> People talk about free speech like it's some goal, but in reality all people seem to do with it is make fun of fat people and post stolen naked pictures of celebrities.

All people do in reality ... if for some reason you choose to disregard the huge number of fairly autonomous communities on Reddit?

If I used that ultra-broad brush for HN, I'd say that all commenters here seem to do is post links to xkcd 927 and the wiki page for ad-hom.

The problem with Reddit (the company) is that it chooses to represent its service as a single community, and thus allows all of its communities to be tarred by the same brush.

If Reddit was more like, say, StackExchange, or Wordpress.com, or Discourse—a hosting site for "communities" which happened to use the "Reddit engine"—then it wouldn't have nearly the PR problem it has now. Nobody blames Wordpress.com for the content of somebody's blog hosted there.

I think reddit accurately represents the fact that both factors are present, lots of specific communities and also a larger reddit-wide community. At least I was never confused about that.

Right, it's clear enough "from the inside" as an experienced user. But from the outside, people (e.g. journalists) just talk about "Reddit" as one place. Reddit Corp issues administrative policies for the site as if in complete ignorance of this public perception.

There is a reason WordPress has the .com/.org split, and it's not just that large customers demand to self-host. That could have resulted in something more like GitHub Enterprise, but instead you see a well-supported FOSS offering. Why? Because this split allows WordPress.com to maintain a very strict TOS that disallows many types of content, while still allowing other people who don't want to adhere to those policies to "run on WordPress" easily by using the WordPress.org software either directly or through third-party hosts.

If Reddit was smart, the "Reddit engine" would be a well-supported, easy to install FOSS offering like WordPress.org, and there would be a healthy ecosystem of third-party hosts running that software. Voat would just be "Yet Another Reddit-as-Service Provider", instead of a competitor and political statement.

As it is, the Reddit engine is an effectively-unsupported blob of code that needs tons of other heavy dependencies to get it running. The only site I know running a copy of the Reddit engine is LessWrong—and they've heavily forked it for their own purposes.

Autonomous public communities on Reddit do not exist because adequate protections against the male white supremacist hive mind do not exist.

Reddit's version of "free speech" works fine for me. I almost never see the kind of hateful speech it's allegedly full of, and if I do it's voted down to -20 or something. It seems to me to be preferable to, say, the Guardian comments section which is full of people being rude to each other but heavily moderated for forbidden facts or ideas.

I have to agree with you here. I don't bother reading any political or news subs (except /r/uk) because I can pretty much guarantee the comments will not be adding anything to the discussion.

For me, Reddit works pretty well and it's very easy to avoid the worst bits.. and to be honest, like you, I find a lot of the comment sections on mainstream news sites and places like Youtube are much, much worse.

How often do you read discussion of politically or culturally sensitive issues in defaults?

Not very.

Free speech is designed to protect potitically important edge cases not optimized for your entertainment or consumption. Thats not to say it cant be, this site for example seems to work out pretty well due to the carefully designed comment economy and fair moderation system.

It would be interesting to study at what user size trolling and offending interactions take root. My take is there is a moderator/user ratio which at some point slants in favor of trolls. Once the slide toward disrespect and instigation begins it's very hard to correct.

> When confronted with the fact that this isn't acceptable behavior

Who defines what "acceptable" behavior is though? If so many people "wouldn't recommend or even admit using in a mixed group", then why is Reddit the 8th highest traffic website in the US?

It's become the seedy underbelly of the net. If Freud were still en vogue, they could rename it redd-id.com

Am I the only one who finds lots and lots of good stuff on forums etc?

My wife is annoyed because I spend time here but just because of the time I spend not because of anything that shows up on my screen; most of the bad stuff people write about just doesn't seem to cross my path.

:-/

I don't see the really insalubrious stuff on reddit unless it's via people being outraged by it. I fairly often see people being unnecessarily rude, eg. professionals on r/filmmakers are often scathing towards amateurs, particularly if they mention working for free or low wages.

reddit is not one place. Each subreddit has its own moderation policy. Stolen naked pictures and overt abuse are one thing, but it is common in other subreddits (e.g. /r/europe) for posts or comments to be blocked just because they are critical of immigration. The mods might deny that, but it happens, because there are lots of mods, and people who donate a large amount of their free time to moderating a web forum are often not that bright or tolerant.