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[aspiegamer]

Being a total free-for-all of content and making a corporate brand that needs to actually make money are not compatible things. This only delays what will inevitably be a wider collapse. One day actual moderation will be needed and they should just get it over with. It won't impact 99% of users who all stick to the 1% of largest subs but the 1% affected would be the ones that make 99% of the noise. It will take some time, but it would pass, and the world will be a better place for it.

Given this string of events started with the banning of a whopping 5 minor subs engaged in entirely horrible activity, lord knows what any actual crackdown would mean. The thought of thousands of people getting upset over the mere thought of the loss of r/coontown is pretty nauseating. Then again, since seemingly none of these people seem to understand what the First Amendment actually means I don't exactly expect a lot of rational thinking.

 

[samn]

We have an awful lot of people on Reddit pretending that banning the minority of disgusting filth content would ruin the experience for everyone else and that without it the site is better off dead. I hope those people don't win out.

I remember when Reddit was exponentially smaller, had fewer idiots everywhere, no celebrity AMAs, no secret santas. It was better back then. None of the changes that came in recently worried me at all.

 

[Suikoguy]

The new CEO plans to keep the anti-harassment policy going, but communicate better plus some changes to the way shadow-bans work.

I was worried they would do an about-face on the recent anti-harassment changes.
Overall it's a good change I think.

 

[Lime]

This is sad to read from their new CEO:

I think our approach to subreddits like that will be different. The content there is reprehensible, as I'm sure any reasonable person would agree, but if it were appropriately quarantined, it would not have a negative impact on other specific individuals in the same way FPH does.

I want to hear more discussion on the topic. I'm open to other arguments.

I want to be very clear: I don't want to ever ban content. Sometimes, however, I feel we have no choice because we want to protect reddit itself.

ie we only want to ban stuff when it's a threat to reddit

how so?

How appealing, diverse and welcoming do you think Reddit actually is? I think the fact that the website is very exclusionary, toxic and threatening to other people should tell you the amount of "success" the libertarian approach to Reddit moderation has been.

 

[HariKari]

How appealing, diverse and welcoming do you think Reddit actually?

Very. Some wonderful subs out there.

Some really terrible ones that you can completely ignore and avoid.

 

[ItWasMeantToBe19]

Not a libertarian but how? It started to "fall apart" when too much overbearing admins came.


If anything it saw unprecedented success as a libertarian haven.

It made so much money.

 

[Ivan Amiibo]

Not a libertarian but how? It started to "fall apart" when too much overbearing admins came.


If anything it saw unprecedented success as a libertarian haven.

I think I came in just before/during the Digg migration and stayed hooked on it for a year or so. To me, I remember thinking the administration seemed more hands off. They seemed to place trust in the voting system, which they worked hard to keep "pure" for a while, to handle everything. But if your qualm was outside what the voting system could handle, then fuck off.

i.e. if pictures of dead kids becomes a popular sub and has lots of upvotes, it stays, and no one should question that. They should mind their own business and stay in r/catpics if they don't want to see r/spacedicks, r/picsofdeadjailbait, r/creepshots, etc. was the attitude. So, anyone can pretty much do what they want as long as they have the capital to do it (in this case, social capital) and it wasn't directly attacking other members (or perceived as that.) The knitting subreddit has as much right to exist as the giant dog boners subreddit, if the people flock to both. If giant dog boners was not wanted, then it should die off from lack of demand, rather than censoring it. See what I mean?

The failure comes in the fact that they have to draw lines and necessarily have to do some governing (which is not a bad thing.) Even before this incident, starting with when it the site started to boom, they began stepping in and making nips and tucks here and there.

 

[Lime]

Very. Some wonderful subs out there.

Some really terrible ones that you can completely ignore and avoid.

I'm talking about its user base, especially in comparison to other online social media:

But Reddit became a web destination and a traffic powerhouse by virtue of the clicking, viewing, and typing habits of a relatively narrow subsection of Internet users. Seventy-four percent of Reddit users are men, the highest of any social networking website. Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube all come much closer to gender parity. Describing Reddit without making reference to its gender asymmetry is akin to reporting on Pinterest, which is 72 percent female, without noting that the site caters to women.

And, indeed, when The New York Times reviewed Pinterest in 2012, they rightly referred to it as "female-oriented," but when the CEO of a 74 percent male social network resigns after facing intense criticism from its users—much of it laced with misogyny—they somehow forget to label Reddit, in turn, as "male-oriented." Reddit too often passes in the media as unmarked and neutral territory while sites like Pinterest get pigeonholed as girly.

Reddit is also one of the most youthful social networks, with nearly 60 percent of its visitors coming in under age 34. For comparison, over 60 percent of Facebook users are above age 34. Increasingly, younger Internet users seem to perceive Facebook as a network for grandmas but, in 2015, grandmas are as vital a part of the Internet as anyone else—even if they'd never be caught dead on its supposed "front page." Only two percent of people over 50 use Reddit.

When we dial back the reverence with which we regard Reddit's visitor numbers, it's clear that the site is not at all representative of adult Internet users in the United States. According to data from Pew, a mere six percent of online adults in the U.S. are Reddit users, and even then, this statistic is driven by young men, who are three times as likely to frequent the site as young women. By way of contrast, Pew found that 71 percent of online adults use Facebook, 23 percent use Twitter, and 28 percent use the female-oriented Pinterest.

Pew data also paints a much more diverse picture of the overall population of social media users in the U.S. The data shows virtually equal gender representation overall, with 65 percent of online adults age 50 to 64 and nearly half of adults 65 and over participating in one network or another. Social media is no longer a young person's game, as your grandpa's incomprehensible Facebook updates can attest.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/07/11/reddit-is-not-the-front-page-of-the-internet.html

 

[Phediuk]

Not a libertarian but how? It started to "fall apart" when too much overbearing admins came.


If anything it saw unprecedented success as a libertarian haven.

lol. Reddit is a huge fucking failure as a libertarian experiment. It hasn't made a single cent of profit since the day it was made. It's been a giant money sink for the last decade.

 

[DICKS AHOY]

Glad I never got into Reddit because this situation is almost as difficult a clutserfuck to parse as GamerGate was. Shitty userbase but a similarly shitty CEO who didn't really know how to run things clash heads over several incidents, some justified and some not? Either way stuff like this makes me just want to take a step back from the internet because there's too many different networks with their own enormous history and drama's and it's just a hassle to keep up with this mindless hate.

m00t stepping down from 4chan honestly meant more to me than this.

 

[Brakke]

I'm talking about its user base, especially in comparison to other online social media:



http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/07/11/reddit-is-not-the-front-page-of-the-internet.html

Yeah I came to link this but you got it covered. Reddit always wanted to present as some neutral-ground, meritocratic, "libertarian haven" but the end result was a pretty homogenized, not that interesting community.

I would love to see GAF demographics, I suspect it's much worse than reddit's.

 

[chaobreaker]

As I expected: Alexis Ohanion (/u/kn0thing), a reddit admin, was responsible for the firing of Victoria. He's expectantly getting burned for it.

 

[hiex_]

Another score for the patriarchy

 

[Drkirby]

Glad I never got into Reddit because this situation is almost as difficult a clutserfuck to parse as GamerGate was. Shitty userbase but a similarly shitty CEO who didn't really know how to run things clash heads over several incidents, some justified and some not? Either way stuff like this makes me just want to take a step back from the internet because there's too many different networks with their own enormous history and drama's and it's just a hassle to keep up with this mindless hate.

m00t stepping down from 4chan honestly meant more to me than this.

To me, saying Reddit is a community is really just not understanding reddit. Reddit is a website that has hundreds of communities on it, it just looks like a single community from the outside. And most of the front page subreddits are just really crappy communities, their mods tend to put more focus on activity then quality comments. Look at the difference between /r/games and /r/gaming.

If you just go to reddit.com and read the front page, yes, it can look like a crappy community, since what you are seeing is the most popular content from ~20 crappy communities. The site has quality content on it, you just have to go to communities that cater to your specific interest.

 

[Perfect Cha0s]

Glad I never got into Reddit because this situation is almost as difficult a clutserfuck to parse as GamerGate was. Shitty userbase but a similarly shitty CEO who didn't really know how to run things clash heads over several incidents, some justified and some not? Either way stuff like this makes me just want to take a step back from the internet because there's too many different networks with their own enormous history and drama's and it's just a hassle to keep up with this mindless hate.

m00t stepping down from 4chan honestly meant more to me than this.

To me, one of the biggest draws of Reddit is that you can use it without being "into Reddit." I unsubbed from all the default subreddits and subbed to 12 specific interest subs, and I likely would have never heard about this whole situation if it weren't making rounds on other parts of the web.

 

[Nozem]

To me, one of the biggest draws of Reddit is that you can use it without being "into Reddit." I unsubbed from all the default subreddits and subbed to 12 specific interest subs, and I likely would have never heard about this whole situation if it weren't making rounds on other parts of the web.

Yup. Even with all the drama it's still easily one of the best and most useful websites on the internet.

 

[thepotatoman]

No one's saying there's not sexism/racism in how some parts of the internet were treating her. What people are saying is that it wasn't the impetus behind what got her fired and what was making her incredibly problematic as a leader there. If you think this was wholly because a bunch of racist/misogynist trolls from FPH shit up Reddit, you are woefully misunderstanding what happened in the wake of the Victoria firing.

Women more often being put in charge of failing businesses than successful ones is a real thing, but that was not the situation behind her hiring- Reddit was not failing.

Financially it was. They had a ton of users when she took over and they have even more now, but most of those users would never pay into the site and probably use adblock on top of that, while advertisers would avoid the place like the plague.

They need to find someway to monetize, and it's probably impossible to do that without pissing off the reddit user base in some way.

 

[Rentahamster]

The more Reddit clings onto the hardcore libertarian crowd, the faster it'll die. The fact that the new CEO wants to keep these reprehensible, disgusting, racist and sexist subs is a field day for news sites if they want to pursue it.

And then the cycle continues. Reddit gets egg on their face, Reddit never learns.

I've stopped using the site entirely ever since I moved here to GAF, mainly because of these issues, along with the userbase being a group of whiny, war-mongering children.

I'm not too familiar with the Reddit community, but isn't the Reddit experience designed to be customizable to your tastes? Can't you only subscribe to the subreddits that are populated with users who are just like you, if you wanted to?

 

[Yrael]

Also, "quarantining" still sounds like the worst idea ever.

Letting white supremacists surround themselves with other white supremacists sounds like it's just going to reinforce their beliefs and make things even worse.

That's pretty much what happens, yeah.

 

[Tacitus_]

I'm not too familiar with the Reddit community, but isn't the Reddit experience designed to be customizable to your tastes? Can't you only subscribe to the subreddits that are populated with users who are just like you, if you wanted to?

More or less. At the very least they'll be populated with users who have similar interests as you.

 

[eot]

Very. Some wonderful subs out there.

Some really terrible ones that you can completely ignore and avoid.

I don't know that I've ever found a wonderful sub. There are ones that aren't filled with misogyny and hate, but they still have their own obnoxious subculture where people laugh at the same fucking joke for years and it's impossible to voice an opinion that goes against the grain without being downvoted to hell.

 

[dLMN8R]

The CEO that preceded Pao, Yishan Wong, was CEO when reddit rid of /r/jailbait when Anderson Cooper featured it on a segment on CNN. He also was around when they got rid of subs like /r/niggers and /thefappening (aka a sub all about sharing those celeb nude leaks from last year.) Of course there was a sizable amount of backlash when those subs were taken down but Wong didn't get his face plastered all over the front page with swastikas and racial and sexist epithets for an entire week.

Whether Ellen Pao is a terrible CEO or human being is irrelevant. She got especially shat on by the reddit masses because she's a woman.

Yep, that's what I remembered too.

Misogyny directed at a terrible human being is still misogyny. It's not bad enough to hate someone because she's an awful person apparently. The most vocal and most upvoted attacks I saw on Reddit last week were clearly most upset with the fact that she's a woman.

 

[Father_Brain]

Really great read on why Reddit is probably unsalvageable: The Death of Reddit.

My favorite visualization of online communities is the community bar. I’ve used, managed and built online communities going back into the 1980s, many of them sports related, so it’s natural to look at those communities as sports bars. The thing I’ve always told people interested in community management is this: if you’re running a sports bar, and you have a gang of bikers move in, you have two choices. You can either eject the bikers, or you’re running a biker bar. I never set out intending to put my time and energy into a biker bar, so I always worked to prevent the rowdy elements from taking over my communities, because I knew that would cause the people I wanted to be around to leave and find some other place to be.

Here’s the thing. there are groups that don’t feel the need to behave, that see that rebellion against authority as the base of their enjoyment. And there are people who simply get off by destroying what others build or screwing up what others enjoy. If you invite those people into your house, eventually some of them are going to start pissing into your fireplace or throwing chairs at each other in the main hall. Even if you keep them in their own out of the way mostly hidden community room, the things they do will attract attention adn the authorities, and when the police come through your front door and raid your basement, your other patrons will notice. When that happens often enough, you’ll see more and more of those become ex-patrons. Most of us don’t want to party in a biker bar. Hell, most of us don’t want to party next door to a biker bar, or within blocks of a biker bar. Once your place gets that reputation, it’s going to make everyone around it nervous.

So Reddit is a cluster. The way the site is built technically is poor with weak tools for the admins and moderators. The rules that built the community and the way the power structure of the community is set up means the people with the most power have the least need to buy into Reddit’s attempts to take more power within the company and away from the volunteer moderators who have done most of the hard work with the site. Throw a lack of any real feedback system between company and moderators or users, and a lack of any real reward system to moderators by the company, and why is anyone surprised nobody particularly cares what the company wants if it doesn’t seem to benefit the users?
I see poor management with a naive attitude about the use of the site, weak tools and IP, a mis-aligned power structure where there’s no need for the people with the real power to care what the company wants, no real communication between company and its moderators or users, and a lot of really toxic users and groups that have caused the site major PR and reputation disasters but which the company is both reluctant and in many cases unable to control or remove.
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?
How do you fix this?
You don’t. You can’t. Reddit has failed, and we are now witnessing its immolation.

 

[Savitar]

I only believe something is dead when it's dead.

Nintendo never being dead taught me that after hearing it being said for a decade.

 

[Ivan Amiibo]

I only believe something is dead when it's dead.

Nintendo never being dead taught me that after hearing it being said for a decade.

it's more like an "if you call that living" thing for reddit.

 

[Jelly Rajah]

I don't know that I've ever found a wonderful sub.

https://www.reddit.com/r/OldSchoolCool

 

[Baki]

I like him already. [deleted] is the worst

He's the original founder of Reddit. They couldn't ask for a better CEO.

 

[bangbang i'm a timpani]

its baffling to me that people don't understand why fat people hate should not be allowed on the front page

 

[RockTurtle]

its baffling to me that people don't understand why fat people hate should not be allowed on the front page

there's people arguing that FPH should be frontpage?

 

[Beer Monkey]

THE front page, or my own front page?

No, I didn't sub fatpeoplehate and found it cringeworthy, but still.

 

[BreezyLimbo]

Also, "quarantining" still sounds like the worst idea ever.

Letting white supremacists surround themselves with other white supremacists sounds like it's just going to reinforce their beliefs and make things even worse.

Eh its really not. Look at 4chan for example, you have all the white supremacists quarantined to /pol/. And they're pretty much ridiculed elsewhere. If they try to pop up on any other board(except b) theyll get mocked, told to go pack to /pol/, and usually moderated. There was even a time where a mod stickied a thread on /pol/ literally mocking and steretyping the people on it, and made it so each post on the board was accompanied by 'this user is triggered'...Granted the difference is that the boards have set moderators/admins/janitors that ARENT elected or chosen by the boards users itself, and unlike reddit its a set number of boards..

 

[Tacitus_]

but they still have their own obnoxious subculture where people laugh at the same fucking joke for years and it's impossible to voice an opinion that goes against the grain without being downvoted to hell.

 

[Black-Box]

aka pictures of hot women in black & white

Whoops sorry.

 

[chaobreaker]

https://www.reddit.com/r/OldSchoolCool

That's a pretty good sub but I wished it wasnt 50% vintage boobs.

 

[Kite]

That's a pretty good sub but I wished it wasnt 50% vintage boobs.

Unless vintage boobs means any pic that dares to have a woman in the frame.. lol wrong?

 

[lanella]

Really great read on why Reddit is probably unsalvageable: The Death of Reddit.

That was a really good read, thanks for the link!

 

[Sober]

Really great read on why Reddit is probably unsalvageable: The Death of Reddit.

Also the hilariously sad part in the article is that if they want to re-do Reddit, it involves basically dismantling the current managerial structure and taking executive control, and in the meantime prepare to have your life become miserable as the seedy underbelly tries to fight back, clinging to the hope they can scare you off.

 

[Aureon]

Really great read on why Reddit is probably unsalvageable: The Death of Reddit.

Reddit has always been the biker bar, though. It's not a decision that's to be made now.

 

[Apath]

aka pictures of hot women in black & white

Yeah, totally. Definitely just hot women in black and white.

All taken from the top 15. And a few of the ones I didn't take had both men and women.

But please, do try harder.

It's a bunch of dudes, and everyone knows that there's nothing worse than the criminal act of being unattractive to a cesspool of peni.
Literally nothing.

Except fat people hate was not just men. It's pretty clear that you are positioning yourself on the polar end of the spectrum. Surely, because Ellen Pao was a female and asian, she did nothing wrong for reddit to turn on her. 100% fueled by sexism and racism.

 

[Phat Michael]

Yeah, totally. Definitely just hot women in black and white.

All taken from the top 15. And a few of the ones I didn't take had both men and women.

But please, do try harder.

Except fat people hate was not just men. It's pretty clear that you are positioning yourself on the polar end of the spectrum. Surely, because Ellen Pao was a female and asian, she did nothing wrong for reddit to turn on her. 100% fueled by sexism and racism.

I actually didn't see any hot women in black in white on the first 2 pages. And I was looking for them after that accusation and post.

It all seemed to be "my grandpa looking cool 50 years ago".

Oh well, distorted viewpoints can force any argument if you really want them to.

 

[OpinionatedCyborg]

It's a bunch of dudes, and everyone knows that there's nothing worse than the criminal act of being unattractive to a cesspool of peni.
Literally nothing.

You couldn't be more wrong about this. Several of the fatpeoplehate mods were women, and many of the posts in that subreddit were by women (example: http://web.archive.org/web/20150326..._i_was_told_yesterday_that_if_i_break_my_leg/), http://web.archive.org/web/20150326...307jav/got_thin_shamed_at_my_local_starbucks/. It unfortunately appealed to a fairly wide audience, not just young white males.

 

[HariKari]

I don't know that I've ever found a wonderful sub.

You haven't been trying. Probably reading defaults.

 

[IronChef]

it's impossible to voice an opinion that goes against the grain without being downvoted to hell.

Compared to "it's impossible to voice an opinion that goes against the grain without being banned", I'll take the downvote any day.

 

[Apath]

Chill out and see what I posted above. I've been subbed to that subreddit forever, though looking back the sarcasm wasn't the same in both points. The first was a joke WITHIN the subreddit, something I assumed anyone that actually was a part of the sub would get. Apparently not.

Also, get over your all or nothing position regarding Ellen. You're the one making that strawman.

Sorry for making assumptions when these are the posts I see from you:

That's because a female has no business trying to tell me what to do!
#residualmommyissues?

B-b-but there's no sexism.

Naw, the new CEO is a white male. Reddit isn't going to care.

And I do not have an all-or-nothing view on Pao; however it appeared to me that you did.

 

[Zaptruder]

So Alexis Ohanian is the cancerous underbelly of Reddit admins huh.

Unfortunately, we're unlikely to see the kind of lynch mob that we need to get him booted like with Ellen.

 

[A_Gorilla]

Compared to "it's impossible to voice an opinion that goes against the grain without being banned", I'll take the downvote any day.

The irony of this post...

 

[Acorn]

Compared to "it's impossible to voice an opinion that goes against the grain without being banned", I'll take the downvote any day.

IronChef
Banned


Lol

 

[Angelus Errare]

The CEO that preceded Pao, Yishan Wong, was CEO when reddit rid of /r/jailbait when Anderson Cooper featured it on a segment on CNN. He also was around when they got rid of subs like /r/niggers and /thefappening (aka a sub all about sharing those celeb nude leaks from last year.) Of course there was a sizable amount of backlash when those subs were taken down but Wong didn't get his face plastered all over the front page with swastikas and racial and sexist epithets for an entire week.

Whether Ellen Pao is a terrible CEO or human being is irrelevant. She got especially shat on by the reddit masses because she's a woman.

Very true, in fact you can even makes comparisons here on GAF. Look at how many threads we had on Pao and Reddit banning threads versus how many we had on Wong when he banned those threads.

I honestly don't even remember having any threads when Wong dropped those threads from Reddit on GAF. Most people didn't care and certainly didn't have as many members making thinly veiled racists jokes like comparing him to dictators or nonsense about libertarian or free speech and whatever other drivel they used when Pao did what she did to those subreddits.

 

[OpinionatedCyborg]

I don't think being a woman makes you immune from taking part in a culture that mostly shames women for being unattractive.

There are plenty of women on /r/redpillwomen, but that doesn't make some of their beliefs any less sexist.

Reddit's overall demographic is largely male, just like Pinterest is largely female.

And yes, I get that it's tempting to want to fight body shaming with body shaming. I am skinny. I know what it's like to get hate for your body. I don't think the answer is to make a subreddit called fatpeoplehate. There's a difference between finding/mocking a fact pattern that is absurd/wrong, and bullying someone. FPH was the latter. It used to not be like that, but at the height of its popularity it really became something pretty gross. Two wrongs not making a right and all.

I'm not going to argue with your first point or last points because I agree with them.

Pinterest is analogous to the reddit of 4 - 5 years ago, but not so much today. If I had to guess, I would bet that 5 years ago reddit had a 90:10 male:female ratio whereas now it's closer to 60:40. Pinterest is still overwhelmingly female.

Very true, in fact you can even makes comparisons here on GAF. Look at how many threads we had on Pao and Reddit banning threads versus how many we had on Wong when he banned those threads.

I honestly don't even remember having any threads when Wong dropped those threads from Reddit on GAF. Most people didn't care and certainly didn't have as many members making thinly veiled racists jokes like comparing him to dictators or nonsense about libertarian or free speech and whatever other drivel they used when Pao did what she did to those subreddits.

You mean subreddits. A subreddit is a forum. A thread is a discussion within a forum. Pao and Wong removed subreddits, not threads (although I hear Pao did censor threads about her husband's ongoing criminal case).

 

[chaobreaker]

Yishan Wong (/u/Yishan), the CEO of reddit that preceded Ellen Wong, was throwing shade at admin and reddit board member Alexis Ohanian a couple of hours ago. Particularly on him letting Pao take the fall for the firing of Victoria when that was all on him. Alexis even pops up to reply to his comments.

Ex-employees are publicly discussing the circumstances of other former employees' termination. No respect for NDA at all. Just airing the dirty laundry of reddit going down for all the see.

It's like watching the world's slowest trainwreck.