Clearly, you've never been called niggerfag jewcunt 437 times in 24 hours, had your wife's life threatened and had people attempt to brute force your password for six months.
The only thing worse than an angry mob is an angry, impotent mob.
I've ventured back lately. What I've noticed is that commenting on Reddit makes me angry and jumpy for hours afterward. It's a deeply confrontational place.
The first time I visited Reddit I was shocked by what a nasty place it was. Then I adapted to it. I got good at "Redditing." Which means it turned me into a nasty mutherfucker. Thing is, so's everybody else so you get so you don't notice it any more.
I enjoy not being so nasty. It's taking me time and I still relapse, but I'm all about any place where conversations can be rewarding without being confrontational.
I think it has more to do with Reddit's efficiency of pushing "cream" to the top when "cream" means "anything people feel passionately about." When Reddit was smaller, that "cream" tended to represent the values of bookish, erudite computer programmers. It now represents a broad swath of humanity, which means the things that are the most appealing are the things that are the broadest - base emotions.
Reddit pushes "happy" very hard. However, it also pushes "outrage." My first 3 digit comment was a pure vitriolic spew of hatred - it got 600 upvotes, back when 600 upvotes was unheard of. Most of the rest of them weren't - but Reddit has definitely been appealing to a broader, baser audience for quite a while now.
Basically try your best to keep this site relatively small. I don't think we should do anything drastic like making the site 18, mainly because it would have the same effect of making porn sites 18. Plus, don't forget that not everyone under 18 is a dumbass, I'm 17 and have been around a pretty long time.
It's just another one of the reasons I like Hubski, and why I'm against seeing certain types of content here.
In it, I warn him of impending Anderson Cooperdom.
In it, I warn him that Reddit's inability to police its users was going to bite him in the ass but hard.
They've known they've had this problem, and they've known they've been vulnerable. The problem is, the minute they decide to start policing content, THEY CAN NEVER STOP.
It's really not a moral issue for them. They paint it as one because it allows them to be lazy. It's a practical issue - they've got 14 people there, 5 of them are half-time, 2 of them are marketing, and the rest of them are coders. They've had an open invitation for a "community manager" since September 10th but they haven't hired anyone.
The interesting thing now is that SA has learned that they can push Reddit around in hours. Not only that, but they haven't begun to find all the hives of content that they must now police. SA is not likely to warn them when they find it (and they will go looking). SA is likely to jump up and down shouting "BOOGA BOOGA BOOGA GOOGLEBOMB!" just to see the admins dance.
it's not a small problem, either. I've seen a Quantcast report for Reddit from 2009 in which the term "jailbait" was fully 20% of their referral traffic. That's another reason Reddit emphasizes Google analytics over any of the accepted traffic counters.
Interesting times.
[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/pmk22/admins...
I recognize that this is a harsh thing to say, but he's lying.
Reddit has always stood forth against censorship. In part, this is a libertarian thing. Mostly it's because they don't want to be censors. If you're going to say "this is not allowed" you need a mechanism in place to deal with things that aren't allowed. Reddit lacks this mechanism.
Bans are hand-coded - Huey has to write them in, one at a time. IP bans aren't possible. I've had maybe six (closed door) conversations with first keysersosa, then jedberg, then hueypriest about why they don't just block URLs if spam is really such an issue. They've never once answered this - it falls in their "we have a secret" category and they get all cagey.
Thing is, you can reverse engineer what they can and can't do. If they could block domains that they don't want, they would. They can't. Reddit's code is open-source, has been since 2007. Yet nobody runs it (well, almost nobody: http://webtoid.com/r/beatingwomen/ ). The only part that isn't open-source is their "anti-spam" measures, which they keep really really secret, and which they insist aren't just them going around and fuzzing data and obfuscating things from users... because if that's what they're doing, then their traffic numbers become suspect etc. etc.
So whenever you talk about "why, theoretically, can't you do (simple thing that would make things so much better for your community)?" the answer is always either "we'd love to, but we can't explain why we can't do that right now" or "for reasons that violate our anti-spam policy."
The emperor has no clothes.
SomethingAwful just gave Reddit a choice: start policing the content of 1.4 million people, by hand, with fewer people than are on a basketball court... or face the unholy wrath of a media machine that hates pedophiles more than Ahmadinejad. One lowly Anderson Cooper story didn't cause them to do anything, which should tell you how much they hate doing this.
And it's not because they're big fans of child porn. And it's not because they're die-hard libertarians with a strict originalist view of civil rights.
It's because they face an existential threat.
Reddit celebrated when they were moved sideways, directly under Advance Media rather than Conde Nast. I'll bet they didn't celebrate half as much as Conde Nast did.
Remember, this is a company that just launched an entertainment company:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2011/10/11/conde-n...
...can you think of a better way to get in the MPAA's good graces than, say, killing the website that launched the SOPA protests?
Like I said, interesting times.
...focus on sexualization of children. Our goal is to be fair and consistent, so if you find a subreddit we may have missed, please message the admins. If you find specific content that meets this definition please message the moderators of the subreddit, and the admins.
I gather Something Awful was launching some sort of action against them, which might have precipitated the action.
lets face it they are a company they are here to make money
Reddit has long had a TOS that their lawyer told them to adopt early on saying, basically, "we reserve the right to pull anything, and don't go posting anything that gets us in trouble, Little Rabbit Fru Fru, or we'll turn you into a goon." The problem is that Reddit has no mechanism whatsoever to deal with anyone violating their TOS on any scale.
One of Reddit's earliest prominent users was a creepy guy who went by "p3do." He was, he made no bones about it, a pedophile. Before IAmA, he had lots of interesting conversations about what actually drives pedophiles - and if he was a troll, he was an exceptionally good one. That dude was creepy. Kevin Bacon in "The Woodsman" creepy.
One day, p3do just up and disappeared. No explanation was given. I even talked to Jedberg about it, in person, off the record - and he refused to discuss it.
https://twitter.com/#!/p3do/statuses/1713672159 (warning - the rest of the account's tweets are unsettling in the extreme)
So Reddit disappeared him.
And unlike Violentacrez, who has a self-promoting streak a mile wide, p3do disappeared into the night. The admins were able to make the problem go away the only way they know how - a strategic first strike without warning. You'll note that when they warned Violentacrez about /r/jailbait the stupid thing ended up back online due to outcry. p3d0 didn't have any friends, didn't make it a 1st amendment issue, and that was that.
Reddit has no problem with the morality of policing content. They have a problem with the practicality of policing content. The reason this whole thing isn't overblown is that SomethingAwful forced their hand - they made a big stink to require Reddit to enforce their TOS. Reddit now has to enforce said TOS with the exact same resources they had yesterday - ie, none.
And they can't pick and choose, either. One whiff of favoritism and that site goes full retard. How many front page events do you think they're due in which someone says "they censored this but not that! They came after me but not him! ROBBLE ROBBLE ROBBLE!"?
That's the issue: Reddit, a fundamentally lawless place, just blinked and said they're going to try and enforce laws... without the most rudimentary beginnings of a police force.