They lump porn (presumably also artistic nudity) along with hate speech, racism and so on as banned discourse. You're not even allowed to have a sexual alias.

This is not necessarily a bad thing for users - I often wish for a place similar to hacker news but with a wider range of topics - however, it almost certainly means they will never reach Reddit levels of popularity.

I do think that Reddit fills an important niche - a place where any topic is open for discussion, including porn and other forbidden topics like drugs. It's just unfortunate that the company currently ruling this niche is so morally bereft that they can't tell the difference between open discussion and fueling hate speech.

"difference between open discussion and fueling hate speech"

Do you have a crystal clear definition then, on where is exactly the difference?

I doubt there exists one.

Yes, real world problems are hard.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to convey though?

We can't just say, "The boundaries of hate speech are unclear, so we'll do nothing and have uncensored speech." This experiment has been tried over and over again, with uniformly bad results.

Early Reddit isn't what what most would call a "bad result". Ditto for early 4chan and for a lot of smaller communities that have very little restrictions on content beyond civility and anti-spamming.

The problem is that having uncensored speech doesn't scale, because eventually you'll become big enough to attract media scrutiny, which inevitably cherry-picks the worst parts of the user base. This cause 1) advertisers to pull out and 2) starts attracting more of the wrong type of users.

My point was, that it is hard and the lines are blurry.

But actually I do believe in the concept of unrestricted speech.

But I really don't know when was the last time, that was tried. There were times, when certain topics were ok to speak freely about, like racism, yes, but at those times other topics were restricted, so what exactly are you talking about?

There's a difference between largely unrestricted speech legally (being free from gov censorship) and having an unmoderated online community. Moderation is a good thong when done correctly, it raises the quality of the conversion by keeping bad actors and off-topic/toxic comments /post out. There's value in both tightly moderated and loosely moderated communities/spaces.

Do you know anywhere with truly unrestricted speech?

The US has the freest speech that I know of (granted it’s also the only model that I’m so familiar with), and even it has plenty of restrictions:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...

The restrictions on speech in the US are confined to “imminent lawless action”, per Brandenburg v Ohio. I think the commenter to whom you are replying might be entirely fine with Reddit’s speech policy following that precedent.

And no, shouting “fire!” in a crowded theater is not illegal and is protected by the First Amendment.

But you can't shout fire in crowed theater with the intent to cause chaos. You can shout fire in a crowded theater, if there is an actual fire.

Yes you can! That argument was made in a SCOTUS argument that has since been unanimously overturned.

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...

Great read, thanks for posting. I had mistakenly thought this for a while too.

Wow. So the argument was first successfully used to jail peaceful socialists and anti-war activists, but was later overturned for benefit of the KKK.

Yup. Today, the law benefits peaceful socialists, anti-war activists, AND the KKK — which is a big win for free speech, in my books.

> I do believe in the concept of unrestricted speech.

Including illegal things?

What do you mean by that?

In Saudia Arabia it is illegal to say, God does not exist. (and in germany under special circumstances, too - meaning, if enough people would get angry at you saying that, it would be illegal for you to say so)

> I do think that Reddit fills an important niche - a place where any topic is open for discussion

This used to be the case years ago but Reddit is anything but open now. It's a giant echo chamber and if you harbor unpopular beliefs or opinions you are not welcome.

Once federation works, porn-related instances can do what they want and you can federate with them if you want.

they did just remove r/theDonald so obviously not just any topic is open for discussion. Basically you can talk about any color as long as it's blue.

That sounds like it applies to contributing to the source, not to users of the software, or they really want to make sure that there are few "what programming language should I use" flame wars with rules like Respect that people have differences of opinion and that every design or implementation choice carries a trade-off and numerous costs. There is seldom a right answer.

True, but the things about bigotry and harassment seem more likely to apply to the site, unless big projects get weirdly abusive issues or PRs. And it is linked from rule 1 on the website, I’m guessing the website rules isn’t referring to rules for contributing. I think maybe it’s both. I certainly don’t get the impression they want to be a Voat style ‘Reddit for after you’re banned’, regardless.

I understood the general goal the same way.

As for CoC: I believe it's more of a signalling act than a reaction to past issues. Just like the KKK would add "no race mixing" to the rules, a left wing open source project needs to signal to their in group, and their main way of doing that is to say "no harassment based on [some criteria]".

"No harassment" qualifies as left wing signalling now?

Adding a code of conduct of that specific kind ("no being mean about weight" etc) not as a reaction to actual issues you've faced, but from the get go? Yeah, and it's a reliable signal as well. Inclusivity is one of the progressive core tenets.

Inclusivity is core to democracy, and to call that progressive in 2020... Its just doing your due diligence in the face of software dev now being done by an ever diverse population. Any association will have house rules, often with very similar stipulations, and now software projects are doing the same, such that the wheel doesn't have to be reinvented.

No, it's really not. Democracy can function just fine without everybody being included everywhere.

I don't have an issue with it if anyone finds inclusivity to be the most important issue, but it is a progressive policy, not "core to democracy". Please stop moralizing your personal political convictions. No, you're not a good person because of random political beliefs you happen to have, no, people who don't share those beliefs are not bad persons, and no, democracy does not rely on everyone sharing your beliefs.

It can function that way, its however no democracy but aristocracy. You could pick up a book on this subject to brush up your knowledge.

Ancient Athens had a democracy. It also had slavery. And of course women are more like children than full adults, so they're weren't allowed to vote too.

Democracy does not require Universal Suffrage.

Also fun quote from Wikipedia: In its original 19th-century usage by reformers in Britain, universal suffrage was understood to mean only universal manhood suffrage

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_suffrage

"No harassment based on certain criteria". The old FreeBSD code of conduct is a good example. Instead of having a blanket ban on harassment, it listed specific criteria that you couldn't harass someone about.

You probably saw the brackets in the quote. I imagine those were added by the poster.