So the new Reddit CEO — returning co-founder Steve “Spez” Huffman — announced the site’s much-anticipated new content guidelines today, and to say that they are disappointing is a bit of an understatement.
Essentially, he told the site’s many varieties of bigots that they could continue to spout their various bigotries on Reddit without repercussions, so long as they didn’t actually threaten to, you know, go out and murder or otherwise physically harm people whose sexual preferences or skin color or religion (or whatever) didn’t meet their approval.
Only now the bigots will be posting on Reddit s dime.
No, really.
Reddit’s new policy on hate speech is to make hateful content “opt-in,” like the site’s NSFW subreddits are now. Oh, and to not embarrass the site’s advertisers by running ads next to blatantly hateful garbage.
As Huffman explained in a posting on Reddit, under the new policy
it’s ok to say “I don’t like this group of people.” It’s not ok to say, “I’m going to kill this group of people.”
Hateful content — or, as Reddit euphemistically puts it, “content that violates a common sense of decency” — will be “reclassified” but not banned. The “indecent” stuff
will require a login, must be opted into, will not appear in search results or public listings, and will generate no revenue for Reddit.
What this means in practical terms, Huffman explained in a followup comment, is that
r/rapingwomen will be banned. They are encouraging people to rape.
r/coontown will be reclassified. The content there is offensive to many, but does not violate our current rules for banning.
So, yeah, Reddit’s grand plan to deal with its bigots is to … subsidize them.
I can’t even.
Adding to the repugnance of this “hide the hate, but keep hosting it” policy is the fact that, in the wake of the #RedditRevolt against now ex-CEO Ellen Pao, and Dylan Roof’s racist murders in Charlestown, South Carolina, /coontown and other blatantly racist subreddits have seen a giant boost in traffic, with more than 18,000 subscribers and roughly 200,000 page views a day.
As MrTomFTW noted in a posting on r/GamerGhazi, r/coontown is
closing in to matching Stormfront’s traffic. This means that Reddit could soon be host to the largest active white supremacist forum on the Internet.
Actually, that’s understating things a little. If you add Reddit’s other racist subreddits into the mix, Reddit is already the number one destination for white supremacists looking for a place to talk online.
And Reddit will keep footing the bill.
Also, of note: people who go on these racist subreddits can still fund Reddit’s servers. All you need to do is gild a racist copypasta in one of the defaults.
http://38.media.tumblr.com/9ce05664f435fd86871cceadf36ef4da/tumblr_inline_nr4tt3NaPv1qa6ru2_500.gif
Reblogged this on Subspace Radio Signals and commented:
So that’s why the rape philosophy forums are still up.
Reddit needs to die.
If reddit is the toilet seat of the internet then i strongly advise you use one of these when visiting.
http://www.mikethebagman.com/toilet_seat_cover_1.jpg
“Don’t worry, it’s just a name….Snake Island is actually a peninsula!” 🙂
This is totally about ethics in frozen peaches.
I don’t suppose r/TheRedPill and r/MensRights/ will be consigned to their very own “safe space”.
quoting /u/CanVox from /r/GamerGhazi
“The correct protest is for the defaults to all consign themselves to the pit, depriving reddit of cash…”
Can we have this happen? Pretty, please?
…Reddit, why? Why spend your company’s funds to keep hatred around? Why use ad revenue generated from user’s posting kittens to subsidize users calling treating other humans as less worthy of respect than dirt?
PEOPLE’S KITTEN PICS ARE LITERALLY SUBSIDIZING HATE ON YOUR SITE!
Reddit? What is wrong with you!?
…You know a company isn’t long for the world when the CEO lacks a basic understanding of business and their own client base.
Dear Reddit,
Free speech does not entitle someone to a platform. You aren’t obligated to give bigots a platform for their hatred. You can’t say you don’t support bigotry when you are making the deliberate choice to host them and their hatred.
Sincerely,
Anyone with any common decency.
Can’t say I’m surprised. His “Teaser” announcement…
… And Yishan’s comment on it…
… Were an obvious pack of lies visible from the moon, designed to keep the heat off for a day or two while the Pao fiasco settled before forging on full steam ahead. I’m just wondering how you and other watchdogs are supposed to keep tabs on them now (if I was a cynical person, I’d say that this “Opt-in” stuff was really designed not to keep hate subs “Hidden,” but to make it harder on watchdogs and pad their user numbers – and I am, so I will).
And yes, I’m sure the Reddit Defense Force will be here shortly to call me a conspiracy theorist. But so far, they’ve either scammed Conde Nast or lied about scamming Conde Nast, set Pao up to fail, thrown her to the mercy of the bigots as a pre-planned scapegoat, lied about setting her up and scapegoating her, lied about cracking down on hate subs, lied about who’s even in charge…
Oh, and tried taking full credit for Pao shutting down /r/FatPeopleHate. Despite this new announcement making that blatantly bullshit.
People with fully functioning consciences need to stop using Reddit. Boycott it and let it rot.
Vagaries of fate to be thankful for, part 813:
Reddit, thank you for being impossible to navigate in any kind of sane way and thank you for being ugly as sin. Made it far, far easier to disengage from you when the entirety of my use was finding Pokemon friend codes.
Dear Reddit,
Frank Sinatra said it best:
http://media.giphy.com/media/8fW8hBH6ncjle/giphy.gif
I hope your website sinks back into the cesspool of the Internet, and good people see you and yours are full of shit, and stop using your site because they’re decent human beings.
Good day.
Yeah, I think it’s about time that Reddit just needs to be cleansed away in the Internet version of fire and the ashes doused in salt and bleach.
You know, I’m willing to bet the subreddits they didn’t take down have just as many people advocating violence as the ones they banned.
Here’s what I’m hoping for. Their plan is to take all the odious subredits private as the first step in actually eliminating them. Later they’ll claim that the lack of revenue from those reddits means they have to be shut down, because they can’t afford to subsidize them any longer.
They may think that doing the elimination in two stages will produce less backlash than just cutting them off at once. Or that cutting them off for financial reason will be easier for the redditers to take and produce less backlash than claiming they’re being cut off because they’re hateful.
Alternatively, once they go private, they’ll start taking them down 1 or 2 at a time because the pushback won’t be nearly as organized if they’re all private.
Reddit: “We’re gonna hide your content, prevent it from being searchable, take out our ads so we don’t profit off of you, and generally isolate you from the rest of our site, making you essentially equivalent to an external site.
But we still are going to host your content. For very, very important reasons. We need you to be associated with our site, despite taking every other possible avenue to avoid associating you with our site.”
What’s the fucking point, exactly? A fetish for Free Speech doesn’t explain their willingness to basically hide away all the offensive content from the majority of the public. What’s the point except to send a clear public message that you really, REALLY want racists to use your website?
Is it bad that my reaction was “This is better than I expected. At least they banned r/rapingwomen.”?
I wouldn’t worry too much about the huge spike in Coontown traffic. While I think it will attract a larger audience, I’m sure many are just curious onlookers checking out what everyone is talking about.
Psst, Paradoxical, I sent you a link on Steam. (◡‿◡✿)
Yeah, I wasn’t a fan of reddit before, but now I won’t ever go there, I don’t want my page views funding the hate speech.
See, this is what happens when we tell people they’re entitled to their opinions – rather than just allowed.
Except shit like this isn’t “just an opinion” and an indicator of the person’s ethical character. They’re holding and promoting sentiments that, directly or indirectly, effect whole groups of people in a detrimental fashion. There’s absolutely no value to it that makes deserving of being defended under the idea of free speech.