I can't say I'll miss any of it, especially /r/transfags, which recently had "lol you don't pass" discussions around pics of a 16 year old trans kid. Yeah sure, you have a right to be allowed to make fun of people, I even encourage it in many aspects - but perhaps you should question your motives when a significant amount of your entertainment involves beating other people down to make yourself feel better. That said, this is a pandora's box, and there's no way of undoing this. As someone mentioned elsewhere, now any "hate" subreddit, or "disagreeable" subreddit that continues to exist long term can be construed as being tacitly accepted by Reddit administration. It's basically a giant game of whack-a-mole that they're guaranteed to lose. This is a wide sweeping policy that is completely indefensible and unenforceable in reality. It will either completely destroy the website as it stands currently, or (in a far more likely situation) do absolutely nothing.
The problem is that absent any cues for affinity, anonymous communities will rally around their aversion to "the other." Negative emotions are much more natural to express in an anonymous forum so you develop communities around things people are against just as easily as things people are for. This leads to a bigger problem: when your community favors anonymity and antagonism over identity and empathy, the general character of your community will become anonymous and antagonistic. I've been discussing this problem with admins since 2008. Anyone with the slightest insight into the sociology of the Internet can demonstrate that an anonymous community based on an approval system (which is what upvotes and downvotes are) will grow meaner over time, even disregarding growth. Yet Reddit has done very little to backstop against the descent into hate. They had a chance when they bought RedditGifts. That was a community based around giving and exchange. However, they never integrated the first thing about it, never built exchanges around subreddits, communities or anything else, never attempted to use it to turn Redditors from anonymous things to hate into people likely to give you pencil sharpeners and manga novels. And now that ship has sailed. The truly ironic thing is that by choosing this hill to die on, this windmill to tilt at, they're enrolling their community in demonstrating just how vociferously they hate the obese. Any casual user that checks /r/all will discover (1) Reddit has little to no ability to police its community (2) that community is vile and repulsive. But hey. They got their blog post.
Absolutely 100% correct. This has been discussed at length by Hegel, Sartre, and many others less famous. If it wasn't fat people, or trans people, or black people, or arab people, it would be someone else. It seems that humanity is in constant need of an "Other", a bogeyman. Much of this has to do with how we define ourselves. It is actually a difficult mental task to define ones self by what they are, and significantly more simple to define ourselves by what we are not. "I don't know what I am, but that is NOT it," as it were. As a Canadian, it is interesting to see how much of Canadian culture is built on the premise of "Not America", or "Not the UK". Our "Others" represent what we see the need to define ourselves as not being. It is even easier to do so when that "Other" is a faceless thing, a caricature. I don't know if this is because of, or if the two concepts are related in how they are treated by the brain, but language has a similar problem. without visual context, how do you explain what the word "Large" means? when it comes down to it, "large" generally means "Not small". "Small", on the other hand, means "not large". Large could also mean "heavy", but what is heavy but "Not light"? A lot of our descriptive adjectives are defined by what they are not, rather than what they are. Just like us. Edit: mk, I'm still getting a lot of 502s these days. Is it my connection?The problem is that absent any cues for affinity, anonymous communities will rally around their aversion to "the other."
I really hope this influx doesn't change the tone or sophistication of Hubski for the worse. I just found this place, and I really like it. Everything about the way it is designed and run seems to be geared towards encouraging thoughtful discussion and communal interaction, unlike Reddit where everything about the way the site is designed encourages antagonism and extremism. It almost feels like the more academic subreddits, except throughout the entire site!
Don't worry about it! I was just curious. I've kind of got a save-comment strategy in case of 502, so It's no big deal.