Quote 1 It seems that sub-reddits, as a place for horribleness to congregate, is the problem. We don't have sub-reddits. We have tags... I just looked at our tags and they all seem pretty damn wholesome. We sometimes have a lot of spam, but it seems that bestiality and hate have never taken hold here -- or have I missed something? (I'd rather not know).Is it possible to facilitate a space for open dialogue without also facilitating hoaxes, harassment, and threats of violence?
ummm, Hubski?
There are only 50-60 real, active users here. The morons come in, act like morons and their engagement falls to zero fairly quickly. Since these style of people feed on attention and drama, and since Hubski is really good at denying them this oxygen they desperately need to live, they go elsewhere. If you want to post bestiality or other terrible stuff? There are multiple other sites where that style of content won't stick out and even some where that content would be encouraged because outrage and shock are 'funny' to some people. I'd list a few that I've run across but doing so helps them in the Google rankings, so no.
The fundamental DNA of Reddit is built on engagement and proliferation. It is designed to generate inbound links first and foremost, and gamifies the generation of inbound links. As it evolved they've welded on bits to gamify the generation of internal links but it's still basically a click farm. Controversy sells. Reddit sells a lot of controversy. That's their metric. Period.
I think for now, we can't really tell because we're a really small community. Let's say a bestiality group takes up refuge here and only interacts under their own #bestiality tags... sure we could all ignore them. But then, it's the same old subreddit problem again. I think we have a different and better system here, but we can't truly know the limits until it gets a big overload - kind of like the reddit invasions we get.
The tags are much better than the subreddits. You can't sit on a tag and create a unified culture around it like you can a sub. If you make a The_Donald tag, you can't ban liberals from using it, and thus anyone on that tag will see all kinds of things. If you're on Reddit you moderate that sub, anything you don't like can be filtered away from the audience thus pushing radicalization. Reddit has that structure problem -- it's designed ground up to facilitate factions and filter bubbles where you can spend your time reading only things you agree with and nothing else.