>Reddit... does it know it's job is to prevent outraged reaction? //

Ha, ha, ha.

Cause that'll increase pageviews.

Outraged reaction is exactly what all news media is going for because people rant and rave and in passing see more adverts. It's just they want to sanitise the topics according to their advertisers wishes.

Reddit doesn't have non-censorship values, it's heavily censored; not all from the top admittedly, but the sanitisation that's gone on in the last few years is huge as Conde Nast have moved to make it a more tempting platform for advertisers.

Well, yes that's the obvious (and cynical) assumption. It's definitely true as a real pseudo-economic force on the internet and media generally, but let's not just assume reddit are following that "interest" blindly.

If you think reddit doesn't have those values, I guess we disagree. I don't see any way of coming to that conclusion apart from fundamentalism, it's either absolute or it's bullshit.

I'm not a Reddit user but there are plenty of stories out there about how the corporate managers have permanently closed some offensive forums. To be clear, I'm not claiming that Reddit management did anything wrong; they're under no obligation to spend money spreading toxic content. But obviously they don't value non-censorship as a corporate value.

Let's see - Vanity Fair, Wired, GQ - there seems good reason to think that Conde Nast are willing to compromise and go with the click bait, a lot.

https://www.wired.com/story/bad-actors-are-using-social-medi... .. is the first entry Reddit, is it in the list, nope.

I think Conde Nast are prepared to stoop pretty low in the search for dollars before integrity.

To be fair, Conde Nast also owns Ars Technica, which, in my experience, has a fairly exemplary reputation as far as avoiding clickbait and running good articles.

That said, it certainly seems to me like if not as an explicit business decision, Conde Nast certainly has no problem with their properties sensationalizing their media for views/clicks/etc

Increased pageviews, yet many users also hate constant outrage and leave the platform entirely. It is not obvious that a platform with civil, high-quality discussion would lose in the marketplace (not obvious it would win either, though).

> But, I think unrestricted speech may be an insufficient value

It looks like you are imagining that every speech has objective "value" which can be determined (maybe it's hard to do, but if we throw enough "big data" magic dust onto it we can get at least close) and then somehow speech can be sorted by value.

I think it's completely wrong from the premise up. The value of the speech is a subjective measure. Some people value invitation of candidate X, some people value rants of Ms Y. In fact, if salaries of talk radio hosts and late night comedians tell us something, way more people value rants than measured, polite discussion. Thus I think "value" exists only in the eye of beholder, and trying to objectify it would only mean dismissing the values of part of the audience and emphasizing values of some other part of the audience. I can see why a site may want to do it and why one may want it to happen, if he or she happens to belong to the latter part, but I see no real justification for it.

> Thus I think "value" exists only in the eye of beholder, and trying to objectify it would only mean dismissing the values of part of the audience and emphasizing values of some other part of the audience.

And yet we need to do it. As you observed, "way more people value rants than measured, polite discussion", and I'd claim that this is a problem. The "value" may be subjective, but the consequences of both "kinds of speech" are real, and so it would be great to incentivize the kind that leads to a more stable, more just society, and disincentivize the one that causes thoughtless destruction.

Yes, I'm aware that "disincentivize" is getting dangerously close to "ban", but I feel we need to try and walk that fine line, if we want to have a society that's better than just random.

> And yet we need to do it

Who are "we"? And what is "it"? Do you just take on yourself the mantle of decider for the whole world who is worthy and who is not? Or how is it determined? Who is worthy to wear that mantle? I don't think any human is.

> I'd claim that this is a problem

Maybe human nature is a "problem". But what you're going to do, replace humanity with better species? Do you have one in mind? Beyond that, I don't see how declaring it "a problem" helps anything, unless there's a fix to this problem. History teaches me that all attempts to create a "new, better human race" didn't just end badly - they ended so awfully terrible that when people point at it, other people get offended that you dare to compare their ideas to that. So, we have to deal with what we have now - and had for millienia. Given what we did with it - well, not ideal, but certainly there have been some improvement.

> it would be great to incentivize the kind that leads to a more stable, more just society

How do you know what leads to more just society? Maybe rants would lead to more just society faster? As for stability, stability is only good when we're at the optimum. Are we?

> I feel we need to try and walk that fine line, if we want to have a society that's better than just random.

Which fine line? Everybody has their own fine line, that's the point. You could maybe find a bunch of people whose fine line is similar to your own, if you don't look too far into the future (and if you do, what you get is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WboggjN_G-4) - but pretending there's some line that's good for everybody is just willful blindness. And out of all possible ways of building a better society, I don't think dismissing people that have different views as something that doesn't matter is the best one to start with.

> Maybe human nature is a "problem". But what you're going to do, replace humanity with better species?

I agree that the root of the "problem" currently lies within people and not process. I agree that changing people wholesale is not easy and not desirable. I agree that there has been some improvement.

I also think human nature is a product of the environment. The way people behave on different websites, in different countries, and in different social situations shows this rather clearly. There is no fixed set of anything that constitutes the whole of how people act. Put someone in a nudist colony, and the environment changes, and the way they act changes (with time). If a reddit user starts going to 4chan, the environment changes, and the way they act changes. Put someone who follows the "always defect" strategy in a community of "always cooperate" people, and the environment changes, and the way they act changes. Put a racist in a racially diverse community of acceptance, and the environment changes, and the way they act changes.

If you accept this idea, it follows that certain environments can be better for society as a whole. Case in point with Reddit: they decided an environment without beastiality and certain violent elements would be better. Maybe they were wrong, but I don't think so. I'm not suggesting I have a wonderful theory of what the best environment is, only that there are better and worse ones. The problem of what we value is hard, but that doesn't mean it's not worth trying.

This ties the loop back: human nature is a product of environment, and environment is a product of humans. We have the power to create environments that make thoughtful discussion easier and hate harder. We can put energy toward solving the problem by changing the environment. HN has an environment I am very fond of, despite being here for only a couple years. I appreciate the work that has gone into making the comments an insightful, respectful, and generally nice place.

We can't replace humanity. We can't change people without changing the conditions they exist in. We can change the circumstances of our struggle in order to grow together as a species.

Picking out only a very small thing that you said:

> I don't see how declaring it "a problem" helps anything, unless there's a fix to this problem.

This seems wrong to me.

The process of (as a group) clearly identifying things that are problems, and coming to agreement that they are problems, and coming to agree on whether they are important, is of fundamental value, regardless of whether we have solutions at hand.

Without this step, folks will either be ignoring problems because they don't know about them, or proposing "solutions" to things that others don't even see as problems, neither of which can lead to any good...

This post is basically saying the problem is not worth looking at because it's too scary...

No it is not. It's saying if you're looking at something as if your private point of view is objective reality and dismissing the very existence of other points then the problem may not be where you looking for it.

"How do you know?", "What are you going to do?" "Everyone is different so we can't know anything for sure!" are very much defeatist, knee-jerk responses to someone doing something extremely important:

Presenting what the problem is.

The first step to solving a problem is understanding it. It's not solving it. Trying to solve a problem immediately is like trying to write code before you fully understand the requirements.

If you lack the mental fortitude to simply look at a problem without having an immediate solution to it, you're not going to be able to solve major, ugly, nasty, uncomfortable problems like this.

But, inevitably, these problems will show up and knock on your door. Running away from them is not a good plan.

What if I don't believe in trying to control people at such a low level? What if I think people should be allowed to be as ranty as they want without having to worry about being "disincentivized"?

Then I'd like to talk with you, see if you have an alternative way of keeping the society from self-destructing.

So we've got desires to identify with groups, and we've got desires to share criticisms of groups, and we struggle to find a balance. If we never criticize, we stagnate, if we never identify, we "self-destruct". We can come up with a "quick solution" as the notion of keeping more of our criticisms to ourselves, but that's certainly not a goal you want to pursue overzealously. You need to be able to share criticisms.

We can tell people it's not attractive to be ranty, but I'm not very comfortable going further than that, at the risk of wandering into thought policing.

Look at some modern political opinion, I'm sure you've seen it as much as me. Ranting is cool. Calling everything under the sun "problematic". The tricky thing is it's not always wrong. There's surely a nearly infinite list of "problems" one could identify, and some of them are truly important. But we just need to turn down the heat on the criticism for just a second. But you can't just ask bipartisans to listen to each other more. We need to make it less cool to be blindly partisan. We need to increase the value of being able to identify with anyone. And we need to make it really uncool to judge hundreds of millions of people you've never met with deep assumptions.

I don't know, it's an interesting problem and I haven't thought of it this way very much. All I'm sure of is that this growing lack of interest in protecting free speech is about the only topic in modern politics that I give a shit about.

> We can tell people it's not attractive to be ranty, but I'm not very comfortable going further than that, at the risk of wandering into thought policing.

I don't want to see it going much further than that either. I was thinking more along the lines of making it so being thoughtful is "sexy" and being ranty isn't, the way today owning a car is "sexy" and smoking isn't.

Free speech has its positive and negative consequences on stability and happiness; I do not want to fight free speech, I'm looking for ways to reduce the negative consequences. I'll protect your (and mine) right to rant about whatever you want, but I sure as hell would like the general policy discussion to involve less rants and more thoughtful cooperation.

> Free speech has its positive and negative consequences on stability and happiness; I do not want to fight free speech, I'm looking for ways to reduce the negative consequences. I'll protect your (and mine) right to rant about whatever you want, but I sure as hell would like the general policy discussion to involve less rants and more thoughtful cooperation.

I agree that free speech is an essential aspect of what makes us humans, and that it comes with both many positive and negatives.

In implementation of a plan to mitigate the negatives though, I much more support a private entity such as Reddit censoring whatever they wish, as if people believe it becomes to harsh they can simply leave. I'm paranoid that allowing an entity like the government (where constituents can't easily just leave) to get involved with it is good, as it allows for many conflicts of interest. These conflicts could be instances where the ruling party or minority parties push to label an opposing belief as more divisive, or where the ruling majority seeks to 'disincentivize' a minority or outside belief/religion by saying it is offensive to what they deem our values.

I feel like we should push for the civilization of speech to be a societal change, not a policy based change.

On a slightly different note, people have been saying that language and civil discourse have been going to hell for a very long time. George Orwell rather famously wrote an essay titled "Politics and the English Language" in the early-mid 20th century, wherein he detailed how society was moving towards using unclear and imprecise language to pander to the many without being forced to use falsifiable statements. Anthony Burgess wrote "A Clockwork Orange" in the 1960's where he highlights the main characters savagery in part by highlighting their usage of 'barbaric' dialect. William Langland wrote that “There is not a single modern schoolboy who can compose verses or write a decent letter.” in 1386. While civil and educated discourse is an important issue, people have been saying it will lead to the downfall of society for a very long time, but in many cases it is just changing and the entrenched powers dislike having to cope with that change.

I do. I propose we do exactly what we've been doing for the last 10000 years when human society didn't self-destruct. Do you have any other proposal that has a similar or better track record?

Human societies self-destructed plenty of times over the past 10 000 years.

Those 10,000 years have involved very, very little in the way of free speech for most people - I don't think going back to the days of lèse-majesté and the Inquisition is what you had in mind, even though those institutions certainly provided stability in a sense.

Facebook and YouTube already do stuff like this: "too many people are just having fun clicking like on funny images instead of typing long comments, so let's increase the newsfeed and recommendation penetration of posts and videos with more comments... oh, shit, but now we are promoting flame wars as the best way to get more comments is to troll people".

While my policy might seem similar to theirs, were I in their shoes, I wouldn't be trying to promote content just for generating comments. Number of comments isn't a particularly useful measure for anything other than.. measuring how much discussion the content creates, it's no indication about the quality of that discussion.

>Reddit... does it know it's job is to prevent outraged reaction?

Says who? Let's get a little more objective first. Its job is to make money, presumably, if not encourage participation by any means necessary. Its job isn't to moderate. Its job is to allow the creation of sub-communities that can be moderated in any conceivable way. Most moderators aren't interested in reducing reactionism, they're just interested in reducing whatever they or their community doesn't like.

>unrestricted speech may be an insufficient value, like nondiscrimination or atheism. It's not enough to build on. You need positive values too.

I agree with this statement, except for the inclusion of atheism in the list. Atheism is literally the lack of a belief. You may as well say "The lack of belief in astrology isn't enough to build on. You need positive values too."

Unrestricted speech and nondiscrimination argue for something. Atheism literally argues for nothing.

> Free speech is also problematic, when taken as 'all speech is equal.'

Free speech is not problematic, as long as everyone has the right to speak and falsehoods can be debunked - there should be no "safe place" for the exchange of ideas, whether they are good or not. Starting by saying that 'free speech' has a problem is a very, very dangerous place to go to.

> there should be no "safe place" for the exchange of ideas

What do you think a "safe space" is? If you are arguing that there should be platforms where people can speak without being shouted down when the audience strongly disagrees with what they're saying, that is a safe space. In order to construct that space, you have to deny some rights of the audience to speak in that context.

And this is the whole problem with naive free speech advocacy. Unrestricted free speech is not possible anymore than unrestricted freedom in general is possible. People cannot possibly hear every single person's viewpoint, so some people will always be denied a platform to speak to some other people.

The question is how best to structure our societal discourse. What values are important, and how do we protect them? And the question needs an answer more complicated and nuanced than "free speech". Because when we don't acknowledge the complexity of this question, we become blind to the de-facto decisions that we're making about which speech to prioritise.

> If you are arguing that there should be platforms where people can speak without being shouted down when the audience strongly disagrees with what they're saying, that is a safe space. In order to construct that space, you have to deny some rights of the audience to speak in that context.

No, I am not asking for that kind of platforms. I am saying to let people express what they want to say, and the only restriction to Free Speech should be "direct incitation to violence" (such as asking to lynch someone publicly) as mentioned in the US Constitution. Everything else should be able to be said and be heard, and debated between people as long as they want to debate. And of course you will be responsible for what you say, as an individual, and you will have to face the consequences of your words. But it goes both ways.

Restricting Free Speech puts power among the ones in control of Speech. Allowing Free Speech is the only thing you can do to allow even the marginal points of view, even unpopular ones, to be heard.

>Everything else should be able to be said and be heard

But what does that actually mean? If all you're saying is that the state should not stop them, then relatively few people disagree with that, but the argument usually goes further. There are many ways people's speech can be limited without the involvement of the state. Be that de-platforming, protests or economic or social limitations.

>Restricting Free Speech puts power among the ones in control of Speech.

This is true, but the reality is there will always be restrictions on speech. It is not physically possible to let everyone speak to everyone, or even just those willing to listen. However we structure our societal discourse, it will always privilege some speech over other speech.

We have to engage with, and be ready to criticise, the implicit decisions being made about what speech is privileged and why. Because if we don't, then we cede power to those who already restrict speech with these decisions.

Just saying "don't restrict speech", and thinking that gives everyone a voice, is incredibly politically naive.

> Just saying "don't restrict speech", and thinking that gives everyone a voice, is incredibly politically naive.

I don't see how "incredibly naive" is something that is the fundamental piece of Western Civilization (at least in most of the English world).

> It is not physically possible to let everyone speak to everyone

No, but first not putting any filter on the nature and contents of speech, as long as it is not violent, is something we should stand for. The "How" is irrelevant.

> However we structure our societal discourse, it will always privilege some speech over other speech.

This should be an individual's choice to make, as in what "speech" you want to listen to. When you go on social networks for example, it should be expected and natural to find people who share different views, no matter how revolting they might appear to you. And we should find comfort in the fact that they are allowed to be expressed, because in turn we are allowed to express ourselves just as well. So in fact, there is no intervention needed by any state actor - on the contrary, free speech is the tool that enables us to discourse and experiment with ideas. Just shutting the door, or filtering inconvenient speech is not making it go away, and certainly will end up having no positive effect towards those who profess such speech, because it could further solidify their opinions and prevent them from being receptive in the future.

Free listening is just as important a concept as free speech. I get to decide who and what I listen to.

It may be good for me to hear an uncomfortable truth, but ultimately I get to decide whether I listen or not. If I want to live in an echo chamber, I can do so, but it should be my choice. Equally if I want to hear uncomfortable opposing views, I should be able to. (Somewhere. Not necessarily on Reddit.com. The site's owners can publish whatever they want.)

This is true in practice, because as a last resort I can put my fingers in my ears and say “la la la not listening” loudly. So frankly, advertisers should give up trying to force me to see their adverts — they can't — and persuade me to listen instead.