I was actually very disappointed when Reddit banned r/WatchPeopleDie. Sure, there were some idiots there - there always are, insensitive comments sometimes, and a lot of gallows humour - sometimes literally. But there were thoughtful comments as well, and the content itself could be... well, educational, in a brutal kind of way. I visited occasionally as a kind of memento mori, and I feel like gained a lot of appreciation for the fragility of life from that sub - as well as a very healthy respect for safety around industrial machinery, and a resolve to never again ride a motor scooter in South East Asia.
Sweeping it away - sure, they likely made their lives easier. But what's the real outcome? The real freaks who get off on that stuff will go off to some horrible other site to ferment and radicalize away from the normalising influence of the more well-adjusted participants there, and regular people, who just might have been curious, have been deprived of whatever insights they might have found. I think it's a real shame.
And for what it's worth, I don't think The_Donald should be banned either. People have a right to speak, and we can ignore them if we want - or we can at least try to engage. I don't buy the "private company, they can do what they want!" argument. The age of the internet has introduced powerful network effects into where we can conduct our public discourse with any efficacy - Reddit is huge and there's no real competitor. It's basically a monopoly, in its niche. "Deplatforming" whole groups because of their political views, however nutty, is a very slippery slope. Unless you also support speech you don't like - you don't really support free speech!
> Reddit is huge and there's no real competitor. It's basically a monopoly, in its niche. "Deplatforming" whole groups because of their political views, however nutty, is a very slippery slope. Unless you also support speech you don't like - you don't really support free speech!
Unlike Facebook and Google, which exert truly horrendous amounts of power over very significant aspects of people's lives, Reddit is, fundamentally, just another forum. It even has its older versions open-sourced.
In fact, There are reddit clones where these things are perfectly allowed.
And those clones are cesspits of schizophrenics, fascists, and deeply disturbed people.
To be honest, you could say HN is just another forum (although it's more like a news & comment site with less self-posts by character) but Reddit's place in the social media landscape gives it a lot more power in addition to the loss of a community when it is banned from there.
Fair enough; I shouldn't be broadly generalizing and indeed most people with schizophrenia are far from this. I don't really know of a term to describe the deranged violent lunacy that manifests in those sites though.
I'm happy to say my exposure to literal insanity has been somewhat tapered over the years, so visiting Voat a while back was eye opening to say the least. There are clearly some very mentally ill people using that site. The issue is, they're getting fulfilment and a sense of acceptance via up-votes from 'edge-lords' who enjoy egging people like this on for their own entertainment. I wouldn't be surprised if the feedback-loop that people get from this website has had some influence on the recent shootings over the past few years.
As someone who has dealt with close family members struggling with this horrible affliction, my first thought was to contact Dang and demand your lynching.
To anyone wondering exactly what it looks like when all the people who can't keep from getting banned on Reddit go to the same place, go to voat.com It's tough to take a look and wish everyone was mixed together instead of these people just communicating with each other.
That is why you should not segregate society in "better" and "worse" tiers.
We all understand that there are people that have a negative influence on every network they participate in. The problem is that banning them is not a long term solution and in many cases it only make things worse. It is the easy one, but it makes impossible to build some difficult conversations.
There are also many different kind of communities and forums, HN is very special in this (no subcommunities, strong moderation clearly stated upfront) many are more like tumblr (as the FAQ put it: "Go nuts, show nuts, whatever").
Reddit is effectively used as a second life, with countless smaller groups, weird circles, and unusual communities. In this regard it is the social network most similar to real live.
Second, these are internet forums, not segregating society.
Third, if being around other people like yourself makes things worse, that isn't a problem that other people can solve for you.
Finally, check out voat, incel groups, the_donald, etc. and see if you think it is just a matter of 'difficult conversation'. There is no rationality to conversations in extremist toxic internet forums. People have an emotional investment and frustration that looks far more like mental illness than actual discord.
Agree, but not always in the direction we want or expect
> Second, these are internet forums, not segregating society.
This is an increasingly irrelevant distinction as we move more and more of our political debates over the internet (How often do people talk IRL with people of opposing view?)
> Third, if being around other people like yourself makes things worse, that isn't a problem that other people can solve for you.
Do you believe the same for addiction? Sorry for the strawman, but it is a silly statement.
>Finally, check out voat, incel groups, the_donald, etc. [...] there is no rationality to conversations in extremist toxic internet forums.
That is entirely the point, if you segregate the extremist and the moderate that is exactly what you get.
Yes, banning more people is the solution to the problem caused by banning too many people (the 'too' is important).
Without getting explicitly political it is important to point out that platforms ban people based on the consequences of not banning them. When you have strong external influences (like journalists asking loaded and threatening questions to create their own stories) platforms become a tool of political activists.
Democracy and eager banning people from political discourse (Reddit less, but don't tell me that twitter is not fundamental in that) do not work well together.
Having a place where people tolerate your toxicity is not a legal right, human right or even on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. If people are addicted to being toxic, they will have to accept the consequences of others' reactions.
> Having a place where people tolerate your toxicity is not a legal right
That is true, and also it is not what I argue for.
> If people are addicted to being toxic, they will have to accept the consequences of others' reactions.
Obviously, my problem is that I do not trust this use of toxic.
What I see is contempt for Trump supporters and in general for less mainstream opinion. What I see are journalist that blur the line between what their job should be and explicit political activism with call to actions.
You know what it is that I consider toxic? Actually claiming that a whole section of a demographic is toxic, or too stupid, or just wants to see the world burn.
I have my experience with this, as an Italian I still cannot understand why people voted Berlusconi, yet even worse than another Berlosconi would be being trendy to think "we know better than them, their opinion is second class".
The disconnect here is that you are either ignoring what goes on in these forums or actually don't know.
They are a constant barrage of proganda with a steady stream of new people to hate and immediate bans for anyone who questions if something isn't right or if people are going too far. There is a reason that there is now far more right wing terrorism in the west than from any other group. If you think this is just about 'political opinions' then you are misinformed or severely downplaying the reality of what is going on.
And once again, this is just a forum that isn't going to be linked to internally as much. It wasn't even banned. Why would Reddit activly promote a forum like this? They should have done it a long time ago.
> The disconnect here is that you are either ignoring what goes on in these forums or actually don't know.
My claim is exactly that the situation is as bad as it is exactly for this reason! You can argue this way with everything, if you let a problem fester enough it become easier and easier to claim there is no solution.
> There is a reason that there is now far more right wing terrorism in the west than from any other group.
On the other hand Antifa, who routinely attack minorities and passerby, is often heralded as the defender of justice.
The difference in banning policies for the left and the right is obvious and with non trivial effects.
Honestly I am more worried about how mainstream media is fueling this point of view and turning a blind eye to people calling for political violence.
I do not think I will be able to better communicate my point. There are many factor at play and I must admit that I am not good enough to adequately order them into a coherent argument with enough evidences.
On this topic I rather trust Tim Pool, he is a journalist that often cover this kind of topics.
How? I've been banned from their subreddit by trying to engage with them (ironic isn't it?).
If anything, this is great, now they have a huge warning on their subreddit that tell pretty clearly that violence is unacceptable. If this is the only way to engage with them, then so be it.
They aren't being deplatformed, the subreddit is still there, they still can post on it (while I still can't ;) ). There's plenty of conservative subreddit not quarantine too if that's really something they consider an issue.
I'm pretty sure too that if they can show that violent speech is now under control, that they'll remove the quarantine.
The real freaks who get off
on that stuff will go off to
some horrible other site to
ferment and radicalize away
from the normalising
influence of the more
well-adjusted participants there.
You don't actually believe the internet works that way, do you?
If the internet truly shaped thought in the way that remark suggests, or nevermind the internet... If it were possible for people to influence one another in that way, by expressing opinions, all opinions would eventually homogenize into a placid average.
What really happens is people stick to their guns and never back down, but sometimes they lose, go quiet, and bottle up their controversy and stew in it until better opportunities come along.
The difference the internet makes is that a wider diversity of opportunities are made available to jump into. The people don't change. They find comfortable places where no one tells them to stop or shut up, even if there's no "censoring" (banning, moderating, deleting or otherwise silencing) of the riff raff.
Here and there, the subsequent outcome to that, is that as birds of a feather flock together, some flocks reach a critical mass. Their noise and biomass becomes big enough that it ruffles the feathers of rivals, and you get collisions. The gang violence then spills out into the open, and the revolting conflict of contrasted polar extremes disgusts all of the outsiders.
But really, these different sorts of people were always running around, it's just that they never joined forces. They never wrote letters, had phone calls, visited, ate lunch together. They were all two towns apart, and total strangers, unknown to their subculture and often unaware of a potential for subculture.
People in America seem to think free speech is an absolute right, but in a democracy no right is absolute. It must be weighed against all the other rights. If I wrongfully accuse "John" of sexual assault, while I know that John is innocent, my freedom of speech should absolutely be restricted. That is just one example.
>I was actually very disappointed when Reddit banned r/WatchPeopleDie.
Perhaps I can get a serious answer here since I have yet had anyone explain to me the difference when I ask elsewhere (and rarely is it relevant to bring up here).
Why do we treat videos of murders different than videos of more prurient crimes? Why is it acceptable to host/download/share/watch a video of a murder as long as no sex crime takes place during it? Even videos devoid of any crime except being videotaped can be far more illegal and socially unacceptable than a video of a murder made by the murderer.
And I don't mean those watching it for political/reporting/policing/etc. reasons, but the ones who do so for entertainment.
I've never been to r/WatchPeopleDie (nor would I want to, as I'm fairly squeamish), but I was under the impression it was videos of people being killed in situ (think Darwin awards), not people actually being murdered.
My understanding, as the other comment said, is that both were included.
Even still, I think the question can be applied to either type, though I think the applicability to purposefully recorded videos of murder is stronger.
I always maintained that r/MorbidReality served a much better purpose than r/WatchPeopleDie and it still exists today.
What I can't understand is how the r/HoldMyFeedingTube shows up frequently for me on the front page. At least with the other two I had to specifically go there to see that kind of content.
It is rather messed up to just be looking at the front page not knowing what that subreddit is and clicking on a silly video only to find out you're watching someone sustain serious bodily injury.
I agree with others that this ban on r/T_D only has to do with the recent media attention.
Of course people have a right to speak about what they want, but reddit is not a country. It's a company that can decide whether they tolerate certain ideologies and behaviours on their platform.
> And for what it's worth, I don't think The_Donald should be banned either. People have a right to speak, and we can ignore them if we want - or we can at least try to engage.
The thing is, with The_Donald, I don't think anyone could reasonably actually try to engage. Their subreddit has and had some of the most heavy-handed moderation. Read their rules on "concern trolling" [1] to get a hint of what kind of things they regularly removed. If you read their full rules, you quickly realize that not being a Trump supporter is a top level rule as well. They were a self proclaimed endless rally, and anything that doesn't fit their narrative was removed.
In my opinion, how notoriously heavy handed their moderation was probably amplified how upset the admins were that they had to regularly step in and clean up content. Anti-trump comments are almost always removed within minutes, and so the idea that they were incapable of moderating away things which violated the site guidelines is easily busted.
> "Deplatforming" whole groups because of their political views
But it's not because of their political views, it was because of how they ran their community. There's a huge difference here. There are plenty of conservative communities that remain on Reddit today. The difference is that those communities have chosen to cultivate and moderate a different environment. T_D cultivated a community that produced problematic content on the regular. They amplified the visibility of that problematic content by hiding downvote buttons and making it more difficult to report. They prevented any sort of self-policing in the community with heavy handed moderation that removed any dissenting opinions on almost any topic. For all the cries about censorship, censorship was at the heart of how T_D was run. Any hopes that you had of interaction with better adjusted individuals providing a counterbalance to the predominant content were removed.
In short, T_D is quarantined because they have intentionally developed a toxic echochamber that amplified content that the reddit administrators view as objectively bad enough to ban site-wide. It's not a matter of political views, it's a matter of views on how to run a healthy community, and a true community T_D is not.
Right, and r/politics, which is the left leaning version of T_D, doesn’t have any reprimands despite having frequent calls of violence against cops. It’s a double standard.
You probably wouldn't have seen those comments, with mostly single digit points, on TD either. They'd be buried deep, well beyond the point most people read the comments.
TD has the population of a midsize city. Of course there are a few violent comments if you look hard enough.
This is like quarantining Hollywood because a few celebrities made death threats in 2017.
Still, /r/the_politics has the population of a large city, so by that logic, if they have these frequent calls of violence against the cops then it should be easy to point those out, right?
Also, if it's now the case that these cop-violence-inciting comments are hidden everywhere, then why does it matter if /r/politics has them too in the first place?
"Get a Rope" is not the same as saying pick up a rifle against cops.
Again, that's not the same as just talking about the effects of riots, and at this point I think you have cognitive bias by thinking these things are the same.
This isn't a refutation of a single thing that I said. "There's calls for violence elsewhere" doesn't negate any point I made. Do these communities have similar heavy-handed moderation practices? Do they also break tooling that communities use to self-police like the downvote button or report button? Do they also have rules that openly and proudly ban any posts or content that doesn't fit with their narrative?
This ban wasn't about an isolated instance of calls for violence slipping through. It is the culmination of years of cultivating a community and moderation practices that have made the admins have to interfere a disproportionate amount relative to the rest of reddit. You can find examples of bad behavior from individuals on any subreddit, but can you find a pattern of behavior that breeds and incites it driven by the moderators of a community itself?
It’s now becoming obvious the 20-something heroes who’ve taken power from the techies who built these platforms are ensuring the US doesn’t make the same mistake it did in 2016.
Considering Trump won close to 50% of the vote - regardless of that silly electoral college - I don’t see this ending like they think it will.
Engaging them isn't possible as they ban anyone who doesn't agree with the current Trump position on something. It is a real world example of 1984 the way they change "acceptable" thinking on a near day to day basis.
Sweeping it away - sure, they likely made their lives easier. But what's the real outcome? The real freaks who get off on that stuff will go off to some horrible other site to ferment and radicalize away from the normalising influence of the more well-adjusted participants there, and regular people, who just might have been curious, have been deprived of whatever insights they might have found. I think it's a real shame.
And for what it's worth, I don't think The_Donald should be banned either. People have a right to speak, and we can ignore them if we want - or we can at least try to engage. I don't buy the "private company, they can do what they want!" argument. The age of the internet has introduced powerful network effects into where we can conduct our public discourse with any efficacy - Reddit is huge and there's no real competitor. It's basically a monopoly, in its niche. "Deplatforming" whole groups because of their political views, however nutty, is a very slippery slope. Unless you also support speech you don't like - you don't really support free speech!