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.
I remember once upon a time Reddit had a banner instead of an ad that said something like “Since you turned off AdBlock, here is a picture of a happy duck!” I guess it’s now going to be “Since you are a white supremacist, here is a picture of a happy duck!”
So far, the idea is similar not to the “Deep Web”, but to sites like Deviantart requiring a login to view R-18 content. Though in this case the category is “offensive” instead of “explicit”.
In addition to all of the other reasons this is a Very Bad Idea that people have already covered, there’s also this one: There is zero way, none whatsoever, that the banned subreddits’ regulars are going to stay in their ad-free haven. I mean, if they ever exercised anything resembling rational thought, they would be ecstatic at this arrangement, but I doubt many are.
If it haven’t already happened, I am positive that the banned subreddits will be making raids on SJW and/or cute fluffy subreddits. A lot. Until some higher ups somewhere cave to their demands.
In my (admittedly limited) moderation experience, it seems to me that garbage-spewing trolls aren’t content to have a designated space in which they can spew their garbage. They want to be able to do it everywhere, and make it everyone else’s responsibility to like it or lump it. They don’t want a corner of Reddit; they want to run it.
I wonder who gets to play whack-a-mole with the raids and new subreddits that will be (or already are) raining down on them.
I wonder if Philosophy of Rape will get taken down or just unlisted.
Front page of the Internet my ass.
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/16/reddit-decency-reckoning-ellen-pao-trolls
The most interesting info in the story is that all but one mod for r/catholic is also a mod on some type of disgusting rape or gore sub-forum too. They have to appease their worst elements. The racists and misogynists and future mass murderers are also moderating Reddit’s mainstream forums in their spare time from being horrible people.
This is a very cogent summary of my experience too.
He has no standards. This all comes off rather sociopathic to me actually, in the sense of lacking the empathy to understand why anyone is having a problem with them and just assuming that if they hide the problem it will go away.
Still holding out hope that this is simply a delaying tactic on their part. They realize that the denizens of threatened sub reddits are primed to explode all over reddit if they cut them off now. That giving them space and cutting them off later will result in far less disruption.
They may think that making the sub reddits private will knock the traffic down a bit and make them easier to deal with later.
Personally, if I’d been in charge of reddit [shudder], I’d have made a clean break, put up with the shitstorm for a week or two, ban a bunch of people and be done with it. Would not be surprised if you banned 100 people and got rid of 90% of the vileness.
Don’t really think the people that run reddit will eliminate the underbelly but that the investors who have poured millions into it and want a profit will.
Translation: We had no idea what we were up to going in, and we still haven’t a fucking clue. All we really care about is all those sweet, sweet clicks from rubes like you. Is the bafflegab working?
Pharyngula today linked to this Daily Beast article, which is a good analysis of why Reddit’s structure has the function of not merely allowing hate sites, but actively encouraging them to nest there:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/07/11/reddit-s-terrorists-have-won-ellen-pao-and-the-failure-to-rebrand-web-2-0.html
ick ick ick ick ick ick ick
ICK
I love that he realizes that certain content violates a sense of human decency, but it never occurs to him to just not host that content.
…as a highschooler, I was a big user of GameFAQs. That website had a huge forum that had grown far beyond the scope of just talking about how to beat video games, and included a board called “Life, the Universe, and Everything,” or LUE, which I’m sure was at least spiritually one of the ancestors to /b/. They ended up doing something-or-other which turned out to be the last straw for the site’s creator and then-owner, but instead of just wiping LUE off the site, he made a weird policy where only accounts created before the date of the last straw thing, would be able to post to or even view LUE. In other words, the population of LUE now had a ceiling, and as people fucked up and got banned, the ranks of LUE would thin out and become irrelevant.
I never paid much attention to LUE, so I don’t know how effective this plan was in the end. I wanted to tell the story though, because I think there’s a possibility gating off subreddits like /coontown is an opening to some sort of similar attempt at a slow death.
But I could be wrong, and Scented Fucking Hard Chairs could have a much better idea of Yishan just posturing and appeasing while making no serious changes.
Do you have to subscribe to reddit, or to the individual subreddits? It’s the latter that I worry about, since it may allow the subreddit mods to limit access to those who might report negatively on them.
@pandapool:
True – as they say, what’s a thousand MRAs chained to the bottom of ocean? 😀
@Freemage — great article, though the comments on it lowered my IQ a few notches.
I forget who said it about reddit sounding like the deeper bit the deep Web does have a lot of good uses too, you just don’t hear about them as often.
It is used by human rights or resistance groups as a way to communicate I’m oppressive countries, used by governments to send important or classified information, used by the military and spies for the same reasons, which is good or bad depending on how you view such things. It is also used as a back market, which isn’t always a drugs and weapons thing but sometimes a way to smuggle in banned ideas or books. It has a lot of uses but allowing people to communicate below the radar and it’s uses by our own governments are the most important.
I guess thiswant no hoped for purge. I don’t think they have any idea what they will end up doing but are trying to do the least possible to appease investors.
I think they hope to get ad revenue from people who would leave if they weren’t allowed to hate, simply because people uses lots of varying subreddits. And I imagine to opt in might just be like the NSFW now, where you just have to say I agree and don’t need to be logged in. Although with a different warning label.
@Jane, Z, and Robjec
Oh, I see! Thanks for taking the time to help me understand this better. At least I can say I learned something in the wake of all this awful.
The Deep Web also has some completely boring, mundane uses. Anyone who telecommutes, or does any kind of banking, is using the Deep Web.
@Catalpa
Np it’s actually something I learned recently from a cracked interview about the Arab spring. (Which was sourced and I checked the source)
I’m always spruced how much I learn from there. :p
*surprised (don’t know how to edit this on my phone)
If reddit didn’t subsidize hateful people, reddit would not exist.
Reddit should get the same companies that handle rebates for PC components to manage the opt-in process. 4 months plus 2 pieces of snail mailed identification later and you will finally be able to let everyone know how much of a shit you are. (Maybe!)
Also, that Frank Sinatra gif is a misquote. It should actually read, “As long as I hate your guts, I’ll take pictures of you getting raped.”
The only thing I read at Reddit is creepypms. Given what I’ve been finding out about Reddit lately*, I am not sure how long that particular subreddit is going to be around.
*I didn’t know a lot, and most of my meatspace friends knew even less. It’s as if many people don’t follow this kind of news.