Re:‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the ...
by quadrangle on Friday April 20, 2018 @01:51AM
(#16882424)
Well, FWIW, internet communication is still pretty damn new. No grown people are the kids of internet-natives even (i.e. no adults today were raised by parents and teachers who themselves grew up with the internet). So, in the long-run, we can see that this is pretty new still.
I am myself aware of all sorts of ideal communication habits that address the common failings. Perhaps there's some slim hope that this wisdom will eventually reach far more people and become dominant to where we actually learn how to communicate better than we do today.
I think of the cases where people met their trolls in real-life and had reconciliation of sorts, or that woman who grew up in the Westboro Baptist Church and got convinced to leave after someone on Twitter responded empathically and intelligently instead of antagonistically, leading to long-term exchange of perspectives… these stories are the exception today, but we have that at least…
Another part of the issue is that not all hateful content has a big blinking sign on it saying "I am being hateful". It is often a lot subtler than that. One big example is how the Reddit community has handled the Me Too movement. If the big subreddits are your only source of news you might think that Terry Crews is the primary victim of Hollywood's sexual misconduct. There is nothing wrong with telling Crew's story. He is clearly a victim and he deserves for his voice to be heard. A single post or comment about Crews is not sexist, however he has been the primary focus of this discussion on Reddit. It is important to think about it deeper and why his story dominates this topic. Maybe it is because a sizable portion of Reddit simply doesn't care about female victims the way they care about male victims. This type of bias is only visible holistically and therefore is much harder to combat with open debate as you describe.