Yeah but if your vast majority of users doesn't see it or know where to find it, who cares? I've been a reddit user for 2 years and never encountered the subreddits you are talking about nor have I sought them out.
The "solution" you are talking about is heavy-handed speech moderation
There are three main ways of interacting with Reddit: posting, voting, and commenting. Hiding the obvious hate subreddits helped address the posting of topics. That was an important step and I don't want to diminish it. Reddit has tried to address the voting aspect with various tweaks to the ranking algorithm but whether it has been effective is still debatable. They haven't done anything as far as I'm aware to address hate comments. That is left completely up to the users and moderators.
For the sake of comparison, here is the first paragraph of the Wikipedia entry for each:
Stormfront is a white nationalist, white supremacist and neo-Nazi Internet forum, and the Web's first major racial hate site.
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is an American nonprofit legal advocacy organization specializing in civil rights and public interest litigation. Based in Montgomery, Alabama, it is noted for its successful legal cases against white supremacist groups, its classification of hate groups and other extremist organizations, and for promoting tolerance education programs.
I do agree that SPLC and Stormfront do not compare, but it could be argued that Reddit blocks or suppresses conservative, non-multiculturalist views much more than liberal ones. That asymmetry is part of what fuels the growing extremism IMO.
Conservatism goes beyond states rights and economics. It's also cultural. Conservatives tend not to like multiculturalism or cultural change, and tend to like things like gender roles, immigration tests, and just generally keeping things the way they were. Rational and compassionate people can have these opinions too, yet they are suppressed on pretty much all social media sites including Reddit.
When people with moderate cultural views and opinions get suppressed, they cling to the nearest groups with the closest mindset to their own. Unfortunately, on sites like Reddit, these are often extremist subreddits.
/r/The_Donald has broken many rules of Reddit and the largest punishment they've been given is that /r/popular was created to steer people to less toxic content.
You can also look to how long they let /r/physical_removal (advocates of political violence towards "commies" and "leftists") and /r/incels (advocates of sexual assault, rape, and violence against women) stay open.
/r/MensRights is still around despite doxxing and harassing people in the past.
Victims?
It works on HN
when i visit HN, i expect the articles to be topical and for the discourse to be informative and interesting. somewhat amazingly, my expectations are usually met here, which makes the site quite a gem.
at the same time, i don't always want that. sometimes i just want to see a true train wreck unfold in the comments. in a way i even appreciate the donald trump and hate subreddits. if there are ideologies spreading that can impact my life, i would prefer to go to the source and read their actual words than have the ny times regurgitate them to me.
there are benefits to the hands-on moderation and the wild west styles. the only optimal solution is having a wide range of choices.
If those channels become extremist echo chambers, then the government could care when terrorists start being made on the site, affecting Reddit's PR in the long run. I know of several subs that are full of such extremist vitriol. Since they're a global website, they've got to consider things like long-term social impacts of their content.
If this is true (and I don't believe it is), then they did a truly masterful job of scapegoating Ellen Pao and playing the PR game since her tenure.
That didn't just happen naturally as they grew, Reddit took deliberate steps to make their platform more welcoming. (See https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/26/us/reddit-violence-policy... for an example.)
I don’t think hacker news would say this but many would: “one side is literally Nazis”.. not a very thoughtful complaint
Do you have a source for this claim? Genuine question. Searching Google Scholar for "flame wars" or "Twitter Reddit sentiment" failed to produce anything useful.
Meanwhile in the real world, people talk about brands in everyday conversation all the time without the sanction of the corporation behind it. Not that paid shilling isn't a thing, but they take the confirmation bias, way too far, to the point where calling shenanigans will get you attacked.
There are plenty of places you can find polite political discourse on Reddit, like these:
/r/PoliticalDiscussion/ <-- the only one I sub. /r/PoliticalOpinions /r/Ask_Politics /r/NeutralPolitics /r/ChangeMyView /r/GeoPolitics /r/WorldEvents /r/PoliticalScience /r/Economics /r/Politics
And for logical, not emotional political debates:
/r/AskAConservative /r/AskALiberal /r/DebateCommunism /r/DebateFascism /r/LibertarianDebates /r/DebateAnarchism
I’d give you echo chamber, but also point out that applies to most subreddits in your list, but especially to the ask_$ideology types. People celebrating their political wins isn’t trolling, neither is celebrating the losses of the other side. It might be many things, but posting to get a rise isn’t it.
It doesn't even make sense - people posting in their own communities about their own ideologies doesn't meet the definition either. Who would they be trolling, themselves? Oncomers who don't agree? If the latter, that applies to every political community everywhere.
That opinion, and the constant shouting of it from every rooftop and constant silencing and badgering those who think otherwise, is the reason for the existence of the_donald.
This very thread has someone in it who called me a liar because I posted an image that proves botted content on the front page of /r/politics, and then I had to spend half an hour screwing around with google to debunk it. That is the online reality for anyone who doesn't viscerally hate the president, and it's become very tiresome.
But unless you’re going to say racism, bigotry, and all the rest that The Donald/alt-right bring to the table are conservative ideals I don’t see ANY way you could take what I said as espousing that.
> Reddit was in stronger shape, he said, claiming that it boosted revenue fivefold during the last three-plus years since he had re-engaged with the company. Reddit, which has been ranked as the fourth most popular U.S. internet site, raised $200 million last year and was in good hands with co-founder Steve Huffman as CEO, he said.
I'm not sure "failing" is the right term to use here. Just because you don't agree with the politics of many of the users doesn't mean that their communities aren’t successful and thriving. TheDonald's candidate was elected president after all...
- The DNC was not paying Correct The Record. Like all super PACs, Correct The Record made independent expenditures on behalf of supportive donors around the country, and you can find their names here: https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/pacgave2.php?cycle=2016&cmt...
- Correct The Record had about a dozen full-time content producers writing favorable posts about the Democratic candidate online.
I'm not seeing any references to improper payments made by the DNC, nor do I see the Reddit connection. While we're on the topic of independent expenditures, would you like to talk about the 328 million Russian Twitter accounts that were used in the general election to produce paid pro-Trump content?
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/07/us/politics/russia-facebo...
Super PACs have NEVER taken advice or worked directly with national campaigns. (they verifiably do)
> Correct The Record had about a dozen full-time content producers writing favorable posts about the Democratic candidate online.
> If this was supposed to be your evidence of a vast DNC conspiracy to ruin Reddit, I'm incredibly disappointed.
I would say reddit going from a place that once supported open and free ideas, to one that only pretends to, is a very dangerous thing. Shilling is real, people are paid to do it. On both sides. Clearly the left wing has the advantage on reddit.
> And given the 328 million Russian Twitter accounts used in the general election to produce paid pro-Trump content, do you really want to have this conversation?
NYtimes writing slam pieces about our president? More fake russian collusion stories? Color me shocked. I don't trust the media, and neither should you. The whole Russia story is hogwash.
As to the question, the answer unfortunately requires some familiarity with Reddit and having been a regular user there for a while. /r/politics is the big one since it was a "default" community up until that concept was eliminated a while ago (basically it was automatically on the front page if you browsed the site while logged out, and if you made an account, you were automatically subscribed to it).
I bring them up, because they're the largest political community on the site, and had a level of privilege that comes with that.
CTR is used as shorthand for the pro-Hillary tonal shift in /r/politics that happened fairly rapidly[1], combined with fairly obvious botting[2]. While there's no proof that any particular organization was responsible for those posts, or that Reddit's owners tacitly permitted their behavior, CTR is to my knowledge the only organization who had social network promotion (beyond the usual writing their own obvious posts or buying ads) of Hillary Clinton as its goal, going to the point of addressing actual individuals. AFAIK, this is new.
[1]: https://www.thedailybeast.com/hillary-pac-spends-dollar1-mil...
The William_Trevino post is a real post on Reddit that was used as a template:
https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/search?q=author%3AWilliam_...
But all the other "FirstName_LastName" entries were edited in by the creator of the image. Unlike William_Trevino's entry, they have no associated Reddit post. You can try to find users by those names or posts with those entries' title, but they don't exist.
- https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/search?q=author%3AHoward_L...
- https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/search?q=author%3ATerry_Mo... etc.
I've gone ahead and flagged you for posting a completely deceptive photoshop of the truth. Please make an effort to fact-check yourself next time.
howard_lowery: https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/4vm8e2/paul_ryan_...
john_valtierra: https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/4vm7zz/could_sput...
frank_calder: https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/4vm88x/donald_tru...
terry_moore: https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/4vm79m/khizr_khan...
carlos_liu: https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/4vm8xn/donald_tru...
All appear to be single-purpose accounts that only posted in /r/politics, all are currently banned or deleted.
So it looks like someone did make super obvious sockpuppets that posted some pro-Democrat content once. I still don't think you can generalize that to a trend - certainly nothing on the order of the Russian bots. If anything, /r/politics had a reputation at the time of being extremely favorable to conservatives.
It's a photoshop and you've been lied to. I hope this teaches you to think more critically about things, especially when they're what you want to believe. Thanks for playing.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/search?q=title%3APaul+Ryan+Sides+with...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/18ejnd/are_old_posts_...
https://www.reddit.com/search?q=author%3A+Karunamon&sort=rel...
Now, if we take the same search to Google, you see [deleted] posts by me, and posts that reference my name:
https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&ei=cnF7WqfTHI7ctQXJt...
If we grab a random account from that image, say frank_calder, we get results:
https://www.google.com/search?ei=n3F7WqD7E8W2sAXu1ZzIBg&q=si...
Including one that calls out the botted nature of that account by name:
https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/4vsk1e/a_tour_of_ac...
And with some more digging, we can turn up their actual posts:
howard_lowery: https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/4vm8e2/paul_ryan_...
john_valtierra: https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/4vm7zz/could_sput...
frank_calder: https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/4vm88x/donald_tru...
terry_moore: https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/4vm79m/khizr_khan...
carlos_liu: https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/4vm8xn/donald_tru...
Reddit's search is and always has been awful.
This accounts for every user called out on that image. I'd thank you not to call me a liar in the future.
I've gone ahead and not flagged you because I don't abuse the flag feature against people who make mistakes, given your utterly baseless and easily disproved assertion that those accounts were photoshopped onto this image.
Free and fair discussion is a lost cause on that platform, 45 has made anyone with conservative values an enemy.
Reddit would not allow Pro Trump posts.
More importantly,I agree that reddit's public perception had changed a lot in the last year, it went from seeming like a boys club where others were tolerated to being totally nondinominational. Obviously there are still some subs that are pretty insular but for the most part as they've grown they've gotten nicer.