Earlier this week, Reddit announced a perplexing new plan to “contain” the worst bigots on the site. Instead of simply banning the bigots, their subreddits would simply be “reclassified.” Redditors would have to sign into them much as they now sign into the site’s NSFW subreddits, and, presumably to avoid angering advertisers, Reddit would remove all ads from them.
In other words, as I noted the other day, Reddit has decided to fight the bigots … by funding ad-free forums for them.
Well, the folks in the 4/chan subreddit (not 4chan itself; the Reddit incarnation of it) want to get into that sweet, sweet ad-free action. So one enterprising channer suggested that they spam a thread with the n-word to prove they’re as hateful as the hateful assholes of r/coontown:
![NIGGER POSTAs many of you have heard, reddit admins are now providing ad-free bandwith to racist hate subs... (self.4chan) submitted 21 hours ago by reese_ridley/he does it for free/[M] - stickied post ...and apparently the admins think we aren't racist enough to receive these great benefits. What the fuck? ITT we spam "nigger" to remove ads from /r/4chan forever](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/4chann.png?resize=433%2C249&ssl=1)
And spam they did. Here’s a portion of the top comment in the thread:
The comment continues on for a time in this fashion.
Other commenters had similar ideas; this one was so relentless I made a half-hearted attempt at censoring it.
![TasselHat [score hidden] 14 hours ago If you smell something funny when you walk down the street, you're in Coon Town. You look and see garbage all over the street, you're in Coon Town. Up and down the street there ain't nothing but trash, nigger girls trying to get a nigger boy's cash. Then you even see a spook with a big moustache, in Coon Town. On the corner there's a nigger with a drink in his hand, that's Coon Town. Trying to bum a nickel from whoever he can, in Coon Town. Don't be surprised, you can make a bet, if you go back tomorrow he'll be there yet. He's trying to get drunk and drunk he's gonna get, in Coon Town. Niggers never bother about going to work, in Coon Town. They seem to think that work is for jerks, outta Coon Town. They don't do nothing but sleep and doze, he don't wake until his eyes are tired of being closed. It's half a day's work for him to scratch his toes, in Coon Town. It amazes me to see the way they live, in Coon Town. They do all the taking while we have to give, to Coon Town. The White man worries, the nigger don't care, cause at the end of the month his check will be there. Every nigger earns his living off the old welfare, in Coon Town. Every nigger earns his living off the old welfare, in Coon Town. I HATE NIGGERS YES I DO I HATE NIGGERS AND YOU SHOULD TOO I HATE NIGGERS YES I DO I HATE NIGGERS AND YOU SHOULD TOO I HATE NIGGERS YES I DO I HATE NIGGERS AND YOU SHOULD TOO I HATE NIGGERS YES I DO I HATE NIGGERS AND YOU SHOULD TOO I HATE NIGGERS YES I DO I HATE NIGGERS AND YOU SHOULD TOO I HATE NIGGERS YES I DO I HATE NIGGERS AND YOU SHOULD TOO I HATE NIGGERS YES I DO I HATE NIGGERS AND YOU SHOULD TOO I HATE NIGGERS YES I DO I HATE NIGGERS AND YOU SHOULD TOO I HATE NIGGERS YES I DO I HATE NIGGERS AND YOU SHOULD TOO I HATE NIGGERS YES I DO I HATE NIGGERS AND YOU SHOULD TOO I HATE NIGGERS YES I DO I HATE NIGGERS AND YOU SHOULD TOO I HATE NIGGERS YES I DO I HATE NIGGERS AND YOU SHOULD TOO I HATE NIGGERS YES I DO I HATE NIGGERS AND YOU SHOULD TOO I HATE NIGGERS YES I DO I HATE NIGGERS AND YOU SHOULD TOO I HATE NIGGERS YES I DO I HATE NIGGERS AND YOU SHOULD TOO](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/f4channcens.png?resize=580%2C486&ssl=1)
You get the idea.
Brilliant move, Reddit admins! You surrendered to the bigots and now they’re walking all over you.
H/T — r/GamerGhazi
The front page of Reddit can have pink elephants for all we care, our problem is Reddit willingness to host and promote hate speech by doing absolutely nothing to prevent it and giving bigots a platform for their stupid shit to reach new frontiers. That’s representative of Reddit, not the content it hosts since the content is representative for their users, but of its policies as a platform.
Reddit’s image does equal to the worst of the subs when they enact policies that enable the worst of the subs to operate, is like when gators say #notallgators, you know what you should do to keep people from mixing you with bigots and assholes?
Stop associating with bigots and assholes, is seriously that easy, how about it?
There’s also something to be said about their moderation tools and policies but I don’t care enough about Reddit to know and comment on that
Instead of standing up the the terrible people they are too afraid of getting a barrage of death threats so they roll over for them.
‘Worst parts’ of Reddit is a somewhat relative term. I spent a vast amount of time on the cleaner, more popular parts of that site as a youth, and at the moment every single paragraph I read in Lolita is giving me horrible, horrible flashbacks to them.
You do realize that you can “customize” the front page to show whatever you want, right? I have an account on Reddit to keep track of some of my favorite YouTubers, so I customized my front page to only show stuff from their subreddits.
So, that’s kind of a bullshit argument, considering that every Reddit user can customize their front page to see what they want to see, instead of everything all at once. Most users who are aware of this will most likely never see bigotry on the front page, because they will have made it so bigoted subreddits don’t show up.
However, let’s say that reddit is being viewed by someone who doesn’t have an account, or by someone who hasn’t customized their front page.
Yeah, they’re not going to see bigotry, because Reddit doesn’t like to advertise that they’re a hive of bigotry. Bigots don’t like to outwardly say they’re bigots, because that means that they’re in the wrong. Just like racists don’t like to hear they’re racists, and sexists don’t like to hear they’re sexists.
They know the word is bad, and they don’t want it applied to them, despite them being the living definition.
Also, “The titles of the posts on the front page seem fine” isn’t really a metric that the front page is fine. The question is more whether a woman who happens to post in one of those topics is likely to get greeted with “Tits or GTFO,” and that sort of thing.
Would it make more sense to say:
‘If the cherry is hate, that page is not an orchard. It’s a dessert.’
just a suggestion.
This has to be one of the greatest PR fuckups of all time.
“We aren’t going to ban hateful people just contain them”, and this happens the very next day.
It’s a damn shame. Reddit could have been something great…..but it’s been totally overrun by the detritus of human society: racists, misogynists, wannabe child molesters, etc., not to mention all the trolls in general-hell, it could give 4chan a run for their money!
@anon
We’re talking about the co-founders of Reddit. I assume they are just like these terrible people, though they probably get their kicks through anonymous accounts.
Considering that people are fed up with the free for all/no rules apply internet culture, I would think that by diligently moderating Reddit would make better financial sense. If people can be reasonably assured that they can visit the website without dirtbag edgelords screaming the n-word or making rape jokes, then traffic will increase and more advertisers will buy space. People can have a pleasant experience and the admins make more money for the company. Win win, right? Or am I just being silly?
What’s going on now is like giving the worst people their own VIP room and bottle service.
@Had
The front page of reddit could be nothing but the cutest of kittens and the most progressive of discussions and it doesn’t change the fact that they still happily host shit like The Philosophy of Rape and racist subreddits. Of course they don’t splash it on the front page, that’d be bad for business.
Meanwhile, /r/PhilosophyofRape is being deleted, and they’re creating their own web site in response: https://np.reddit.com/r/PhilosophyOfRape/comments/3dqwa9/our_new_website_philosophyofrapenet_has_been/
Chris, if you could link stuff like that through donotlink.com in the future, that’d be great. Just a friendly request.
I put your link through there if anyone would like to view it without giving that awful subreddit page views.
http://www.donotlink.com/fzqq
It shows that these people aren’t just going to go away through being “contained”. Their childish hatred spills out into the less offensive places.
Google’s “nofollow” tag is generally better than donotlink (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en)
This sentence is gonna be ugly, but here goes: donotlink.com links link to the donotlink.com website. They will only take you to the actual content for as long as donotlink.com stays live and chooses to provide the service. Also, the redirect itself means you have to load 2 pages instead of one.
If you make a link with a nofollow tag, google won’t use it for page rank, but the link itself works like a normal link. There’s no extra load time, and the link will work for as long as the content itself is there.
Orion, thanks. I’ll experiment with that.
I’d think that for many usefs of donotlink, it’s not the Google page rank they’re necessarily worried about so much as the Referer header that allows people with log access to the destination website to see where their traffic is coming from. Particularly when the destination site is known to contain regular harassers, this is definitely something to be concerned about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_referer#Referer_hiding
Donotlink and most other refresh setups remove the referrer. HTML5 has an explicit ‘noreferrer’ tag to set links to not send a referrer header. But the ‘nofollow’ tag only blocks conforming search engines and doesn’t stop the source from ending up in the logs of the destination web server.
The Do Not Link service has always seemed to me to be like security theatre at the airport — it doesn’t really do much good, it just makes people feel better. At the cost of hassle.
And it can only increase page views for the offending site. The page from the site still gets loaded — it just gets loaded in Do Not Link’s frame. Plus, people like me who can’t stand frames (we are legion) then right-click and choose View Frame In New Window, which loads the page again, adding another page view.
I think it is link juice that people are trying to avoid — the more links Google sees, the higher a page ranks in search results. But the effect from a site like WHTM is probably minor, especially if we’re talking about a page at Reddit. The nofollow tag is a better option. Invisible to the user, same effect.
The whole enterprise seems slightly slightly slightly shady to me, though. Google is trying to measure what people are talking about, not what people approve of. Why mess with the accuracy of that? And what are the better search results in the future that you’re expecting by lowering the rank of the page you are (not) linking to? Do you know that they’ll be better for your attempt at tampering?
A lot of people (myself included) get sucked into reddit because of the seemingly innocuous content on the default “front page” that non-registered users see when they first visit. The more time you spend there, though, the harder it becomes to ignore the pervasive undercurrent of cishet white male supremacy that touches almost every corner of the site. Basically, if you’re hanging out on any subs that aren’t primarily devoted to cute animal pics, you’re going to run into it again and again and again. Eventually, I realized that I was spending most of my time on the default subs trying to talk back against the casual misogyny (and other bigotry) that I kept seeing EVERYWHERE – and oftentimes, the response I got would consist largely of derogatory slurs. That’s when I discovered SRS and other anti-bigotry subs like r/thebluepill. Now I spend pretty much all of my reddit time in places like that where I know I’m not going to be called a cunt just for being a woman with an opinion (at least not by someone who will be allowed to continue abusing me without being banned, that is).
Here’s a comic I saw a while ago that perfectly sums up the experience of discovering reddit, and then actually getting involved in it as more than an unregistered lurker. (Don’t know who/where this originally comes from, otherwise I’d give credit where credit is due.)
Are you fucking serious? When a website hosts advertisements for a profit, the amount of money they make is determined by the quantifiable amount of visitors their site receives. The point of things like donotlink.com and Google’s “nofollow” tag is to prevent offensive sites from making even MORE money in ad revenue because of traffic received from people who are only checking the site out BECAUSE of how offensive it is. Ad revenue is based on NUMBERS, not on whether the people visiting a site “approve” of the content or not.
I don’t know what your deal is, but you’re a really crappy troll.
@Gets Said Often Enough Already
Are you aware that a lot of time and money is spent on placing high in search engines? If a site is a known reactionary cesspit that goes in for inflammatory clickbait (Reddit, the Daily Mail), it’s reasonable to deny them the oxygen of publicity. Can you see how that principle is more appealing than an intellectual crusade for pure objectivity and accuracy in search engine results?
Referrer-hiding is the most obvious (to me) benefit of using donotlink or similar. When the destination is somebody’s blog that enables automatic pingbacks/trackbacks, direct linking there can create an automatic comment that leads the troll army straight back here. It’s not immediately obvious whether each harrassment site does this (I have no idea whether subreddit mods get to see their referrers, for example), so hiding links uniformly is the safest policy.
You’re right that donotlink doesn’t reduce page views/ad revenue – it’s a redirect, not a mirror. On the plus side, if we’re linking (via redirects, nofollow or otherwise) to Reddit’s newly ad-free pages, we’re no longer providing them with the page views they need.
Why the fuck is there a swastika wingding/emoji thing?
Completeness.
@ Newt
Based on your comment, I guess I was wrong to assume that donotlink affects ad revenue. I’ll keep that in mind, and will try to remember to use “nofollow” links instead of donotlink from now on.
Regardless of all that crap, though, I’m still not sure why “Had To Be Said” feels the need to try and convince us that any attempts to avoid directly linking to sites filled with hate speech is suuuuuuuch a pointless waste of time, no matter what the circumstances, and that we should all feel dumb for doing it.
According to Google, it’s a Chinese character for the original good luck symbol, not the Nazi swastika.