Reddit is in flames at the moment. Following a stricter "anti-harassment" policy put in place by new CEO Ellen Pao, and the "imgur incident" yesterday (where imgur staff started arbitrarily deleting certain pictures that made it to the front page), a large subreddit called "fatpeoplehate" (which had more than 150,000 subscribers) has been banned.
The reaction of the reddit community is like nothing I have seen before. We're talking about a site-wide fire, and a lot of people there are seriously considering leaving reddit for places where freedom of speech is taken seriously and the users are not sacrificed on the altar of profit and political correctness. Reddit clone Voat will surely take advantage of this situation to grow its own userbase; what about Hubski?
I honestly don't think it's to Hubski's benefit if we scalp a bunch of users that are in the midst of a hissyfit because they can't look at r/fatpeoplehate anymore. Hubski aims to be more cerebral, relaxed, community and discussion-oriented than what reddit has been since, well, ever probably. The frothing tactless immaturity that's swimming around reddit right now should stay there.
I made this tweet that pretty much describes how I feel about all this:#reddit users looking for a place for good discussion, check https://hubski.com looking for a place to hate fat people, go to voat.
Hey, Welcome to Hubski everyone! We deal with this every once in a while when we somehow get linked to. The last influx resulted in a solid few days of reddit posts. Soooo – can you (and anyone who reads this) do us a HUGE favor and tag any reddit/drama related posts as "reddit". A lot of us choose to ignore the #reddit tag so that we can not be disrupted by drama-rama. Hubski is my safe space when I'm avoiding angry client emails (BTW, why aren't they ever nice emails telling me how awesome I am?!) I made a post list for new users a while back that you might enjoy. It's like a collection of meta-discussion and awesome discussions and generally insightful discussions. If you comment on any of the old posts, they will be reinjected into the current hubski feed and also on the chatter tab so... do it. This ain't reddit. The shit you say matters...forever. ;) Also, I always find it interesting when we get a mass influx of new users. If this one results in any interesting data, I'll make a post about it. We have so much customization on piwik that I don't have any idea how accurate it is anymore. I know the numbers are way off. Oh well. We can always do relative numbers. ps: I'm talking to YOU - the person reading this. Not just Grendel.
you're pretty alright. so we disagree on stuff - so what? I don't think less of you. You've brought some good content and discussion to the site.
I only added that line because I didn't want you to think I was calling you out singularly because some of the stuff I said in the comment may have come off a bit harsh but if it's spread across everyone it may not come off as harsh and plus you aren't a 3-hour-old-user and I didn't you to think that I thought that you were? You're not wrong. I like stealing people from reddit. I just haven't found an effective way of finding and stealing the good ones.
I can always count on you lil. BTW, did you know I've been using the pens you sent me NON STOP. They are amazing. I even did all the new hubski sticker envelopes in them. Thank you again for everything.
I am fine with some people finding their way over here, but I'm hesitant of any mass-migration here, because usually what happens is we end up inundated with people who immediately start posting to complain about Reddit and finding out who else is from Reddit, without actually engaging the community and systems that are already in place here. Which then causes a lot of friction.
Oh, I completely agree and I came from reddit a long time ago. But my first instinct was never to seek put other reddit refugees as soon as joining, though I can see why people would do that. I also didn't find Hubski because or subreddit drama.
As mk is about to leave for his yearly vacation, we were just dicsusion the shitstorm that was [REDACTED] around this time last year. No more [REDACTED] humanodon. Shhhh....
Lots of photos. LOL. A pretty cool sword in Sri Lanka. Awesome jewelry (but nothing too crazy expensive or anything). Here's the #tripreport I did on Hong Kong: Never got around to tripreporting Bangkok or Sri Lanka, although they are sorta on my instagram. The boyfriend got an awesome Sak Yant our last day in Thailand. How long have you been away? What else do I need to catch you up on? "The boyfriend" is on Hubski — randomuser. We were thinking about going to Cuba around June 22nd because the boyfriend has a break. Unfortunately, I have two websites launching July 1st and Cuba's lack of reliable internet would not be ideal. Plus it seems like it's really fucking hard to get there still. Lots of paperwork. Soooo, that's on hold and we're going to Curaçao instead. I'm so excited.
Oh dang, what does that one protect against? I don't know. This is my answer to "how are you?" lately. I don't know. What I do know, is that I have a whole bunch of Colombian students who keep telling me how easy it is to get to Cuba from Colombia, but like . . . that might not be the greatest thing ever to have stamped in your passport (but you can ask them not to stamp you in both places, or so I understand). Dude, wicked jealous about all the travel. This is the longest I've gone without travel . . . ever. I miss it. I even miss the confused looks on people's faces as they try to figure out what nationality I am. Much as I love swords (a whole lot), I don't really have a use for them. I haven't even had the chance to use this amazing cleaver my cousin brought me, but I mean, killing livestock and chopping it up just isn't really "done" 'round here. Hope the Cuba plans pan out. I'd love to get there before it becomes something different (if that makes sense). From what I understand, Raul and his daughter are a whole lot more progressive and open to the West than Fidel has been. I hope this turns out well for the people.
Not going to lie, this whole censorship fiasco on Reddit drove me out and brought me here. I've been meaning to leave it behind for a while, but for some reason never thought to actually see if there's an alternative. Voat was down and this was the only other place mentioned. I've only been here about an hour but I'm already in love, so I think I'm here to stay.
Send some people our way Grendel, we'll take care of the rest :) Those that suck and want "free speech" to be mean and cruel and spread hateful ideas would do well to check out another "alternative." But there are plenty of good people over on reddit. Hell, mk was a redditor before he built Hubski. Our community owes that place a LOT.Reddit clone Voat will surely take advantage of this situation to grow its own userbase; what about Hubski?
We rely almost 100% on you guys spreading the word. So, if you all want to go to reddit and spread the love, that's great. We're not very good at the whole "taking advantage of moments." However, when people do come over, I think we are pretty good at being welcoming.
Personally, I just want free speech to be... free. That means that I recognise people's right to say mean things. I'd also like to say that, although making fun of fat people can hardly be considered a good use of this right, the subreddit in question was just one side of a coin. You've probably heard of the "fat acceptance/healthy at any size" movement that's been growing bigger and louder recently, and I think subreddits like fatpeoplehate are partly a reaction to this attempt to make obesity look normal.
Well, first, I'm assuming the nature of that subreddit is self-evident, obviously. I'd never heard of it. The larger idea is that modern intellectuals have decided censorship is automatically a bad thing, and I disagree. Some ideas deserve nothing but. I do not consider the concomitant slippery slope rebuttal logical, before you raise it. Never have.
This seems naive at best. Obesity carries with it increased health risks leading to overall higher medical costs for everyone. Second, "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it." is a concern stone of Western Civilization, iirc.
Please don't give me flack based on me knowing, but the guys and girls on /r/fatpeoplehate often talked about not only the increased medical costs, but a lot of the issues that were had were things such as nursing staff and EMS employees being physically injured and unable to work due to having to move/lift obese people. Also there were many people who were upset by people who they worked with stealing lunches, being obnoxious about eating, or being rude seeing that they weren't "eating a man's lunch". It's easy to see /r/fatpeoplehate as its name, and at its core, it is just a hate sub. But anyone who looked through the comments would see people who are frustrated and just need a place to unload, and it was by far the most tolerant sub I've seen. Didn't matter if you were gay, trans, muslim, or any minority. As long as you weren't fat, you were seen as not just another person, but as brethren. You were also a shitlord. What I'm trying to say is that most people seem to think if you were to subtract the fat people from /r/fatpeoplehate it would just be an angry group of trolls looking for something else to be angry and hateful about, but at least from my experience, it was a safe-haven where everybody was truly equal, and everyone was valued.
I don't have anything specific to say about the subreddit. I never visited it and have no experience. However, I do find it a sad fact about human nature that we can bond so strongly around opposition to another group of people, which can be defined in almost any arbitrary way, as long as a commonality of negative opinion can be reached.
All human bonding is based on an arbitrarily common opinion. I highly doubt you have any friends who you disagree on everything with after all. I personally have most of my friends and bonds come from the queer community in my city. It's completely arbitrary and says little about our personality, but it's a commonality we could bond because of. We share the opinion of anti-queer people being bad people, and that's why we bonded. Not only can we strongly bond around opposition, we are required to bond around opposition. What I'm saying now is all conjecture and not on any level of research, but if you think about pre-historic days, it makes sense that we would all bond when a problem arises, that way we as a group can fix the problem, and it's a boost to morale knowing others have the same opinion. It just so happens that the biggest threat to today's society is arguably the obesity epidemic which is overtaking smoking in it's death toll. If instead, say, windows were a huge issue in society killing more and more people every year, chances are I'd be over on /r/glasspanehate or some similarly named subreddit. That being said, I cannot hide the fact that /r/fatpeoplehate was a hate subreddit. It had people there specifically to stir up shit. There were people who were overtly hateful, brigading people, wishing them death on their social media, etc. I am not proud of this, nor did I or any of the mods condone this behaviour. It was however the exception, not the rule.
This is pretty much spot on from what I experienced. Despite the name, it wasn't just filled with, "hey, look at this fat person, fuck them. " It was mostly directed at other people's obesity/fat promoting causing issues for others - taking up multiple bus seats, convincing people to give up on diets with pseudo facts, encouraging obesity. There wasn't hate for larger people in general, just hate for fat people that felt their weight gave them a right to act entitled and pretend there was absolutely no way they could change their situation.
When you say
Tolerance, adjective, "showing willingness to allow the existence of opinions or behavior that one does not necessarily agree with." Their rules said
it was by far the most tolerant sub I've seen. [..] As long as you weren't fat
So not tolerant at all. No dissent / No being fat
Absolutely NO FAT SYMPATHY
I mean...if there's one thing we can say with certainty it's that Hubski is most active (among old and new members) when these kind of things happen so...yay?