods on Reddit are volunteers so their dedication (rapidly approaches zero) is limited. Even in the most mundane subreddits e.g., tea, fountain pens, stationery, ask science, and handwriting there are many posts inflected with this problem.

Personally, I felt a lot better as soon as I stopped visiting that place except for maybe like once a month or so for sales.
posted by chrono_rabbit at 2:56 PM on March 10

>...sexually suggestive content featuring minors.

Guess an entire subreddit devoted to close ups of the butts of girl's volleyball teams doesn't count.
posted by Catblack at 2:57 PM on March 10 [3 favorites]

If not, is there anywhere on the internet where such offensive but legal speech could acceptably be hosted?

I'm not a blanket supporter of the American vision of "free speech", but I don't have a problem with Stormfront or whatever having their own website and domain. You don't just wander onto Stormfront.com (or whatever it is, I honestly have no idea) without having some understanding of what you're getting into. Whereas with Reddit it is shockingly easy to go from a group about cute dog photos to a hate subreddit without realizing it, and the racist culture leaks into comments all over the place. Send those assholes to their own sites and not somewhere that calls itself "the front page of the internet".

There's actually a really interesting culture war happening on Reddit at the moment that has been brewing for years. The old user base -- generally teen and college white boys with a nerdy background and a conservative ethos -- is being pushed out in the wake of Reddit's expanding popularity with all demographics, and it's making them real testy. (See: Gamergate, "subreddit cancer")
posted by jess at 3:00 PM on March 10 [24 favorites]

Yeah. I don't mind if neo-nazis want to run a neo-nazi bookstore. It's their right. I don't want my local bookstore to have a section full of their recruitment material in the interest of free speech though.

I use Reddit because there are some subs there I find really useful and entertaining but I'm pretty upset they continue to allow this stuff. It adds nothing positive to the site.
posted by Drinky Die at 3:02 PM on March 10 [6 favorites]

It's not just racism, it's like everything bad. Misogyny, transphobia, weird PUA/redpill shit.

Basically anything hateful you can think of has a home there. And it all leaks out in to all the subreddits you see on the front page.

No child pornography or sexually suggestive content featuring minors.

Which is funny, because it isn't just that they drug their feet as mentioned above... it's STILL THERE, in private walled off invite only subs that there's no way they don't know about.

They don't care about what they did wrong, they just care about getting caught. All that matters is keeping the pageviews and usercount up and worshiping the almighty dollar.


I hate that on a lot of niche things, or nerdy techy things reddit is kind of the preeminent site and it's just where everyone goes... because i really just don't want to give them anything. But for worser or for worse, it's the biggest site now, and it's here to stay.

I'm really wondering what it'll take to make it change. First i thought it was the violentacrez thing, then i thought it was some other stuff, and now GG... just nothing seems to faze them or bring any real action down upon them for hosting stuff that literally organizes harassment, child pornography swapping, etc.

Read through this if you want a classic example of reddit being worse than 4chan.
posted by emptythought at 3:02 PM on March 10 [17 favorites]

and the racist culture leaks into comments all over the place

Is this a reddit thing, or an internet thing? Like, it seems like generally there sure are a lot of racists, and unless they are actively moderated away, they are everywhere.
posted by smackfu at 3:03 PM on March 10 [5 favorites]

Like, see any open comments form anywhere.
posted by smackfu at 3:03 PM on March 10 [5 favorites]

Their former CEO expressed the belief that the users bear responsibility for the racist and misogynist content on the site, and that they wanted to run the site to be as neutral as possible within the law. I don't think it's so much a question of highly valuing "free speech" as it is that reddit wants to be able to host a lot of content, getting a lot of users, without having to spend a lot of effort managing the community. As the article points out, banning a subreddit will just result in users making a new one and migrating there. The only solution is either shrinking the userbase or engaging in a large scale, expensive moderation effort, which isn't really an option for an unprofitable company.

You can compare reddit to Google, which will index everything it can reach in a content neutral way, or Usenet, which is a federated system that is not centrally controlled. But the difference with reddit is that they are a company that is actually hosting this content, not merely pointing to it like Google does, and they are attempting to profit off of it, unlike Usenet.

It's hard to justify patronizing a company that is hosting and monetizing this kind of content. I say this as someone who uses reddit.

The question I haven't been able to answer is whether it would be better if reddit (and other social media platforms like Twitter) were a federated, non-centrally managed service, like email. In that case, there wouldn't be a company that's actually profiting off of hate speech. But if the content is the same, what would the actual difference be?
posted by zixyer at 3:06 PM on March 10 [7 favorites]

It's a internet problem but I get the sense that Reddit attracts 99.99% more offensive people with the exception only being that other place which I won't name here.
posted by chrono_rabbit at 3:06 PM on March 10

It's well known that Reddit is some sort of wretched hive of scum and villainy, but that's the Internet as a whole. Reddit's less of a site, and more of a platform. It's like saying that tumblr and the like are porn sites.

It seems disingenuous to say that one of those SubReddits is in the top 2%, when the vast majority of SubReddits are somewhere between empty, derelict, and abandoned. If you created some criteria for "active" SubReddits, it'd probably be a lot lower.

Which is not to say that Reddit's great. It still has huge problems. But it's a platform as much as a website.
posted by explosion at 3:08 PM on March 10 [8 favorites]

Is this a reddit thing, or an internet thing

Both. Yes, the unmoderated internet has its share of people saying horrible things, but Reddit has actively fostered that culture over the years through both admins and users. It wasn't that long ago that even searching for "Reddit" in Google would turn up /r/jailbait as one of the six major subreddits, and the moderator of that subreddit was friends with admins. They even literally gave him an award for all of his moderating efforts! Hooray!
posted by jess at 3:08 PM on March 10 [8 favorites]

Yeah, their rallying around that guy blows all of the "neutral platform" arguments out if the water for me. This shit is a culture they actively encourage.
posted by Artw at 3:12 PM on March 10 [6 favorites]

Sorry, double post, but I also think there's a pretty big difference between hosting, say, comments on a news article that contains racist people, and having a whole section of your website dedicated to being "Negro Free".
posted by jess at 3:12 PM on March 10 [2 favorites]

You can compare reddit to Google, which will index everything it can reach in a content neutral way, or Usenet, which is a federated system that is not centrally controlled. But the difference with reddit is that they are a company that is actually hosting this content, not merely pointing to it like Google does, and they are attempting to profit off of it, unlike Usenet

See this is why I respect Google so much, because I've never gone to aYouTube video and been confronted by virulent hate-filled comments.

/mega-fucking-sarcasm
posted by cyphill at 3:13 PM on March 10

Also, I don't think I need to point this out, but the amount of disgusting hatred for others I see on every public location on the Internet (including this one) has really made me question the point of participating in any online discussion.
posted by cyphill at 3:17 PM on March 10 [2 favorites]

Luckily Reddit doesn't think the SPLC is a legitimate organization - they've come at Reddit before, and they respond like Fox News commenters: SPLC has a left-wing bias, etc etc etc. Even on the "intelligent discussion" subreddit with this article - one of the commenters says "I looked at the website for the Southern Poverty Law Center (splcenter.org) and I see no suggestion that they know anything about the Internet."
posted by windbox at 3:17 PM on March 10 [4 favorites]

Reddit is mainly made up of middle-class white dudes who weren't popular in high school, which is to say it is a factory for growing entitled shitbirds who think white guys are the REAL minority, racism is made up by POC to unjustly get into college, and women are all selfish whores who need to be kept in line with harassment and psychological manipulation.

That said, there are subreddits I like very much. But they tend to be completely apolitical, heavily moderated, and/or not very popular.

Also, I would suggest staying off /r/TwoXChromosomes these days. It has been made a "default", which means its posts show up on the front page without being specifically subscribed to the sub, which means the genpop of Reddit goes there to espouse their opinions about how one woman or the other was really asking for it and women who have babies didn't really want those careers anyway.
posted by schroedinger at 3:19 PM on March 10 [19 favorites]

"See this is why I respect Google so much, because I've never gone to aYouTube video and been confronted by virulent hate-filled comments. "

So I did a little experiment to test this out a bit. I searched for "Obama" in youtube, found the first speech listed (of his, not some random political ranter talking about stuff on youtube), then I read the comments.

Virulent hate-filled commets? Check. Racist comments? Check.

[not defending Reddit, but lets not pretend hate-filled racism has been cured by google's army of content monitors]
posted by el io at 3:20 PM on March 10 [3 favorites]

But it's a platform as much as a website.

Being both is kind of the problem. It's enough of a website that I don't buy the platform excuse. It's a good excuse for, "We can't catch everything," but not for, "We don't even try."
posted by Drinky Die at 3:21 PM on March 10

YouTube has a report button. Just making an effort instead of none is a big deal.
posted by Drinky Die at 3:21 PM on March 10 [3 favorites]

I've got an RSS subscription to /r/all, which is nice because it surfaces popular content from non-default subreddits you aren't subscribed too. The thing I've noticed recently is the growing popularity of overtly offensive content in this mix. These subs style themselves as edgy/funny/no-bullshit bastions that cater to the aggrieved majority at the expense of marginalized targets -- places like FatPeopleHate, TumblrInAction, and ImGoingToHellForThis, the last of which started out as a sort of alternative to TooSoon (which made jokes out of recent tragedies) bu which now posts openly racist stuff fairly often.

I feel like a lot of it is driven by clueless middle/high school and college kids, who want to rebel against The Man, which they perceive as the liberal/feminist/genderfluid/social justice crowd. It reminds me of recent studies that suggested the rising generation was destined to be more conservative as a reaction to the Obama presidency, just like my generation was more liberal in reaction to Bush.

Anyway, I think the answer, for those who feel up to it, is continued participation in Reddit as a whole to counteract all this bullshit. Like it or not, it has become the preeminent destination for discussion of virtually everything for a very wide swath of the web -- why abandon such a prominent platform to the bigots and haters? I think the site can be a valuable resource when moderated responsibly, not just by the subreddit owners but by the user base at large.
posted by Rhaomi at 3:21 PM on March 10 [13 favorites]

Lack of moderation.

Yes. But, we pretty rarely have these type of people even trying to show up here, so I think there's thankfully something in the site culture that discourages it. Just a thought.
posted by jonmc at 3:21 PM on March 10 [2 favorites]

>el io, i think you missed the part of cyphill's comment where they had the "/mega-fucking-sarcasm"
posted by DGStieber at 3:23 PM on March 10 [1 favorite]

DGSteiber: Doh!
posted by el io at 3:25 PM on March 10

Also, I've never used reddit. Not out of any animus, I just never felt the need to. What I've heard on mefi makes me glad for that fact.
posted by jonmc at 3:27 PM on March 10 [4 favorites]

It's well known that Reddit is some sort of wretched hive of scum and villainy, but that's the Internet as a whole. Reddit's less of a site, and more of a platform. It's like saying that tumblr and the like are porn sites.

And, much like Tumblr and Twitter, the user can customise their access to the platform in order to make it less bad. I've had a registered UN on reddit since before there were subreddits, and I've seen it's devolution pretty up close. I have a filter set up on specific subreddits and users, and the block-list is getting up towards 100 subs. It used to be an amazing place, and I'd still argue that their upvote/downvote system can be very useful for having large conversations, but reddit (as a populace, not a platform) is now totally unrecognizable compared to the place it used to be. I mean, Aaron Schwartz was involved in the early days of it. Colbert used to hang out there! And now, when I'm in class and I see another student hop on reddit, the things that fill their front page are totally alien to me. There's a large number of subreddits now that actively celebrate hate and bullying, and I don't even know what to do.

I'm sorry, this is a ramble, but watching reddit evolve (for me) has felt a lot like watching that smart kid you knew in high school gradually turn into the guy that stocks shelves at the grocery store who rants at you about racist conspiracy theories. I'm sure some non-english language has a good word for that particular sorrow that arises from watching a promising thing rot. I'd like to borrow that word, right now.
posted by DGStieber at 3:27 PM on March 10 [32 favorites]

I can argue both sides of Reddit's free speech stand. But I will say this about the site; I've been a regular participant in the past couple of years and this aggressive racist shit is entirely invisible to me. I regularly spend 30 minutes plus reading Reddit a day, including a bunch of very marginal subreddits like /r/WTF. Outright racism is seldom on display and usually when it is, immediately criticized and downvoted. I don't particularly like that Reddit helps host horrible racist people, but I do appreciate how they are mostly confined to a ghetto where they are invisible to me.

(There is a lot of passive racism on Reddit, but I take that as more of a reflection of American Internet culture in general than the specifics of Reddit. There's a lot of casual misogyny visible too, including on the subreddits I like to read, and that bothers me a lot.)
posted by Nelson at 3:29 PM on March 10 [7 favorites]

Look, you want the assholes where you can see them. Don't drive them underground. That way lies madness, and the Third Reich.
posted by gsh at 3:30 PM on March 10 [3 favorites]

Silicon Valley Free Speech Math

Let:

A be the amount of engagement your site gets right now.

B be the amount of engagement that your site gets from virulent bigots.

C be the amount of engagement that you are losing from other sources by letting virulent bigots hang around.



If A - B + C < A then protecting Free Speech is a Moral Imperative.
posted by ethansr at 3:30 PM on March 10 [17 favorites]

To me it seems weird to refer to reddit as a singular entity, except insofar as it is an actual company with employees, and in that the default homepage is incredibly popular.

It's a platform like newsgroups, IRC, chans, BBSes, and indeed the basic structure of the web, on which anyone can express themselves as long as they are not blatantly breaking the law, and even then it's often hard to enforce against, prevent, or even detect such behavior.

There are creative, interesting, and valuable communities on Reddit, and there are toxic, horrible, and illegal ones. I don't think of them as linked in any way except that they use a common platform, just as there are creative/interesting/valuable and toxic/horrible/illegal blogs on Wordpress or Tumblr.

That part isn't interesting to me. What makes it interesting is the demographics - that's what makes it a community if anything does. As others have pointed out, Reddit is largely populated by internet-savvy white men between 15 and 40. That demographic includes me, but that's not generally a group I try to cultivate acquaintance with in everyday life, and I understand that what bubbles up on Reddit is being selected by that demographic.

I don't know. It's an ugly world and Reddit just lets people upvote it.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 3:31 PM on March 10 [9 favorites]

I would also like to take this opportunity to give a shoutout to subreddits that don't suck:

/r/artisanvideos
/r/vintageobscura

and the sports reddits are really fun during the season. I only really know the college football one, but I've heard good things about the others.
posted by DGStieber at 3:33 PM on March 10 [1 favorite]

(See: Gamergate, "subreddit cancer")

Not sure how old "X Cancer" is, but my first association with it will always be 4chan and the idea that "X is the cancer killing /b/". So if that's the phrase that's coming in, I have suspicious about where it's been coming from...
posted by Going To Maine at 3:34 PM on March 10

I have suspicious about where it's been coming from...
Considering the point made just before that about how Gamergate was booted from 4chan and found a welcome home on Reddit...
posted by CrystalDave at 3:36 PM on March 10

>But I will say this about the site; I've been a regular participant in the past couple of years and this aggressive racist shit is entirely invisible to me

This has been my experience as well. It's like the internet: you will find whatever you want to find there. The gaming subreddits are great: due to their moderation policies, safeguards and upvote / downvote system they function a lot better than "official" forums - compare the quality of content between the Hearthstone subreddit and the one that Blizzard hosts, for example. The Blizzard one is regularly overrun by spammers. Reddit has become the de-facto "home" for a lot of communities due to just how well their moderation and curation policies work. Shadowbanning was a really amazing concept (to me) the first time I heard of it, as their solution to stopping spammers.
posted by xdvesper at 3:36 PM on March 10 [1 favorite]

AFAIK the people running Newsgroups never got together to award the creator if alt.photography.upshots a medal.
posted by Artw at 3:37 PM on March 10 [6 favorites]

The subreddits in the article is the least of Reddit's problems with racism. Trolls gonna troll.

The much larger problem is the casual racism that gets thrown around in some of the most popular reddits like /r/funny, /r/pics and /r/adviceanimals. And it has been getting worse over time.
posted by ymgve at 3:41 PM on March 10 [8 favorites]

due to their moderation policies, safeguards and upvote / downvote system they function a lot better than "official" forums

Ugh ugh ugh. Nothing against you but this is my pet peeve -- companies, gaming companies in particular, who refuse to host their own information and just post to some subreddit instead. It's a TERRIBLE option. Thanks to being the public home of Gamergate Reddit is absolutely an unsafe place for me, a lady who writes about gaming, to post, so when a game tries to route its customer support through Reddit (which is becoming more popular) it just means I can kiss goodbye to ever getting tech support or being a part of the community.
posted by jess at 3:43 PM on March 10 [33 favorites]

Is perhaps a Conde Nast boycott worthy of discussion at this point?

No, Conde Nast doesn't own reddit. Advance Publications does; reddit and Conde Nast are siblings in terms of corporate structure.

How is your answer "no" then? If you want AP to crack down on Reddit's management, it would make perfect sense to convince advertisers not to do business with, say, Vanity Fair or Vogue.
posted by mullacc at 3:43 PM on March 10

But in any case, even though I know there are s bunch of hobby sites I would enjoy in Reddit, I won't go there. As far as I'm concerned, going to any subreddit is supporting overall Reddit culture.

Yeah don't log in and downvote stuff and participate or anything, because that would be supportive. Just make sure to never ever go to a place and just talk about it while sitting in another place. I'll never understand that attitude. It's a good thing civil rights activists don't think that way.
posted by trackofalljades at 3:44 PM on March 10 [6 favorites]

But I will say this about the site; I've been a regular participant in the past couple of years and this aggressive racist shit is entirely invisible to me

Same here. Misogyny? That's a different story.

The Disqus comment system that's taking over just about every news comment section ever is actually far worse in my experience, and although they have a flagging system, I haven't ever seen it amount to any actual moderation.
posted by small_ruminant at 3:46 PM on March 10 [1 favorite]

Yeah don't log in and downvote stuff and participate or anything, because that would be supportive. Just make sure to never ever go to a place and just talk about it while sitting in another place. I'll never understand that attitude. It's a good thing civil rights activists don't think that way.

This works from the assumption that the place/structure/system in question is worth redeeming, rather than being razed and having its earth metaphorically salted.
posted by CrystalDave at 3:47 PM on March 10 [6 favorites]

If you're going to claim that reddit is completely useless, and not in fact an amazing resource for hundreds of thousands if not millions of perfectly sane and communicative people, well I'm not sure how to have a conversation because you're just making things up.

It's a massive ecosystem of forums, it's practically the modern usenet...it's not just one thing. Throwing a ton of babies out because you don't like the smell of the bathwater seems a little ridiculous to me. I like reddit. I like metafilter. They are very different things. Neither is valueless, neither is perfect.
posted by trackofalljades at 3:50 PM on March 10 [16 favorites]

If you want AP to crack down on Reddit's management, it would make perfect sense to convince advertisers not to do business with, say, Vanity Fair or Vogue.

If this strategy actually worked, you'd think GamerGate would have been at least a little more successful on that front.
posted by a manly man person who is male and masculine at 3:51 PM on March 10

If this strategy actually worked, you'd think GamerGate would have been at least a little more successful on that front.

I didn't say anything about it working. Just that the common ownership makes it logical.
posted by mullacc at 3:52 PM on March 10

Pretty simple solution if Reddit's management wants to stay freewheeling and discourage these guys:

make it a policy that ad revenue from racist subreddits be diverted to organizations helping the objects of each subreddit's hatred.
posted by ocschwar at 3:55 PM on March 10 [4 favorites]

I'm not saying it's useless, I'm saying it's not worth it.
If it's possible to separate the good from the bad, then why hasn't it been done, unless those with the ability don't want to?
If it isn't possible, then I'm sure the Internet will mourn for its lost cat photos, but will in time rebuild and hopefully learn from the matter.
tl;dr: Reddit delenda est
posted by CrystalDave at 3:55 PM on March 10 [1 favorite]

Reddit is a collection of a lot of communities united by a bunch of platform services. Some of them are detestable, and (as evidenced by the testimonials in this thread) many community members are shocked by that content.

I have to wonder if some of the harshest critics have actually logged in and customized their view at all, or if they just read the default subreddits or /r/all or something?

If I randomly flipped through basic cable channels, I would think television was a useless trough of the lowest common denominator of all human entertainment. If I set up my TV to skip most of those channels though, and tuned into ones with great stuff I'm interested in, that's a whole different experience.

Some content is curated for you, other content you have to curate yourself. Preferring one approach doesn't make the other approach irrelevant for the thousands and thousands of people who like it and don't mind culling a bit on their own.
posted by trackofalljades at 3:56 PM on March 10 [2 favorites]

I think the cable TV analogy would work if NBC owned literally every channel.
posted by a manly man person who is male and masculine at 3:59 PM on March 10 [7 favorites]

I would say it's absolutely possible to visit Reddit and even participate in the community and never get exposed to the gross weird shit, but that doesn't mean you're not passively supporting the gross weird shit by doing so.
posted by Artw at 3:59 PM on March 10 [33 favorites]

Heads up for readers, there are disturbing very explicit racist language/ideas quoted in full in this article.

Considering politicians, particularly those in the Tea Party and the "new" Republicans among other groups say the most deplorable things seemingly daily, I'm not surprised it's very common. It's infinitely depressing to hear about the Oklahoma fraternity or asshats talk about "legal" rape but the States is openly very nasty right now. Fuck you seems to be a celebrated principal. You have full networks pumping out anti-women, racist, and anti-poor of any race propaganda and people take them seriously. It's unfathomnably horrible. Has it always been thus but just more noticeable?

This depresses the hell out of me, as I use reddit and find some of the site really useful.

I've heard of it only through MetaFilter but some of my friends who are also on MetaFilter have said that parts of it offer a level of conversation that's even better then Metafilter in recent years. Giving up on the parts that are good sort of lets the asshats win but like many, it's so fucking tiring that myself and many others just want to give up. This kind of shit is so widespread that, like the clothes on our back, the electronics we use (from tax evading fuck the country we grew up in companies) we can't turn anywhere without a casual endoresement of exploitation and bullshit save getting out of the society we live in.

There's actually a really interesting culture war happening on Reddit at the moment that has been brewing for years. The old user base -- generally teen and college white boys with a nerdy background and a conservative ethos -- is being pushed out in the wake of Reddit's expanding popularity with all demographics, and it's making them real testy.

Let's hope that the culture "war" is not a war but a gradual (not because it should be gradual but because such things usually are by nature) shift away from nonsense.

I'm sorry, this is a ramble, but watching reddit evolve (for me) has felt a lot like watching that smart kid you knew in high school gradually turn into the guy that stocks shelves at the grocery store who rants at you about racist conspiracy theories.

And then hope is lost again.

But I will say this about the site; I've been a regular participant in the past couple of years and this aggressive racist shit is entirely invisible to me.

And then hope returns. I'll really have to check the site out sometime.

The principal of free speech or equal voices is a great one but it's been distorted and simplified to not be about conversation or communication but rather, let's let bigoted insane people who will not be at all reasonable participate in our discussion about infrastructure or politics or science or what have you. The voices of the super rich and the super ignorant are not being countered enough because the principal of coming to agreement or perspective or understanding is not valued anymore by so many and of course, you can't have an adult conversation with someone who absolutely refuses to converse with you honestly and reasonably. There's a reason there are hate speech laws in other countries.

If one of the central principals of a free and open society is equality then hate speech clearly violates that principal. It's not an easy thing to police (and who trusts the law these days?) but the selective devotion to the principals the States is supposedly founded upon is to say the least, annoying.
posted by juiceCake at 4:03 PM on March 10 [1 favorite]

Yeah the game subreddits are pretty good - r/civ has been doing this amazing thing in the past few weeks with the so-called 'AI-only' games, and r/banished has been nothing but decent.

Default subreddits are awful. The default front page is awful. The site admins could do something about that but they don't. I feel the same way about reddit that I do about twitter and facebook (and metafilter!): cautious engagement is the best approach.
posted by um at 4:03 PM on March 10

I mean sure, if you use adblock, there aren't many ads on the internet. Basically your argument is: sure there is a ton of shit on reddit, but if you filter it all out, there isn't shit there.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 4:04 PM on March 10 [9 favorites]

Reddit is much closer to Usenet. Technically nobody owns Usenet, but you need to pay your ISP or a news server to access it. That server can ban newsgroups en masse, but it's not really what they're being paid to do.
posted by BungaDunga at 4:04 PM on March 10

Some of them are detestable, and (as evidenced by the testimonials in this thread) many community members are shocked by that content.

Yeah, but they're still community members.

I get not wanting to give up your favorite subs. I used to have a "not even once" Reddit policy, then spent a couple of months there and got really attached to some subs (all pretty benign lifestyle stuff). But every single one of them was, at some point, either subjected to a sudden attack of misogyny/racism/fathate/horribleness, or just started slumping into those things as the general standards of the sub slowly fell apart under (I think) good-faith participants who were comfortable with casual misogyny, victim-blaming, mansplaining (not a word I like but I have no other for what I saw), and then probably also bad-faith participants who managed to pass for a while as they brought the tone down, just for fun.

And then I decided, you know what, yeah. And now I'm back to "not even once" and I'm about to stop donating money to organizations that actively pursue Reddit community participation (including one organization my husband gets paying work from and I want very much to support) because, you know, there are places to foster community that are not racist woman-hating shitholes.
posted by Lyn Never at 4:06 PM on March 10 [10 favorites]

It's worth mentioning that a lot of great Metafilter threads are pretty obviously inspired by recent Reddit posts.

Given an option I usually prefer to see any particular discussion here due to the sustained conversation and moderation, but that's certainly not always the case. Despite looking for years I've found nothing that replaces the better aspects of reddit.
posted by tychotesla at 4:06 PM on March 10 [2 favorites]

I've never felt the need to filter Reddit. The default subs are... not great, but they're not /r/watchpeopledie or any of the virulently racist subreddits, or anywhere close.

You have to go looking if you want to see something really awful. You also have to go looking if you want to see something awesome, but you won't see most of the nastiness the article talks about.
posted by BungaDunga at 4:07 PM on March 10

I've never felt the need to filter Reddit. The default subs are... not great, but they're not /r/watchpeopledie or any of the virulently racist subreddits, or anywhere close.

You only need to read /r/shitredditsays for about 10 minutes to realize this isn't true. almost all the super bad stuff actually happens right out in the open. in /r/videos, /askreddit, etc.
posted by emptythought at 4:09 PM on March 10 [12 favorites]

Meanwhile, Reddit CEO Ellen Pao took the stand

She went into venture capital, a wretched hive of scum and villainy, on purpose. She's a millionaire many times over. She has three Ivy League degrees, two of them from Harvard, one of the most corrupt and corrupting institutions on the planet. What makes you think she cares about racism or sexism that doesn't impact her life directly? She's firmly a part of the "elite" class. She and her descendants will be rich and powerful, forever. Concerns like this are for the plebs.
posted by 1adam12 at 4:10 PM on March 10 [1 favorite]

Throwing a ton of babies out because you don't like the smell of the bathwater seems a little ridiculous to me.

One could also stop bathing the babies in unflushed toilets and take them to a clean bathroom instead.
posted by Celsius1414 at 4:10 PM on March 10 [16 favorites]

My advice: If you gotta go in there go in there with your shields up and do not open hailing frequencies.
posted by Renoroc at 4:11 PM on March 10 [2 favorites]

What makes you think she cares about racism or sexism that doesn't impact her life directly?

What a shitty thing to say.
posted by a manly man person who is male and masculine at 4:12 PM on March 10 [2 favorites]

Using reddit is like staying at a hotel that lets the KKK book group reservations.
posted by mullacc at 4:12 PM on March 10 [2 favorites]

"Yes. But, we pretty rarely have these type of people even trying to show up here, so I think there's thankfully something in the site culture that discourages it. Just a thought.
posted by jonmc at 6:21 PM on March 10 [+] [!]"

I think the $5.00 entry fee has a lot to do with this.
posted by disclaimer at 4:13 PM on March 10 [5 favorites]

Arguments that "it's a platform" and "it's just the internet" kind of fall flat on their face once you start looking at or thinking about it. Reddit positions itself as being the New Usenet, but it's still a single website, and it does have a sitewide culture that leaks into every other subreddit. Even "safe," moderated subreddits aren't, really, because every post you make makes you more visible to stalkers/harassers/bigots.

Then there's the sitewide admins/mods. I really half believe (or maybe 75% believe) that if Reddit continues to be a major Thing, it's only a matter of time before we find out that (at least) one of the sitewide admins has donated to a white supremacist org, written for a white supremacist magazine, or something. The way they handle issues concerning race, or any kind of bigotry, stalking/harassing, etc., leaves a lot to be desired and honestly often reads as support of bigotry. This is a team that considered ViolentAcrez a helpful mod assistant, but threatens to bring the banhammer down when trans people downvote transphobic garbage too much. The rules lawyer/naive libertarian way they approach anything "controversial" is, I think, probably just an "ethics in games journalism" way of deflecting noncommittal criticism; no one can be as blind to context as Reddit's staff have been. It's standard enough for corporations and media outlets to be as cowardly and lazy as possible on many issues, but Reddit has been so weirdly foot-draggy on things that anyone else would rush to absolve themselves of, like non-consensual upskirt photos of minors.

I lurk on Reddit and have/would defend it from the silly site rivalry that crops up over here from time to time, but it's very frustrating to me that it's pretty much the default platform for forums right now. Because there's a lot of wonderful stuff once you move away from the defaults, but as a site it's super ugly, and there's no reliable way to wall yourself off from the ugliness beyond just not engaging even in places you like.
posted by byanyothername at 4:13 PM on March 10 [18 favorites]

I've also seen this weird thing happen on mefi several times now. Why are so many people invested in saying "i don't see it?"

It's perfectly fine to just say "yea, it's a shithole and i know it but i use it anyways". I'd honestly think a lot more highly of people if they just admitted they didn't care rather than pretended it didn't exist. I use the site, and i know it's a fucking shithole. I used 4chan for years too.

The fact of the matter is that they could kick all this stuff out overnight if they wanted to, or in a couple weeks at most. But they don't, because it makes them money having all these users shitposting.

I guarantee they'll soon graduate from "we're hands off" to "It's too large of a problem to surmount we can't watch everywhere all the time" when actually, yea they could at least on the default subreddits, and it's kind of their responsibility.

They're like school admins saying they take a hands off approach to bullying because it builds character. Meanwhile, people on here are saying no one in chess club is getting beat up even when it's happening right outside the windows on the playground.

C'mon people, really?
posted by emptythought at 4:14 PM on March 10 [27 favorites]

Some content is curated for you, other content you have to curate yourself. Preferring one approach doesn't make the other approach irrelevant for the thousands and thousands of people who like it and don't mind culling a bit on their own.

As I've said before, just because you don't see the septic tank doesn't mean that it's not leaking sewage all over the neighborhood. Self-curation is not the answer.
posted by NoxAeternum at 4:15 PM on March 10 [5 favorites]

but threatens to bring the banhammer down when trans people downvote transphobic garbage too much.

also sitewide shadowbanning black women for being mad about racism.
posted by emptythought at 4:16 PM on March 10 [11 favorites]

I would say it's absolutely possible to visit Reddit and even participate in the community and never get exposed to the gross weird shit, but that doesn't mean you're not passively supporting the gross weird shit by doing so.

This is how I feel as an immigrant about living in the United States.
posted by srboisvert at 4:16 PM on March 10 [3 favorites]

You only need to read /r/shitredditsays for about 10 minutes to realize this isn't true. almost all the super bad stuff actually happens right out in the open. in /r/videos, /askreddit, etc.

The only reason to visit SRS is to actively search out the offensive material, and then even when it isn't that bad to circlejerk without argument about how bad it is. It's a toxic reaction to the toxicity itself.
posted by Drinky Die at 4:16 PM on March 10 [1 favorite]

If this strategy actually worked, you'd think GamerGate would have been at least a little more successful on that front.

To be fair, GamerGate did get some advertisers to pull ads, the problem was that GamerGate did not pass muster once these advertisers actually looked at who they were listening to. Presumably company that would pull ads from a client this large due to questionable content would not discover that those requests were coming from a crypto-hate campaign.
posted by GameDesignerBen at 4:16 PM on March 10

Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out.
posted by charlie don't surf at 4:17 PM on March 10 [1 favorite]

But even in Ye Olden Days of Metafilter, when there was no $5 fee and much less moderation, the site culture was -- not as gentle as it is now, and more of a boyzone than it is now, but nowhere near as bad as reddit. I remember the days of "I'd hit that"! -- but STILL, nowhere near as bad as reddit. I think it's heavily dependent on culture reproducing itself, and the web people and bloggers who were Metafilter's first users were mature-ish... but I have no idea what reddit's early user group was like, so I don't have much of a point to use for comparison.
posted by Jeanne at 4:17 PM on March 10 [1 favorite]

I used to be really active on Reddit, and the reason I left was that I was tired of seeing rampant misogyny and racism everywhere I went.

It was kind of a joke: tired of Reddit's awfulness, someone created /r/TrueReddit, a place for smart, interesting discussions based on following the rules of etiquette that everyone on the site was supposed to have been following all along. The idea being that this would be the mature part of the site. Of course, that fell apart when it became very obvious that no one cared about the "rules," and that any post about race would be filled with "blacks are the real racists!" comments, or worse. So some dedicated readers split off and went to /r/TrueTrueReddit. Sadly, /r/TrueTrueReddit started getting its share of awfulness, and I don't even know what state it's in today.

So sure, maybe the problem isn't the site itself; maybe it's just that no one has made /r/TrueTrueTrueReddit yet?
posted by teponaztli at 4:18 PM on March 10 [5 favorites]

Sure, this buffet has a bin labelled "MysteryGravy" that is actually raw sewage, and sure, now that we're talking about it, so are some of the other bins. And yes, sometimes you go to get Shepherd's Pie only to find out while you're eating it that they made it with the raw sewage as well. And yes, the owners suggest everybody take some MysteryGravy as a default option and really seem to insist on having it there in the buffet, but you can choose to skip that with enough effort. And okay, people aren't all that careful about serving the MysteryGravy and it sometimes spatters onto other dishes. And to be fair, sometimes a bunch of MysteryGravy fans pour a bunch of it deliberately on one of the other dishes, because they want everyone to eat it.

But what I'm saying is that the green beans and the mac and cheese are both delicious, and if you carefully choose only those two items and avoid any accidental or intentionally spattered sewage, I think you'll concur with me that it is an excellent buffet restaurant, worth every penny.
posted by Homeboy Trouble at 4:18 PM on March 10 [43 favorites]

> So maybe the problem isn't the site itself, maybe it's just that no one has made /r/TrueTrueTrueReddit yet?

There's a joke about PHP in there, but everyone who'd get it has already thought of it themselves.
posted by benito.strauss at 4:22 PM on March 10 [6 favorites]

If not, is there anywhere on the internet where such offensive but legal speech could acceptably be hosted? Does Stormfront's hosting company have a moral obligation to shut the site down, or alternately, do they have a moral obligation to provide their customers with equal treatment and an equal platform regardless of their offensive viewpoints?

They absolutely do not have a moral obligation to treat their customers equally, and are complicit in promoting Stormfront's message of hate and violence, which calls for the extermination of entire races of people.

"Freedom of Speech" is a gratuitously misused phrase. While it generally describes the concept that a government should not be empowered to curtail the freedom of expression of its citizens, there's no clean or logical way to extend that concept to private affairs. Private citizens are very much empowered to use their discretion when deciding who they want to listen to, put up with, or do business with. Implying otherwise would be ridiculous.

Furthermore, private citizens and entities have an obligation to act responsibly and ethically. While the 1st Amendment provides a convenient legal cover for Stromfront and their webhosts (and I seriously question whether it actually does), the webhost is absolutely not upholding any sort of moral virtue by facilitating literal Nazis.

Freedom of Speech does not exist to allow political extremism to flourish unopposed. It exists for precisely the opposite reason -- so that reasonable majorities can speak up against extreme factions without fear of repercussion. The actions of Stormfront's webhost are reprehensible and immoral, and it is not even remotely hypocritical for us to decry them for it.

Also, Fuck Reddit.
posted by schmod at 4:23 PM on March 10 [5 favorites]

The only reason to visit SRS is to actively search out the offensive material, and then even when it isn't that bad to circlejerk without argument about how bad it is. It's a toxic reaction to the toxicity itself.

I think the point of that post was for those who are like "it's invisible! It isn't really around!" to understand that it's in the popular places on reddit, and here's an easy way for you to see it.
posted by cashman at 4:24 PM on March 10 [12 favorites]

It's a toxic reaction to the toxicity itself.

I don't know if i buy this. It's pretty much the only place on the site you can talk about it without getting massively sealioned and told "but that isn't what i meant, you're so oversensitive" even about jawdroppingly terrible shit.

It also, in my experience, doesn't even manage to catalog a third of even what shows up on the main default subs, or even just the front page on a given day. I mean yea, you're seeking out what's terrible that day by going there, but i think it's pretty useful as a response to someone saying "i go on the main subs/front page and never see anything terrible really!" because it's right there and pretty often it's even the top comment in that thread.
posted by emptythought at 4:24 PM on March 10 [9 favorites]

For what it is worth: as a woman, I have never used Reddit. I have never even approached Reddit or tried to find a subcommunity I wanted to be part of or tried to have a conversation there. I do not have an account. I don't follow links to the site. Effectively, I spend most of my time pretending it doesn't exist, which is not so difficult.

That's because in my mind, the site community is pretty inextricable with the things I hear about it, over and over again: creepshots. GamerGate. Jailbait. Racism, sexism, general stuff like that. I'm sure that better reddit communities exist within the sitewide culture, but I have less than zero interest in investing in any community hosted there right now. I am a person that the Reddit discussion has scared off. And I am not the only person I know, either. I do not want to participate in a place where I might come to the attention of those scumbags. I do not want to give the site that harbors them any money from my pageviews. But mostly, I don't feel safe there.

The site has, at the very least, a massive PR problem. Massive. Because I know lots of people like me, particularly women like me, and they either steer clear of Reddit for the same kinds of reasons I do (those I've discussed the site with), or they're really pretty cautious about mentioning Reddit use around me, which is impressive given that I don't think I've ever explicitly said "I don't feel safe there, even on subreddits, I have no faith in the site staff" to anyone who wasn't already going "well, Reddit." They are driving away many, many people by hosting this shit. And they are attracting the sort of people who enjoy it.

And the thing is, from my perspective--as someone who is not a Reddit user, granted--but my perspective is that they don't care about this or view it as a PR problem. And you know, that's fine. But it's certainly another tally in the "nope, not safe there" ledger in the back of my mind.
posted by sciatrix at 4:25 PM on March 10 [34 favorites]

Hmm, I only ever see racism in /r/darknetmarkets ("Black people deal drugs") and /r/conspiracy ("Jews run the world.") If I didn't subscribe to those subreddits, I don't think I would see any. I would have guessed that cryptic misogyny is much more pervasive on reddit as a whole. But I basically never see the regular front page of reddit so my view might be skewed.

Generally I love that reddit has many forums with different levels of moderation so I can hear a broad range of views, even if sometimes I find those views appalling. It's like drinking at a talkative bar.
posted by fivebells at 4:29 PM on March 10

According to r/shitredditsays, what are the 'good' subreddits, i.e. which subreddits have never had something appear on srs?
posted by um at 4:30 PM on March 10

Even with my very occasional visits to reddit when linked there for AMAs or cute kitten links, or when it was the only available place to see customer support responses on a game, there's been plenty of racism and sexism. Shockingly so. So I am side-eying anyone who chirps about how you'll only find it on the site if you are looking for it, so it's your fault. I suspect some people are working very hard to not see it.
posted by tavella at 4:31 PM on March 10 [9 favorites]

>sure there is a ton of shit on reddit, but if you filter it all out, there isn't shit there.

I aggressively use the filters in the reddit enhancement suite, so for a typical /r/all page load, I see maybe 10 out of 100 posts. (And I feel this is the only way to use the site.) Still if I click on new or rising, I tend to see new inane (and sometimes racist) subreddits pop up there. But RES makes it easy to add subreddits to the filter. But what it needs, as Gibson wrote in Neuromancer, is a shared killfile.
posted by Catblack at 4:31 PM on March 10

I don't think the publicity issue is going to be an issue for them as long as they're happy to get many clicks from people looking for upskirt shots or stolen sexytime pics from female celebrities and maybe the personal information of the subjects of that. Because at least historically, the rules against doxxing only count if you're doxxing guys on reddit, and mmmmmmaybe a female-identified redditor but I wouldn't count on it.

I would like reddit to be useful, but frankly there's enough bad shit there that it's enough to keep me from doing more than occasionally following reddit links and never ever posting.

Fuck those guys.
posted by rmd1023 at 4:32 PM on March 10

So, Reddit is an awesome place for talking about Kerbals and other niche interests, as long as you don't go all SJW and start having discourse on gender and discrimination?

Jesus. I'm glad I filed it under 'ravening id of the internet'.
posted by mikurski at 4:33 PM on March 10 [6 favorites]

Catblack - if reddit started supporting some kind of crowdsourced shared killfile (sort of like what Randi Harper did with her ggblocker for twitter), I might be a bit more interested in it.
posted by rmd1023 at 4:33 PM on March 10 [3 favorites]

> It's like drinking at a talkative bar.

I do use reddit, so I'm not coming from any position of purity. I've heard the "place for lively exchange of ideas" trope before, and I'm okay with that, if you'll agree that there's a Klan meeting going on in the pool room in the back.
posted by benito.strauss at 4:35 PM on March 10 [9 favorites]

I've also seen this weird thing happen on mefi several times now. Why are so many people invested in saying "i don't see it?"

I think the point there is that Reddit is a gigantic and diverse community, which has the ability to self-segregate.

It's somewhat analogous to Usenet, which had a well-earned reputation for being a complete shithole. However, if you spent most of your time on Usenet discussing 18th-Century Literature, you probably had a much different opinion of the network.
posted by schmod at 4:37 PM on March 10 [2 favorites]

You don't just wander onto Stormfront.com

Stormfront.com just says 'future site of' but Stormfront.co.uk have branches all over the UK and sell apple products, its the .org you want to stay away from but this makes me think wandering in wouldn't be that difficult.
posted by biffa at 4:38 PM on March 10

Though it's often denied, it seems to me incontrovertible that there is, more or less, a Reddit culture and that it's a culture with an ingrained friendliness to many right-wing values (misogyny, homophobia, racism, class prejudice, anti-social/anti-tax politics, etc.), which friendliness is sometimes cloaked under the guise of a commitment to "free speech" and other times not.

This is the Reddit culture now because there's a critical mass of MRAs and RedPillheads - Reddit hosts some of the central communities for that stuff - and white supremacists on top of the techie/college Libertarian leaning that was always there and permeates the Internet. While it's true plenty of smaller subreddits are perfectly usable, there's nothing stopping those guys from using them like anyone else - in subs that cater to niche interests this tends to be invisible until someone mentions, say, feminism. Or sometimes you'll notice a user who seems like a bit of a crank and go to their user page and find out that they're a real crank.

How it got that way is the real question. I think the policy of no central moderation originally came from a pretty genuine place but over time the interaction between the user base and internal politics and money has taken the site to the point where hosting "creepshots" is actually a pillar of its business model.

Also SRS is fun and an example of troll tactics used for a good cause.
posted by atoxyl at 4:39 PM on March 10 [11 favorites]

> "The site has, at the very least, a massive PR problem. Massive. Because I know lots of people like me, particularly women like me, and they either steer clear of Reddit for the same kinds of reasons I do (those I've discussed the site with), or they're really pretty cautious about mentioning Reddit use around me, which is impressive given that I don't think I've ever explicitly said "I don't feel safe there, even on subreddits, I have no faith in the site staff" to anyone who wasn't already going "well, Reddit." They are driving away many, many people by hosting this shit. And they are attracting the sort of people who enjoy it. "

I think you might just hang out with people who are thoughtful and aware. I know many (cishetero white men) people who talk about reddit all the time, even to the point that they'll say things like "i got banned from /r/feminism today" in a casual conversation as though it is not a thing to be ashamed or cautious about talking about. I am doing graduate studies, so I am around a lot of people who are the right age to have taken in a lot of reddit when they were just developing critical thinking skills, and to them, reddit is a fun, cool, respectable place, and "the SJW's" are a real enemy/threat. Even if they recognize that there are extreme elements on the site, simply seeing that shit presented alongside valuable posts for years, without differentiation, has changed their intuitions about things. The shitty people are being attracted to reddit, but reddit is also growing its own shitpeople.
posted by DGStieber at 4:41 PM on March 10 [23 favorites]

How to use reddit:
- create an account
- unsubscribe from all default subreddits. Never think about them again.
- subscribe to subreddits on gardening, programming and any other subreddit that is moderated and does not appeal overly much to young or stupid people.
- Enjoy reddit. Upvote great posts and great comments.
- If, at any time, a subreddit starts getting too many annoying/crappy/stupid posts or comments then unsubscribe and never think about it again.

All sites degrade over time. I used to read slashdot. I no longer do because the quality and comments degraded past the point where it was worthwhile. Eventually, metafilter will degrade. I don't know how long it will take, but eventually it will degrade. Such is life.

At reddit things are different. When quality degrades in a subreddit I don't leave reddit as a whole, I just unsubscribe from that one subreddit. That's the beauty of the site. It is whatever you want it to be. You only see hate if you put up with hate by reading subreddits filled with hate. It probably helps that I do not subscribe to any current events subreddits.

The primary purpose of the default subreddits is to be a craphole where lazy bastards who don't customize their experience can stay so that they don't pollute the good subreddits. All you'll find there is pure unadulterated standard humanity.
posted by HappyEngineer at 4:42 PM on March 10 [5 favorites]

Also SRS is fun and an example of troll tactics used for a good cause.

Hah, you should see /r/againstmensrights.
posted by fivebells at 4:43 PM on March 10 [2 favorites]

According to r/shitredditsays, what are the 'good' subreddits, i.e. which subreddits have never had something appear on srs?

Most of the city or college specific ones are fine, or have only shown up once or twice. i think the chicago and st louis ones can be bad? There's very rarely or never anything from stuff like the iphone or android subreddits, most tech related stuff that isn't like /r/technology, most of the music and art ones.

Anything related to gaming is generally fucked though, until you get as far down as like /r/buildapc or the emulation/emulators ones.

Another thing of note is that if you're bored enough, and start clicking through to the profiles of prolific posters on some of those subs... you'll realize that they're shitposting or just posting scary stuff elsewhere on the site pretty often. They just don't shitpost in the niche interest subs.

it's kind of a weird feeling once you realize that you're surrounded by assholes even when they're not assholing. It reminds me of how i felt being the only teenager dressed up all hipstery in skinny jeans with long hair at a demolition derby and figure 8 race.

I've also gotten comment replies when i was just talking about technical/hobby shit that were like "OMG U POST IN SRS U R A HUGE BITCH F****T" or whatever, and tons of disgusting PMs to that effect. In the "good" subs.

People definitely stalk around the site, and if you don't toe the party line, you will get attacked even if you're only posting about boring normal hobby shit or in some obscure music or photography or urbex sub or whatever.

Sometimes the raw sewage will come find you, even if you haven't interacted with it. Just by association of being on the "wrong team".

If reddit was a physical place offline, it would feel like a frat boy bar where i was always afraid that i was going to get my ass kicked or my friends drink was going to get roofied.
posted by emptythought at 4:43 PM on March 10 [24 favorites]

I think a more interesting question is how it compares to other modern social media/community websites. Is there a similar virulent racist community on tumblr? That site has similar self-segregation into different communities. If so, how has the site handled it? I assume with yahoo now at the helm and trying to disown the adult content portions of tumblr, they'd frown on racist snuff videos. How about when it was independent? Anyone know?

Livejournal is also a good analog for reddit, since they're both strongly organized around discrete communities with volunteer moderation, unlike tumblr and twitter. As far as I know, livejournal never attracted this kind of garbage, although it had it's fair share of awful nonsense.

Like someone mentioned above, a big part of the issue is the founding communities: for livejournal the founding communities were early bloggers and other old web types, and fandom. For reddit, the founding communities were young, tech-oriented men and teens.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 4:48 PM on March 10

Most of the city or college specific ones are fine

Definately not r/philadelphia
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 4:57 PM on March 10

At reddit things are different. When quality degrades in a subreddit I don't leave reddit as a whole, I just unsubscribe from that one subreddit. That's the beauty of the site. It is whatever you want it to be. You only see hate if you put up with hate by reading subreddits filled with hate. It probably helps that I do not subscribe to any current events subreddits.

I agree with you that it's possible to have a pretty good experience Reddit if you use it in a limited way. And I lean - slightly - toward thinking the best way to try to change Reddit would be to a.) use it in a constructive way and b.) demand change.

On the other hand I absolutely think it's skeezy for a supposedly mainstream commercial web site to host Stormfront-level stuff. I think Stormfront has a right to be on the Internet but that's their domain, their server, their community, everybody knows what they're about. If Reddit wants to profit from having the White Power people around then damn right they're gonna have to take the heat for it. And even if they decided to crack down on explicit hate the MRA types are very practiced in stepping right up to the line so I have a hard time imagining they'd ever really be kicked off.

Basically some days I think it would be possible for a more diverse community to take over Reddit and reshape it and some days I think the best case is that you have parity between SRS and RedPill and they just downvote each other back and forth for eternity.
posted by atoxyl at 4:59 PM on March 10 [2 favorites]

I think Reddit is guilty of policies that have tended to feed the beast instead of working to build and support communities.
posted by humanfont at 5:00 PM on March 10 [1 favorite]

what are the 'good' subreddits

Rather unsurprisingly, the ones that are very strictly moderated. A good example is /r/askhistorians, where the mods are absolutely ruthless in deleting anything that is unsourced, derail-y, or assholish. It can be somewhat dry and humorless, but the sticking to "just the facts" means that the chances anything shitty comes up are almost nil. Of course, a lot of people and mods do have a humorous side, for which they head over to /r/badhistory. That sub also tracks the kind of racist/sexist/etc stuff people use elsewhere on their site (for example, anti-feminist nonsense so loved by MRAs, Red Pillers, gators, etc).
posted by zombieflanders at 5:01 PM on March 10 [2 favorites]

How to use reddit:

-close the tab. Jesus Christ. People kept telling you this would be worthwhile. You're putting in all this effort to hide the jokes about starving Africans and hypocritical college feminists just so you can hopefully read someone saying a thing about transistor radios that if it's actually interesting will be linked on Buzzfeed next week anyway and in the meantime you're contributing page views and traffic and legitimacy to a site which gleefully makes money off of the degredation of women, which overwhelmingly thinks the narrative of Ferguson, MO was one in which the media incited riots. Why are you doing this. Close the tab.
posted by shakespeherian at 5:03 PM on March 10 [46 favorites]

I've never seen racism or sexism on Reddit.

Also, I only go to /r/kittensgame.
posted by el io at 5:06 PM on March 10 [5 favorites]

I'm a moderator on an active, academically oriented subreddit (but not one as big as AskHistorians). All of the moderators agree that we don't want to host hate--and we even have a rule against posting bigoted opinions that are contrary to the basic findings of the field, which can result in the ban.

Even so, the site-wide culture of Reddit does affect us.

One of the consequences is that some conversations are impossible or difficult. Anything that could be interpreted as "feminist" gets a blast of knee-jerk criticism. It's treated with an intense scrutiny that is not given to other topics. The obviously hateful comments can just be removed, and the user banned--but many of these comments would be okay or borderline if there weren't so many like them.

It's the age-old problem of identifying bias; often it's not clear in an individual instance, but only as part of a larger pattern.

So, the platform matters, even with an active mod team. We want to have a subreddit with a high quality level of discussion, free from hate, but it's a challenge to maintain this. And yes, I do in part blame the site moderation team. Sometimes I feel like I should be leaving, and not supporting them anymore -- but other times, I think of comment chains where I feel like someone has actually learned something, and that we have actually done a small bit to dispel some of the hate there. Us being there makes it less of an echo chamber. I don't know what the right thing to do is, in the end, so I stay because I like it.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 5:08 PM on March 10 [19 favorites]

I think the $5.00 entry fee has a lot to do with this.

We didn't have this kind of trouble even in the pre-$5 days.
posted by jonmc at 5:10 PM on March 10 [4 favorites]

If, at any time, a subreddit starts getting too many annoying/crappy/stupid posts or comments then unsubscribe and never think about it again.

And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 5:10 PM on March 10 [3 favorites]

The people who say the crap is invisible apparently don't look at the front page. Calling people "faggots" is not only accepted, it is expected.
posted by Justinian at 5:11 PM on March 10 [9 favorites]

The thing about metafilter that kept it from being a cesspool is that was owned by someone who took responsibility for it.

What is notable about the sites that become cesspools is that instead of personal responsibility you have hand waving about abstract principles and responsibility shell games.
posted by srboisvert at 5:20 PM on March 10 [25 favorites]

Keep in mind that Reddit is absolutely capable of moderating subreddits on the site-wide level. I believe they shut down some of the subreddits that drew the worst publicity (ie Jailbait) a while back, but my (unscientific) perception is that it seems more common for subreddits to get shut down for selling products/affiliate links.
posted by fermezporte at 5:22 PM on March 10

If you're thinking SRS is too circle-jerky, check out the list of Fempire subreddits on the right. There's a bunch of places that are for discussions that will probably be more to your liking. SRS Prime has been preserved add a circle jerk because allowing the circle jerk to be broken makes it prone to being shit up.
posted by Pope Guilty at 5:23 PM on March 10

The people who say the crap is invisible apparently don't look at the front page. Calling people "faggots" is not only accepted, it is expected.

Well yea. That's the point. I never ever look at the default front page. I would only see that if I was logged out.
posted by HappyEngineer at 5:25 PM on March 10

And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee.

Actually, it's more like cutting off a fingernail. Cutting off the whole hand would be what others are doing when they "close the tab" and leave reddit entirely.
posted by HappyEngineer at 5:31 PM on March 10

To continue this increasingly bad comparison, it's more like cutting off tumors that keep growing on every part of your hands, then after a while smiling as you look at the scraggly pieces of leftover flesh and admire how smooth the scars are if you look at them in the right light.
posted by cashman at 5:35 PM on March 10 [6 favorites]

I never ever look at the default front page. I would only see that if I was logged out.

Because nothing says 'my house is awesome' like 'you have to come in using the backdoor, or else you'll see the burning effigy my racist neighbors have out.'
posted by mikurski at 5:37 PM on March 10 [32 favorites]

"Front" page is customizable. I won't defend reddit, because it can be a cesspool, but I find it useful at times for interests that i have, and my experience, by and large, is that the crap is invisible to me. I certainly know about it, from discussions like this one.
i would certainly be behind a movement to pressure reddit to change, and try, whenever it's possible to call the assholes out for their assholery.
posted by OHenryPacey at 5:47 PM on March 10 [2 favorites]

It seems really striking how, whenever criticisms of Reddit come up, there's always a strong reaction that "It's reflective of humanity. How could you expect Reddit to be better?". And I can be cynical at times, but I'm really not convinced that all the issues raised about Reddit *just so happen* to coincide with issues inherent to the human condition.

In other words, there's clearly room for vested interest in asserting that 'all of you are just as bad as we are'. (and depending on where you look, an addendum of "and we're just more honest about it, not subject to Political Correctness/SJW wrgrbl") (If you want a pop-culture comparison, remember the "Bombs on the ferry" scene from The Dark Knight.)
posted by CrystalDave at 5:47 PM on March 10 [3 favorites]

"People are saying the punch is a bit, well, shi-"
"THEY'RE DRINKING IT WRONG."

"But isn't that a tu-"
"NEVER MIND THAT YOU'LL NEVER NEED TO SEE IT AGAIN."

"But it tastes a bit, um..."
"JUST GET A NEW CUP IT'LL BE FINE."
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 5:48 PM on March 10 [7 favorites]

"Front" page is customizable.

If I, a stranger and hypothetical friend of yours, come to visit Reddit? It is not customizable, and the awesome interesting stuff is not the first thing I see. The first thing I see is the goddamn burning cross. Websites use their front pages to try to attract new users. Reddit's is not, shall we say, particularly attractive.
posted by sciatrix at 5:49 PM on March 10 [1 favorite]

I think you might just hang out with people who are thoughtful and aware. I know many (cishetero white men) people who talk about reddit all the time

I know several women who say they like Reddit and seem fairly oblivious to its bad reputation. They are not-particularly-tech-oriented people who I would guess see the default front page they way they see Youtube - as a collection of funny viral stuff with really shitty lowbrow discussion if you scroll down. The presence of organized hate movements is not obvious to that kind of casual user especially if their expectations are low. But the destructive impact becomes clear as soon as you dig even a little bit deeper, and it's fundamentally pretty objectionable.
posted by atoxyl at 5:50 PM on March 10

Another thing a lot of people here aren't realizing is that when they're suggesting deleting everything that shows on the front page and picking specific subs, you need an account for that. Most people browse reddit without an account, even in apps. I forget where the stats are, but i think it was something like only 10% of people have accounts, and only 3% of them ever comment or close to that.

So most people who view the site get no choice in what they see, and just see the garbage can. And creating an account and looking around enough to curate and not see shit is a time investment. Hell, if you're not willing to browse through piles of turds you need a friend willing to give you some guidance on it.

You're basically admitting that default logged out experience that 90%(+/-) of people see is garbage, while trying to get people to invest time to route around that garbage who have no real motivation to do so.

How the hell does that make sense from an opportunity cost standpoint?
posted by emptythought at 5:57 PM on March 10 [9 favorites]

The much larger problem is the casual racism that gets thrown around in some of the most popular reddits like /r/funny, /r/pics and /r/adviceanimals. And it has been getting worse over time.

The overall site culture is really, really awful; if you have anything that is at all related to any social justice issue (as in, it's about anything other than cishet white men) you end up with a shitload of awful comments, and the triviality of making new accounts mean that it's overwhelmingly the job of the volunteer moderators of the "good subs" to ban the constant deluge of trolls, who are able to create new accounts really easily. Because of the one account for the entire site issue, there's no way for individual moderators of "good subs" to do anything but play whack-a-mole with these assholes. I think it's really gross that reddit hasn't done anything about this and continues to make money (or attempt to make money, I guess) off of these volunteers by not giving them the tools to manage their members better.

The only good subs are ones that are actively focused on anti-bigotry (including SRS, the dorknet, and AMR) and SUPER aggressive about using the banhammer, and even those create enormous quantities of work and waste a ton of volunteer time addressing these basic issues, because reddit won't give sitewide bans to horrible people.

The site culture thing really comes up when you get general-interest subs that happen to be moderated by someone with basic human decency, because you end up getting a million accusations of them being social justice warriors/SRS/etc and they act all mad and hurt and complain about their free speech. I've seen this happen a couple times with dorknet subs that I follow; people got REALLY mad a few years back when the mod didn't let them all post rape jokes on their shibe memes.

The only reason to visit SRS is to actively search out the offensive material, and then even when it isn't that bad to circlejerk without argument about how bad it is. It's a toxic reaction to the toxicity itself.

It's really nice to be able to post really shitty stuff and have other people say that yeah, that's fucking terrible. The culture of reddit is so awful that it can really gaslight you about what is and isn't acceptable; having a place to validate feelings of "this is bad and it makes me feel bad" can be really useful. Disallowing discussion means that you can't get away with tone arguments, concern trolling, etc, and it can be really nice having a place that can be a refuge from that kind of bullshit.
posted by NoraReed at 6:02 PM on March 10 [22 favorites]

If I, a stranger and hypothetical friend of yours, come to visit Reddit? It is not customizable, and the awesome interesting stuff is not the first thing I see. The first thing I see is the goddamn burning cross. Websites use their front pages to try to attract new users. Reddit's is not, shall we say, particularly attractive.

Any friend, hypothetical or not, that I would direct to reddit, i would steer directly to a sub that was germane to our mutual interest, or i would absolutely give you a warning that reddit can be an awful place for all the reasons. how many people just stumble upon it unawares? do they tuck tail and run? close the tab? find what they want and block out the rest? organize a protest or boycott?

It is, in some ways, like s smokey dive bar in the bad section of town, filled with miscreants of all sorts, but with a basement room (that you can later access through a teleportation device) that sometimes holds meetings that are more interesting, or more difficult to be a part of than in other places.

I suppose i f i happened upon the owner, and felt i had some influence, i would say 'hey this place is a shithole, if you cleaned it up you'd have a better reputation" but then Bill Gates stops by the very next day for an AMA.
posted by OHenryPacey at 6:03 PM on March 10

i would certainly be behind a movement to pressure reddit to change, and try, whenever it's possible to call the assholes out for their assholery.

Is there something that is currently preventing you from doing this? You can start a letter-writing campaign or new subreddits or any other bunch of things. No need to wait for a fully grown movement to be created by other people.
posted by rtha at 6:03 PM on March 10 [1 favorite]

It puts them all in an easy to find location that can be trolled by the FBI and used to prosecute them. It's a win, a Pyrrhic one, but a win. (Not really, that's a great deal of bad in one place)
posted by NiteMayr at 6:09 PM on March 10

Another factor is the lack of a mechanism to oust bad moderators. My city's subreddit has some toxic moderators whose actions have driven away a lot of positive contributors and reduced the discourse to a sterile pap with ugly undertones of racism. There's no way to force the mods out, though, so that's how it's always going to be.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 6:10 PM on March 10 [4 favorites]

qxntpqbbbqxl : What about /r/[mycityname]happy (eg: /r/chicagohappy) or something like that. I'm sure there are plenty of folks that want to discuss your city without ugly racist undertones. With some nonracist moderation in a new subbreddit, you could have the discussions you want.
posted by el io at 6:17 PM on March 10

Reddit has become an unredeemable toxic wasteland. I refuse to support a platform that allows the sort of viciously misogynistic and racist comments that have become all too common there, so I deleted my account last year and will never use it again. Starting to think my Twitter account is next.
posted by oulipian at 6:19 PM on March 10 [2 favorites]

I think it's worth adding, since I've recommended trans subreddits before, that most of the feminist subreddits on the site are transphobic/TERFy. /r/feminism is crypto-TERFy--posting trans things, being out as trans, aren't explicitly verboten but will get you a lot of downvotes, arguments and harassment. /r/feminisms is openly TERFy. Don't even. /r/TwoXChromosomes is about the only feminist space that's been clearly anti-TERFy, but is now a default sub, so...yeah. That's leaving aside all the subs specifically for TERFs and violent transphobes of all stripes, which don't deserve mentions.

It's just an additional layer to the whole thing of engaging with the site in "read only" mode. Even the spaces that are "safe" for one group aren't always for others.
posted by byanyothername at 6:20 PM on March 10 [7 favorites]

It is, in some ways, like s smokey dive bar in the bad section of town, filled with miscreants of all sorts, but with a basement room (that you can later access through a teleportation device) that sometimes holds meetings that are more interesting, or more difficult to be a part of than in other places.

"Here, use this teleporter to get to our meeting. But if you go out the door to find the can or something, you're gonna get cut by some hoods."

Isn't there a nice, wholesome community center you can use to discuss your esoterica?
posted by mikurski at 6:20 PM on March 10 [1 favorite]

Is there something that is currently preventing you from doing this? You can start a letter-writing campaign or new subreddits or any other bunch of things. No need to wait for a fully grown movement to be created by other people.



I've been on metafilter long enough to know that calling out any individual, about whose daily life and struggles you know very little, for not doing their part on any given issue to organize or participate in whatever is the social justice item of the moment, is unproductive.

Time, energy, the obligations of my life as a parent, employer, coach, mentor, son, brother, uncle and member of many organizations that represent my ideals of social justice prevent me from doing a great many things, while still giving me the satisfaction of accomplishing many others, the result of which benefit the lives of those around me in countless ways.

Forgive me for choosing to be a follower on this one, for the time being.
posted by OHenryPacey at 6:21 PM on March 10 [1 favorite]

Another factor is the lack of a mechanism to oust bad moderators.

Oh god yes. Also a single mod can sometimes lose their shit, oust all the other mods, and take over; I saw this happen recently with a sub a bunch of my friends hang out on when one of the folks they'd trusted to mod them got offended about deleting some anime child porn and basically took over

it's really telling that the one way to really easily ruin a sub on reddit is "have a lot of redditors go to it" because they immediately shit up the place

i never noticed /r/feminism being TERF-y because it was too busy being full of MRAs and banning all actual feminists, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was a transphobic shithole in addition to the other kinds of shithole it is
posted by NoraReed at 6:23 PM on March 10 [5 favorites]

I never notice racism or sexism on Reddit, said the cishet white dude
posted by shakespeherian at 6:28 PM on March 10 [18 favorites]

Last year, in the wake of the Ferguson verdict and #blacklivesmatter, I was wondering which faction was stronger on Reddit, the "fuck the cops" contingent or the racists. Based on the posts that were bubbling up in r/all (and the comments therein), it seemed to me that the racists had the definite advantage (2-to-1? 5-to-1?).

I just checked redditarchive.com around Nov. 24, 2014 (the verdict day) and there are way, way fewer Ferguson-related posts than I remember. Maybe a difference between frontpage and r/all? Or maybe my memory is just faulty? Now, I kind of wish I had taken screenshots to confirm my memory.
posted by mhum at 6:31 PM on March 10

Yeah in general the madding crowd seems to be shit. I've been a redditor since 08 and I've seen a lot more BS as the site has become more popular. On the subs I frequent mostly the trolls and morons get downvoted to oblivion. But in some places on reddit reasonable people appear to be in the minority. What's also disturbing is group tactics or individuals with multiple accounts for downvoting. I've noticed that in TwoX where there's a lot of feminist debate.

Anyway I generally don't go to the places where the assholes predominate, and I'm not ready to give up my other communities that I'm perfectly happy with. Whether twitter or reddit can solve their troll problems I don't know, but I doubt it.
posted by Ansible at 6:31 PM on March 10

Does Stormfront's hosting company have a moral obligation to shut the site down, or alternately, do they have a moral obligation to provide their customers with equal treatment and an equal platform regardless of their offensive viewpoints?

They absolutely do not have a moral obligation to treat their customers equally, and are complicit in promoting Stormfront's message of hate and violence, which calls for the extermination of entire races of people.

"Freedom of Speech" is a gratuitously misused phrase. While it generally describes the concept that a government should not be empowered to curtail the freedom of expression of its citizens, there's no clean or logical way to extend that concept to private affairs. Private citizens are very much empowered to use their discretion when deciding who they want to listen to, put up with, or do business with. Implying otherwise would be ridiculous.

I see where you're coming from here -- the Constitutionally-guaranteed right to freedom of speech just protects you from the government silencing you, since if private Website A won't let you speak there you can just go to Website B, whereas oppressive governments don't allow for easy alternatives. On the other hand, there's a private ideal of free speech that is broader than the mere legal right: the idea that all viewpoints should be heard, even the repulsive ones, because (a) the best way to marginalize repulsive views is to out-argue them, and (b) once you start silencing "repulsive" speech it's easy to let yourself also silence reasonable speech that you personally disagree with.

There's an analogy here with racial discrimination. Not only is the government forbidden from discriminating its services based on race, but so are private businesses. (Private citizens are still free to not let certain races in their homes, of course.) This is because historically so many private businesses would discriminate against blacks given the right to do so, that in practice a black person would get inferior service if any, even though theoretically they could "just" go find a non-discriminatory alternative business. I see Reddit's and hosting companies' tolerance of Stormfront et al. the same way: Nazi views are so widely despised that if everyone were comfortable with denying them service, they wouldn't be able to create websites, book hotels, or basically do anything, because all those are technically private. And before you say "Okay, good, let the Nazis suffer" -- acceptable shunning of the Nazis and the KKK will inevitably devolve into shunning more reasonable people on the opposite side of the political spectrum. I don't want the "red state/blue state" divide to become even more literal than it already is.
posted by Rangi at 6:32 PM on March 10

The only reason to visit SRS is to actively search out the offensive material, and then even when it isn't that bad to circlejerk without argument about how bad it is. It's a toxic reaction to the toxicity itself.

Shining a light on toxic behavior that is tacitly accepted within a community is a vital step in changing the behavior and overall culture of that community. Ignoring it does nothing but allows it to fester.
posted by krinklyfig at 6:36 PM on March 10 [5 favorites]

Reddit has become an unredeemable toxic wasteland. I refuse to support a platform that allows the sort of viciously misogynistic and racist comments that have become all too common there, so I deleted my account last year and will never use it again. Starting to think my Twitter account is next.

Can you explain why you draw the "platform/non-platform" boundary at Reddit and Twitter versus the rest of the internet, instead of good subreddits versus bad ones, or the internet versus other media? All I can think of is that since sites have central owners/admins, you expect them to police their platforms, and the internet as a whole has no such mechanism. But after all, that's what the individual subreddit moderators are for. As for Twitter, I don't use it myself, but don't you only see tweets from people you choose to follow? I can't imagine Twitter Inc. being able to moderate all the tweets and delete misogynistic/racist/unacceptable-ist ones, especially since their list of unacceptable isms probably won't be exactly the same as yours.
posted by Rangi at 6:39 PM on March 10 [1 favorite]

Tumblr to me felt like a endless chain email from that one friend. Yes, there are problems w/racism, spam, and other less pleasant items online but it helps that there's Tumblr Savior/block options too.

I like it as it let less tech savvy artists/creators post their works online w/o having to create a separate personal site. However, most of the members are <18 and in fandom. This is OK as I liked LJ but less interesting over time as I move away from it. Also, it's terrible for long form or writing unlike blogs. The bright side is that most tumblrs are accessible via RSS readers which saves me a lot of time.

I've been on Reddit for 2+ years as I was linked there for niche subreddits but default page "not bad"? Hahaha, good one. I aggressively filter out problematic posts using extensions and even then garbage shows up when I least expect it.

For people who say it's like a bar, internet, the world are missing the point. I've had exp with all kinds of forums, BBS, sites, games, and bars but rarely did I expect from reading about the latest video game review to extreme opinions by the local angry man at the street corner w/o any warnings.
posted by chrono_rabbit at 6:47 PM on March 10 [1 favorite]

Rangi: "acceptable shunning of the Nazis and the KKK will inevitably devolve into shunning more reasonable people on the opposite side of the political spectrum"

I think that "shunning of the Nazis" is not merely acceptable in Germany but more or less sanctioned by the state. I don't know if the inevitable devolution has happened yet.
posted by mhum at 6:49 PM on March 10 [1 favorite]

All sites degrade over time. I used to read slashdot. I no longer do because the quality and comments degraded past the point where it was worthwhile. Eventually, metafilter will degrade. I don't know how long it will take, but eventually it will degrade. Such is life.

But this is super duper fatalistic in a way that excuses bad stuff on the basis that maintaining or improving a site's culture is literally impossible rather than just difficult and resource-intensive. There is no law of the universe that says a website must degrade over time; it's just actual hard work to be attentive to what's going on, and requires making decisions that favor community quality and cohesion over stuff like continued high rates of growth of the userbase, traffic, revenue, etc.

And scaling issues just make the problem of community management understandably harder and more resource-intensive. Early Metafilter was workable as a solo gig when it was a few hundred relatively tight-knit people, but at this point we're operating with on the order of ten thousand at least minimally-engaged users as a small team of paid moderators, and even that's a bit of a strain at times. It'd be far more of a strain if there wasn't a really solid sense of baked-in site culture lending a continuity of community ethos and a real sense of shared responsibility to the non-moderator proceedings here.

So reddit has this sort of impossible task: deal with massive, massive scale issues without a proportional staff of paid moderators and with a userbase that has, in fractions, gotten used to a baked-in sense that a lot of horrible stuff is anywhere between loathsome but worth defending on principle and actively what they want from the site. And I don't envy anyone the task of trying to deal with that. But part of what makes it an impossible task is that they're not willing to go to war with the shitty elements of their site culture and userbase. That some slurry of principle and profit-motive and conservatism and cowardice drives a top-level response of inaction, of disinclination to do the hard thing and say "it is worth damaging our bottom line and alienating users to make this a better place for non-racist, non-sexist, non-shitty people to spend time."

Reddit is what Reddit is in very significant part because the people who call the shots at Reddit value keeping the ball rolling over actively, aggressively fighting the bad parts of their site culture. They are unwilling to risk damaging the model, even if the model actively and conspicuously abets some of the worst, most vile shit on the entire Internet. That's how you get a decline; that's how Reddit degrades.

Sure, this buffet has a bin labelled "MysteryGravy" that is actually raw sewage

Hey now, I've got dibs on the restaurant-that-also-serves-sewage metaphor, dang it.
posted by cortex at 6:51 PM on March 10 [21 favorites]

> I've been on metafilter long enough to know that calling out any individual, about whose daily life and struggles you know very little, for not doing their part on any given issue to organize or participate in whatever is the social justice item of the moment, is unproductive.

I don't personally care what you do, or don't do, regarding reddit. Life is busy, we all have a limited amount of bandwidth blahblahblah. But then why bother to say anything at all about how you would do a thing except you're not going to do it? That just seems weird.
posted by rtha at 6:51 PM on March 10

I have great disdain for the general community of reddit. Anyone who says you have to go looking for racism/misogyny/assholery must not read comments on any discussion that is remotely tangential to any current events or mentions a woman or POC. Shit, even on the makeup subreddit I go on there are periodic discussions where non-white women say "Hey, it sucks there aren't more WOC posting here" and white women say "WHY ARE YOU ALWAYS COMPLAINING GO TO THE BROWN PERSON MAKEUP SUBREDDIT UGH" or people bitching that trans* posts get upvoted too often. I still go on a number of subs, I enjoy the information I learn there, I appreciate the mods who are heavyhanded, but not for a moment do I forget the general populace tends to be a bunch of dickholes. Because they make it *impossible* to forget that.
posted by schroedinger at 7:01 PM on March 10 [2 favorites]

Overtly racist/sexist internet bastions such as the ones mentioned in this article are certainly a bad thing, but I think that the most noxious form of racism, and sexism, are found right on the front page of Reddit ( r/funny, r/pics, r/TIL, etc.), coming from people who pretend to know better. The binary way of seeing things as racist/not racist (sexist/not sexist) is why people who do not consider themselves racist say, do, and think things that are hurtful and destructive. It's easy to think "I'm not racist/sexist/homophobic, so of course I can say X", when in fact X is something that reinforces a destructive norm.
posted by willrudisill at 7:09 PM on March 10 [2 favorites]

I'm interested to see how reddit evolves now that /u/yishan is gone. He was so, so bad as a community manager.

While I am relatively pleased with my reddit experience, I don't think I can recommend it any more. I took down my profile guide to reddit. If you want to put in the effort, I can only encourage you to subscribe to the most specific (or most explicitly, restrictively moderated) subreddits possible. For example, when people say that gaming subreddits are good, they are talking about subreddits for specific games, because no way in hell are they talking about /r/gaming or even /r/Games.

The reddits for specific programming languages are pretty good. I'd like to give /r/rust a specific shoutout for having a code of conduct that they are very happy to enforce (I've never seen a banhammer wielded so gleefully as by /u/kibwen). /r/haskell has a weak set of community guidelines but the default culture is oriented towards learning and productivity.

I've never seen racism on /r/programming, but sexism is the default. The only reason to subscribe to it is that a lot of links to stuff relevant to programmers don't get posted to specific language reddits.

Probably the best way to avoid all of the shittiness is to simply not read the discussion there. Consume reddit via RSS. Use the normal UI to find a few places that post interesting links, but rather than subscribe to them, add .rss to the ends of the subreddit urls and put them in your RSS reader. I haven't done that since the death of Reader, but if you don't feel like wading through the shit it's the way to go.
posted by Jpfed at 7:11 PM on March 10

Can you explain why you draw the "platform/non-platform" boundary at Reddit and Twitter versus the rest of the internet, instead of good subreddits versus bad ones, or the internet versus other media?

Reddit is a privately-owned platform in a way that subreddits are not, and that the internet as a whole is not. By using any subreddit you are supporting and validating that platform, which helps support and validate the flagrant and persistent hatemongering taking place elsewhere on the site.
posted by oulipian at 7:13 PM on March 10 [8 favorites]

Rangi: "As for Twitter, I don't use it myself, but don't you only see tweets from people you choose to follow?"

I'm pretty sure this is not the case. You can definitely be tweeted at and it's one of the main actualizations of the sealioning cartoon (e.g.: people filling up your Twitter feed with replies & mentions every time you say anything about #Gamergate).
posted by mhum at 7:16 PM on March 10

Can you explain why you draw the "platform/non-platform" boundary at Reddit and Twitter versus the rest of the internet, instead of good subreddits versus bad ones, or the internet versus other media? All I can think of is that since sites have central owners/admins, you expect them to police their platforms, and the internet as a whole has no such mechanism. But after all, that's what the individual subreddit moderators are for.

So here's how i see it. I think frat houses are actually a great comparison. Everyone involved in them is legally an adult, and they're expected at least to an extent to mostly police themselves with the help of some other theoretically more mature involved adults. The problem is, those adults have a vested interest in the status quo and not acknowledging anything is wrong.

Which is why sometimes the college itself has to step in.

Reddit admins are like the college admins that refuse to step in because then they have to acknowledge they were just letting the problem fly. Even if they're going to say it's the moderators problem, they still have a responsibility to act if the mods aren't doing their fucking job(or are doing a dongbrained awful job).

So yes, to answer your question, i think it IS because they have central owners and admins. Another good example would be Action Park. You can't just put drunk teenagers in charge underneath yourself and then say "well hey, they were supposed to be supervising, what were we supposed to do?".

Them trying to disown and not talk about their responsibility and culpability does not relieve them of it.

I also think that the way they've tried to grow a sitewide "community", and constantly refer to the reddit community is pretty damning when it comes to the "subreddits are islands" type of arguments that people have made here, and that they occasionally even try and make themselves.

You can't have it both ways. Either it's some hosting platform like the old free phpbb sites, or it's one big community. You can't have some amalgamation of both that leaves everyone with the responsibilities of neither as is convenient.
posted by emptythought at 7:32 PM on March 10 [5 favorites]

I'm sorry, this is a ramble, but watching reddit evolve (for me) has felt a lot like watching that smart kid you knew in high school gradually turn into the guy that stocks shelves at the grocery store who rants at you about racist conspiracy theories.

I've been on reddit (not continuously because it is awful) since before subreddits as well, and while I guess the racism has gotten worse, the misogyny has been there all along.

I delete my account and comments every now and again and start over with a new username, and consistently, when I was obviously female, at best, I'd be ignored or downvoted, and at worst harassed. If I posted anything on a technical subject, I was clearly an idiot who had no idea what I was talking about. Any observation I made was met with extreme skepticism, and I was often accused of lying. If I said anything at all about any gender related topic, someone would threaten me somehow.

When I had a male sounding username, I was some sort of wise sage on technical subjects, and my random little observations were taken as gospel. I posted some short little anecdote about getting patronized by customer service or something, and I got a couple of guys messaging me with heartfelt encouragement and outsized outrage about the way I'd been treated. It was hilarious, because I knew damned well that if they knew I was female, it wouldn't have bothered them a bit.

Much of the internet, including Metafilter, wasn't much better at the time either, so maybe it seemed less egregious relatively speaking, but it was not good.
posted by ernielundquist at 7:32 PM on March 10 [7 favorites]

Rangi: "On the other hand, there's a private ideal of free speech that is broader than the mere legal right: the idea that all viewpoints should be heard, even the repulsive ones, because (a) the best way to marginalize repulsive views is to out-argue them"

Except sometimes you don't want to spend your time out-arguing people who think you don't deserve basic human rights because of your gender or race or sexual orientation or whatever. You want to talk with people who take that it as a given that of course you do. I've used the example before if you're Buzz Aldrin you don't want to prove that the moon landings weren't faked every time you talk about the moon.

The "neutral" approach to this in Reddit culture I think is bundled up in the anti "brigading" attitude which I can kind of get behind but there's enough people who will say what they're doing doesn't count if it's not VOTE brigading, or it's only bad when it targets other subreddits, so targeting non-Reddit stuff is fair game. Or as mentioned above:
schroedinger: "the genpop of Reddit goes there to espouse their opinions about how one woman or the other was really asking for it and women who have babies didn't really want those careers anyway."

They weren't brigading, they just need to make sure everyone hears THEIR opinion on this matter which is very IMPORTANT because otherwise it's a CIRCLEJERK of feminists who think jet fuel can melt steel wake up SHEEPLE.

In conclusion, land of contrasts.
posted by RobotHero at 7:34 PM on March 10 [4 favorites]

Also, i've posted this before, but i think it's a worthwhile comparison.

4chan is widely regarded as a shithole. I feel like everyone here knows that. A friend of mine in high school(who was a senior, and 18, the photos weren't illegal) posted naked pictures of herself online at one point including on /b/. Later she got identified and started getting e-stalked and harassed so she deleted the photos from her photobucket, etc.

One day she was browsing /b/, and saw the photos of herself.

So she got on the 4chan IRC channel(which might still exist?) where most of the admins and mods, and a bunch of real weirdos hung out and asked for help. Several staff members replied, and one of the mods PMed her, asked for details, then deleted the thread. They got reposted, mod replied to the thread and said you can't post these, banned the person and deleted the thread again. He also gave her his AIM and said to contact him if she got harassed by people who were obviously channers.

Later, when they added the functionality, the photos were added to a killfile. A couple other people got banned for mspainting stuff on the photos and posting them.

That's fucking 4chan. 4chan. In a million years, can you ever imagine reddit admins doing that?

They also kicked out gamergate, disallowed invasions after a relatively short period of time, and have banned child porn and even borderline creepshots type stuff that might be child porn for at least 8 years.

This is the bar they're limboing under as admins. 4chan has, by comparison, significantly higher standards.

It's like making a crappier skateboard than walmart or something. It feels like you have to put effort in to getting there. Like skydiving vs flying a plane straight at the ground with the engine maxed out.
posted by emptythought at 7:41 PM on March 10 [17 favorites]

And scaling issues just make the problem of community management understandably harder and more resource-intensive. Early Metafilter was workable as a solo gig when it was a few hundred relatively tight-knit people, but at this point we're operating with on the order of ten thousand at least minimally-engaged users as a small team of paid moderators, and even that's a bit of a strain at times. It'd be far more of a strain if there wasn't a really solid sense of baked-in site culture lending a continuity of community ethos and a real sense of shared responsibility to the non-moderator proceedings here.

reddit only recently started hiring "community managers" to keep up with the scaling problems. It might be worth noting that the reddit TOS says "You may not perform moderation actions in return for any form of compensation or favor from third-parties." You would not believe how hard it is to prevent corruption, especially in very large subreddits. There isn't a huge supply of incorruptible people who are willing to moderate subreddits for free. Fortunately, most of the incorruptibles tend to stand firm against other corrupting influences of sexism, racism, etc.

So reddit has this sort of impossible task: deal with massive, massive scale issues without a proportional staff of paid moderators and with a userbase that has, in fractions, gotten used to a baked-in sense that a lot of horrible stuff is anywhere between loathsome but worth defending on principle and actively what they want from the site. And I don't envy anyone the task of trying to deal with that. But part of what makes it an impossible task is that they're not willing to go to war with the shitty elements of their site culture and userbase. That some slurry of principle and profit-motive and conservatism and cowardice drives a top-level response of inaction, of disinclination to do the hard thing and say "it is worth damaging our bottom line and alienating users to make this a better place for non-racist, non-sexist, non-shitty people to spend time."

I think there are two primary problems here. The first is resources, both human and financial. Priority goes to system threats. If you want to see the reddit admins take quick action, do something that is destructive to their software operations. Pro Tip: do not coordinate a DDoS on reddit from a subreddit.

The other issue is that they believe reddit is structured to work around social problems. It must be some sort of libertarian fantasy, I don't know where they got the idea. I saw one comment in this thread that kind of hints at this structure:

What about /r/[mycityname]happy (eg: /r/chicagohappy) or something like that. I'm sure there are plenty of folks that want to discuss your city without ugly racist undertones. With some nonracist moderation in a new subbreddit, you could have the discussions you want.

Yes, that is exactly how the reddit model is designed, if you don't like a subreddit, create a better one and people will follow. It's a nice dream. This general idea is behind a lot of reddit system structures, they are intended to route around problems. For example, I had some long talks with an admin about trolls. He said that mods should have a hair trigger for bans. Sure the trolls can just create a new account just as easily as you can kill them. But he said, casual trolls usually don't have much persistence, when they see their comments disappear so quickly. They can sink a lot of energy into it, and it's all for nothing. They aren't able to build any presence when mods can disrupt it so easily. In the past, this was mostly workable, but the truly dedicated trolls will just go on and on. You wouldn't believe the stuff I've seen, I even saw a troll buy ads to get around a ban! These tactics don't last long, and I know the admins have internal methods to prevent dedicated, persistent trolls. The problem is, they can't tell anyone about their internal countermeasures. If they tell people about their countermeasures, they're just teaching people how to get around them.

Reddit is what Reddit is in very significant part because the people who call the shots at Reddit value keeping the ball rolling over actively, aggressively fighting the bad parts of their site culture. They are unwilling to risk damaging the model, even if the model actively and conspicuously abets some of the worst, most vile shit on the entire Internet. That's how you get a decline; that's how Reddit degrades.

Oh poor, poor cortex and his ten thousand users. You would absolutely melt down under the pressures of moderating a top 100 subreddit with hundreds of thousands of users. If you grow large, eventually your userbase tends to reflect the demographics of the world at large. And the world, by and large, is full of idiots. This is a much harder problem to solve. But occasionally, there are signs of hope for the world. Some of them even happen on reddit.
posted by charlie don't surf at 7:48 PM on March 10

I like reading websites that cater to people who think people like me are everything wrong with the world.

I'm left-of-center, so I read redstate (I've been banned twice!) and townhall and nro because there is a real and thriving culture in these places, an entire civilization, and I feel like I had better know what they are saying and try to understand, as much as I can, why they are doing it.

I'm also Jewish, so reddit's default subs, plus r/conspiracy has been enormously helpful to me for the same reason. I am not a Zionist for many reasons, but I like unrestricted speech on the internet because it helps me watch my back and the back of others.
posted by oneironaut at 7:54 PM on March 10 [2 favorites]

Oh, and speaking of misogyny, here's another half-remembered Reddit anecdote where I wish had taken screenshots or bookmarks. A while back there was a fairly benign post in r/AdviceAnimals (I know, I know) that was basically a woman recounting how grateful she was that she could have dinner and a movie with her ex-boyfriend (a Good Guy Greg, I think) and not have him put the moves on her. The comments section basically exploded into a burning mess of "how dare you lead him on" and "you're just using him for free food and Netflix" and so forth to the point where the mods had to lock the thread.

A short time later (a few days?), there was another post on r/AdviceAnimals (possibly a Confession Bear) where a fellow was claiming to be using photos of a handsome dude to make fake dating profiles in order to scam women, either by getting the women to send him nude pix or by setting up dates, standing them up, and then swooping in with his real dating profile. The comments section to that post was filled with lots of "that's awesome" and "teach me your ways".
posted by mhum at 7:55 PM on March 10 [4 favorites]

I haven't seen this posted yet in this thread, but here goes:

What if all the reasonable, non-racist, non-sexist non-asshole people who like the buffet but are sick of the sewage being served and splattered around just open up a nice buffet restaurant across the street? Something with the Reddit feel, without the sewage. And big bouncers who muscle out anyone bringing in a bucket of sewage, or little bits of sewage in their pockets that they try to sprinkle on the mac & cheese.

There must be some reason(s) why this must be a dumb idea, but I just don't get it. Take the nice communities around various subreddits with you. Is the Reddit interface some kind of rocket science, or can it be approximated elsewhere? Aren't there are a lot of people who would be interested in having a nice, fun, safe space that is like Reddit only without the horrible parts?

Surely there are some people willing to step up as programmers, moderators, etc. And of course you'd have to fend off the bad people who would surely want to mess with it.

Pipe dream here: mass exodus. Because working within the system doesn't help, from what I'm hearing. Don't just stop giving them your eyeballs and contributions, take your content and your traffic away somewhere safe and snub the hell out of them.
posted by megafauna at 7:57 PM on March 10

As with wikipedia, the more remote and niche your subreddit is, the better the experience will be (ymmv).

On the subject of nerdy, loud, unpopular white guys being the assholes? Yeah, its like the one insufferable pseudo philosopher at a party of 30 people. You keep hearing him because no one's pushed him into a room with his navel gazing buddies (or to apply it to reddit, there are still default subs. There should not be default subs.
posted by Slackermagee at 8:01 PM on March 10

Wow, I've been on Reddit for going on 10 years and I was not aware of any of these racist subreddits, although in hindsight it doesn't surprise me too much. I've been tempted to switch my /etc/hosts/ to send reddit.com to 127.0.0.1 for a while, this might seal the deal.
posted by furtive at 8:03 PM on March 10 [1 favorite]

Is the Reddit interface some kind of rocket science, or can it be approximated elsewhere?

The Reddit web site, certain anti-spam measures notwithstanding, is open source. Reddit clones have been made (e.g. hubski).
posted by Jpfed at 8:06 PM on March 10

/bad internet jokes
reddit = AOL groups
discuss?
posted by daq at 8:09 PM on March 10

Pipe dream here: mass exodus.

There's a group on reddit who think there's already too much control there, and are immigrating to voat.co. Maybe all the assholes will end up there.
posted by fivebells at 8:15 PM on March 10

Oh poor, poor cortex and his ten thousand users. You would absolutely melt down under the pressures of moderating a top 100 subreddit with hundreds of thousands of users.

That's rather starkly missing the point. I'm not interested in moderating a subreddit with hundreds of thousands of users. I'm not even interested in moderating a Metafilter with hundreds of thousands of active users. The whole thrust of my comment is that managing large crowds is difficult and resource-intensive, and that valuing accruing that sort of large crowd while failing to prioritize the assignment of those necessary resources is a recipe for a bad, unmanageable situation.
posted by cortex at 8:19 PM on March 10 [14 favorites]

The whole thrust of my comment is that managing large crowds is difficult and resource-intensive, and that valuing accruing that sort of large crowd while failing to prioritize the assignment of those necessary resources is a recipe for a bad, unmanageable situation.

Of course, but you're sort of missing my point too. reddit relies on unpaid volunteers to manage their users. There has to be some sort of value proposition to keep the volunteers active, and in sufficient numbers to keep ahead of the chaos. It is probably obvious what value spammers and trolls get, and some people just want to watch the world burn. Altruistic volunteers get nothing but the satisfaction of seeing their community working. And that is so easy to disrupt. Perhaps it is a leap of faith, an optimistic delusion that amidst the mud, something beautiful might flower. Maybe more people should have this sort of delusion.
posted by charlie don't surf at 8:30 PM on March 10

Or, maybe it is that "optimistic delusion that amidst the mud, something beautiful might flower" that is part of the problem, since delusions are what drive some people to walk out into traffic, confident that nothing can hurt them.
posted by oneswellfoop at 8:38 PM on March 10

The reddits I follow are thankfully not full of as much hate, and just like google safesearch, I don't go looking.

so, there are some good things there.

but I do feel more engaged here, with a variety of topics, viewpoints and user answers.
posted by dreamling at 8:47 PM on March 10

Maybe more people should have this sort of delusion.

Maybe, but this isn't a value proposition to keep the volunteers active.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 8:53 PM on March 10 [1 favorite]

The Internet as it exists now allows people to build their own forums to discuss whatever they want on unique sites. Earlier on I guess you had news groups and things like that that were technologies that people had to go to to meet the like minded. But that was a contained technology, like reddit. I know if you're interested in kittens or racism there are forums other than reddit out there. So, how does a technology like reddit become so influential when you can go elsewhere? Easy interface?
It makes me think about the end of Tron, lots of lights out of one big dumb powerful thing. I look forward to seeing what comes after it.
posted by PHINC at 8:59 PM on March 10

Even if you've got the good intention of trying to sprout flowers, you're still responsible for the pile of manure you gathered as part of your effort.

'Cause it's attracting flies.

And some parts are really smelling ripe.
posted by benito.strauss at 9:01 PM on March 10

Okay, no more analogies.
posted by cashman at 9:03 PM on March 10 [2 favorites]

Reddit just feels gross, even when what you're actually reading is benign. I used it for a couple months awhile back and I started to really not like how it was making me feel.
posted by saul wright at 9:06 PM on March 10 [2 favorites]

The Reddit web site, certain anti-spam measures notwithstanding, is open source.

And that is the embodiment of the original problem. It's like the olden days when Linux didn't have drivers for your printer and the linux people would tell you to write your own. And if you didn't like it, you could always use Windows 95. This is the old libertarian dream underneath open source projects.

Okay, no more analogies.

Just be glad I edited out my "rising tide lifts all boats" analogies from my earlier post. It kind of died a tortured death when I observed there are no tides in small freshwater lakes, and then the ocean...
posted by charlie don't surf at 9:16 PM on March 10

Oh poor, poor cortex and his ten thousand users.

That's my first public sighting of someone being a dick to cortex since his Upgrade. Didn't take long, and certainly speaks to the levels of stress that led at least in part to Matt finally throwing in the old towel.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 9:17 PM on March 10 [6 favorites]

One thing that Reddit and Metafilter both have in common is that as online entities they don't really care what I think.
posted by ovvl at 9:18 PM on March 10

a rising sewer grows all flowers (the flowers are racist)
posted by NoraReed at 9:21 PM on March 10 [7 favorites]

I literally just made a reddit account a week ago. I'm using it to monitor and post in specific, highly moderated subreddits. /r/LeagueOfLegends is pretty well run as an example, and it's usually better for discussion than Riot's official forums.

I think a big advantage of Reddit is ease of entry and unification of disparate interests. It's actually pretty hard to find communities/forums that specialize in niche topics and are still active, but with reddit it's easy to search the subreddit list and find whatever weird niche you want. If I want to read about electronic music, psychology, and video games I can join 3 different forums that all feel and work very differently, or I can join some subreddits and get a feed that unifies them. Reddit has replaced usenet in all ways, good and bad.

If a system could exist that works as well as Reddit's, and excluded the 10% of the population that I would really prefer to never talk to, I would switch to that in a second. But, I'm really not sure how anyone would create such a system, it takes years to reach the kind of critical mass needed to support niches and I don't personally have any ideas for how to build and maintain something that big so crafting an alternative doesn't seem practical. I guess the choice comes down to rather you want to try and make reddit better, or give up and boycott/avoid it, hard choice that I'm not sure about as I just started interacting with it.
posted by JZig at 9:27 PM on March 10 [1 favorite]

Reddit is what Reddit is in very significant part because the people who call the shots at Reddit value keeping the ball rolling over actively, aggressively fighting the bad parts of their site culture.

Also, frankly, it's because the general Reddit population tolerates, accepts, or even favors that culture. Look at all the people going "oh, Reddit isn't so bad if you do X,", making excuses, or flat out saying the "bad parts" are worth what they get from the site. Because bottom line, access to hobby sites is simply more important than not supporting an incredibly toxic culture.

I think I'm going to go reread "Walking Away From Omelas" again.
posted by happyroach at 9:33 PM on March 10 [1 favorite]

The reason Reddit and Condé Nast don't address Reddit's hate speech is the same reason Bill Cosby doesn't respond to rape allegations.
posted by Johann Georg Faust at 9:39 PM on March 10

Except it's not only just "hate speech" anymore. More like some extreme fetishism of hatred-fueled propaganda.
posted by Johann Georg Faust at 9:45 PM on March 10

If a system could exist that works as well as Reddit's, and excluded the 10% of the population that I would really prefer to never talk to, I would switch to that in a second.

This is an interesting thought.

It's possible to fork reddit, but the community won't follow you; existing reddit clones haven't grown much. Easier than this, probably, would be to fork the Reddit Enhancement Suite and make the killfile functionality (the "hard ignore" option of User Tagger) draw from a shared blacklist. There were some people that did something similar to this for Twitter in response to GamerGate, I think; how did that work out?
posted by Jpfed at 9:54 PM on March 10

There were some people that did something similar to this for Twitter in response to GamerGate, I think; how did that work out?

I haven't followed it closely but it seems to be quasi working. The system basically works by seeing what other users a twitter user follows, and if it's > x% GamerGate, treat the user as a GamerGate user and block them. As you would expect GGs are complaining of "censorship" about it. I've also heard of the same tactic being used by mainstream game journalists who are GG leaning to ignore "SJW" users the same way. I can see this escalating into an actual feature of twitter eventually, some way to soft-wall yourself off from other people.

Another potential tactic to replace Reddit could be some sort of forum-aggregator, that takes content from multiple forums you belong to and makes a federated stream of the most popular 10 threads. But I don't know how you would do that when forums all use such different authentication setups. That's another advantage of being centralized like Reddit, single auth makes federation trivial.
posted by JZig at 10:04 PM on March 10 [1 favorite]

There were some people that did something similar to this for Twitter in response to GamerGate, I think; how did that work out?

GGAutoblocker. And it worked well. Based on the screams of "censorship!" from the gators, you could assume it worked very well.

Some subreddits use a variation of the method you suggested. There's a bot called AutoModerator which can block people based on certain criteria. For example, the anti-gamergate sub GamerGhazi uses the bot to automatically block people who have greater than X amount of karma in KotakuInAction (the pro-gamergate sub). For the subs willing to use it that way, it's very useful.

I would love to see a shared blacklist. I think one could be generated from looking for people with X amount of karma from the terrible places like KotakuInAction, TumblrInAction, MensRights, TheRedPill, Conspiracy, and the other major hangouts of the racists, misogynists, and general scum. Could also use SRS posts as an automated way to add users to the blacklist. Also, could get volunteers to poke their heads into the sewers of the defaults to add users who only post in those subs.
posted by honestcoyote at 10:09 PM on March 10 [1 favorite]

the awful thing about the "reddit is the only place with a good forum for (obscure subtopic)" is that it means you have to put up with whatever background radiation of shit is there in order to talk about that subject with only other people who are willing to deal with that stuff too; you're still made complicit in the awfulness of the site's culture and you're expecting volunteer moderators to keep that awful culture at bay. and maybe you end up with something reasonably not terrible a lot of the time, but as soon as anything related to marginalization comes up in any way, you get people whose bigotry filters are calibrated so out-of-whack that really egregious stuff is okay. it gets really gross really fast. and when stuff on those subs end up on /r/all, the comments get full of awful shitlords; the moderators sometimes get totally overloaded in that kind of situation.
posted by NoraReed at 10:09 PM on March 10 [2 favorites]

the awful thing about the "reddit is the only place with a good forum for (obscure subtopic)" is that it means you have to put up with whatever background radiation of shit is there in order to talk about that subject with only other people who are willing to deal with that stuff too

Seriously. I've seen people mirror benign links to an article on Kotaku on some other server, presumably just so that racist/sexist Redditors could avoid spoiling their precious ideological purity through a page view.
posted by DoctorFedora at 10:36 PM on March 10 [3 favorites]

Sorry, I don't understand. Is Kotaku considered to be "impure" by some Redditors? And viewed through which ideology?

I bet this is GamerGate-related. I never really got the hang of GamerGate.
posted by benito.strauss at 11:22 PM on March 10 [1 favorite]

Reddit: It is the best of the internet, it is the worst of the internet.

I'm fairly new to Reddit vs my membership to MF. I find a lot of good content at Reddit and I find a lot of really horrible stuff. I'm always appreciative that I can come back to MetaFilter for non-abusive conversations; even the best of Reddit has the worst of people visiting and commenting.
posted by _paegan_ at 11:33 PM on March 10

Is Kotaku considered to be "impure" by some Redditors? And viewed through which ideology?

I bet this is GamerGate-related.

The reddit home of GamerGate is /r/KotakuInAction.
posted by Jpfed at 11:34 PM on March 10

benito.strauss: "Is Kotaku considered to be "impure" by some Redditors? [...] I bet this is GamerGate-related. I never really got the hang of GamerGate."

Short answer: Yes. Longer answer: OMG yes.

If you've avoided getting into the minutiae of Gamergate for this long, you probably don't need all the gory details. Suffice it to say, Kotaku's coverage of Gamergate has been decidedly unsympathetic to their "cause". We can skip over the part where Eron Gjoni's initial screed (the one that kicked off this whole dumpster fire) included some false accusations involving Nathan Grayson, a Kotaku writer.
posted by mhum at 11:37 PM on March 10

It's a long and incredibly boring story, but Kotaku is considered bad by gators for their own ridiculous reasons. I won't get into those reasons as I'd have to make a sanity check if I wrote this stuff down. And my luck with the dice has been horrid lately.

Since it's part of the Gawker empire, it's also considered bad by some Redditors who hate Gawker for unmasking Violentacrez (who ran the jailbait sub as well as other incredibly dark subs).

For a time, even the Reddit admins banned any direct Gawker link, and then backed down. Not sure why they backed down, but it was probably because people with sense told the admins it looked like they were defending borderline child porn. Which, in their brogressive version of libertarianism, they basically were.
posted by honestcoyote at 11:39 PM on March 10

I just wanna say I agree with emptythought 100%, and that they basically said everything I wanted to.

A lot of the content on the defaults isn't racist or sexist, but the comments are, and you don't need to look very far to find them. They are almost always the most up voted comments, which is saying that the majority of users agrees with them. When a racist post has 6000 up votes and is gilded, what is that suppose to mean? People on reddit will tell you it's "just a joke", but it's pervasive, and then there are comment chains continuing it. If you go against the majority you're down voted and ridiculed.

SRS, circlebroke, circlebroke2, subredditdrama are pretty much the safest places on reddit, with SRS the safest imo (it's also a massive circlejerk). Someone's criticism of SRS was that it's putting shitty comments up front, but that's the point, those comments are already up front. They're right in front of you the entire time. I pretty much only look at the comments because I can guess what sexist or racist shit is going to be said before I see them and I look to see if I'm right. Subredditdrama has begun to post less drama and more anti-social justice comment stuff, with the circlebrokes doing the same.
posted by gucci mane at 12:00 AM on March 11

Start censoring this stuff which we all agree is abhorrent, and eventually you'll see something you love censored.
posted by atchafalaya at 12:00 AM on March 11

mhum: "Oh, and speaking of misogyny, here's another half-remembered Reddit anecdote where I wish had taken screenshots or bookmarks."

Oh by the way, in case anyone cares, I managed to find the two posts I was thinking of:

• Woman's ex-boyfriend invites her over for tacos, doesn't hit on her (the image is deleted now, but I'm pretty sure that was the gist based on context clues)
• Man introduces friend to dating site, scams nudes via fake profile

Two days apart.
posted by mhum at 12:04 AM on March 11

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