Consistent irony and in-jokes become real over time.
Social media has a trolling/brigading/hive mind problem in general across all platforms and I would add solving this problem to Paul Graham’s list of “frighteningly ambitious” ideas.
I'm fairly certain it started off that way. Unfortunately it doesn't actually take much coordination to brigade and take over a subreddit.
This is not a fair portrayal of that sub.
Reddit can do what it likes about banning political subs but the banning of r/gendercritical is quite concerning, in my opinion.
Someone's interpretation of their own sexuality or gender affects no one but themselves. You can discuss it over at /r/philosophy if your intentions are truly analytical.
I don't feel you've really followed the debate. Some trans rights activists are demanding that they be legally defined as the sex they 'identify' with. This equates to biological men being housed in female prisons, biological men competing in women's sporting events, etc etc. It's an attack on women's spaces and the very meaning of what it is to be a woman and what women's experiences entail.
This is just a short summary but the idea that they are affecting 'no one but themselves' is way off base.
This section was already covered by another user, but I'd like to provide an example too:
So, you fall in love with someone, and marry them. You have children with them and you have a nice family. Everything is going great until one day ... they confess to you that they have always felt like they were the opposite gender. This was not disclosed to you before you said your vows.
You want to support them because you love them so you encourage them to treat their dysphoria. You think it will be fine.
But then it turns out that when they begin to transition hormonally, you're no longer attracted to them. This is no fault of your own, sexuality is what it is, but you kinda feel like the person you were in love with has died. Your marriage falls apart. You're hurt. You feel vaguely betrayed even though you weren't really.
Whenever you try to talk to someone about what happened, just to vent, they all take your ex-spouse's side.
This is the content that was in a lot of the posts on GenderCritical. People who were hurting who wanted a place to vent about something a SPECIFIC person in their life did without automatically being labeled transphobic for working through their feelings.
Additionally, all the posters there were cis women. Men and trans women were asked to go somewhere else. Occasionally they would make exceptions and allow trans men to post, but for the most part it was cis women.
People who don't know better think of GenderCritical as aligned with the alt-right, but basically they are a despised part of the left. They would vote in the interest of women, being feminists, which meant NOT voting with the alt-right.
One of the main reasons they asked men to go elsewhere was because more often than not, those posters WOULD be aligned with the alt-right, and they would not have the best interests of women in mind when discussing things. Alt-right men would just see a subreddit that seemed to be for bashing trans people and be like "Sweet! This is my new home." and all the radical feminists would be like "nuh uh, out."
Source: I starting doing a deep dive into this community about a year ago to attempt to understand them.
Why an exclusive community about this subject necessary? This topic is not prohibited on /r/offmychest or any other "venting" subreddit. To me it seems like community of common hate and that's just awfully unnecessary. I'm pretty certain posts of "my spouse turned out trans an left me" would never be removed from any platform.
There's so little value here that negatives outweigh the positives by an absurd margin.
Genuinely curious what the link to antisemitism is. Is the thought that consumerism = big business, and big business = "the jews"?
Edit: I made this comment early in the thread, before others started to weigh in on why this subreddit was banned. I'm willing to engage in a discussion if you reply instead of downvote.
> Could it be the Chosenbergs? Although a small group, they seem to control the majority of US record labels, as well as the news outlets, the pharmaceutical companies, the bank institutions, the pornography industry, the entertainment industry, ect.
(9 points, replying to "I wonder who runs these record labels?" which was setting up that reply)
https://web.archive.org/web/20200620202415/https://old.reddi...
I visit a number of conservative and libertarian discussion forums and the "blame the jews" conspiracy has completely lost its steam. Don't get me wrong I can see how it's offensive and unwelcoming to jewish people but I just don't see the same level of commitment to the idea that some secret cabal of jews run the world or run America as I used to, just random remarks.
On the other hand it could be these are the same people who were previously writing theses on the matter and they've actually been effectively silenced and only drop hints at the idea anymore.
Fuck the modern internet, I'm out.
edit/ There are quite a few actually disgusting subs that have managed to evade this ban, in addition to a few which I kind of expected to see banned that survived. There are also quite a few which are basically worse versions of a subreddit that was in the banwave which leads me to conclude that the Reddit admins simply don't know that they exist.
All this will do is push these folks out to different platforms where they will organize brigading and bad faith participation in the dark. There are gobs of matrix/discord/irc rooms where people organize the manipulation of social media, and this move just removed visibility of it from reddit.
The other thing is that reddit is inherently multi-topic. You can't host hate groups and then quarantine them from non-hate groups. So what you get is a bunch of people who showed up for the hate groups also commenting hateful things in the non-hate groups. This creates problems for people who wish to have a hate-free experience to talk about their gardening projects or video games.
Will some people move to an alternative venue? Almost certainly. Will most people do that, and will the alternative venue continue growing like the old one did? I'm pretty skeptical. The reason so many communities are on Reddit is because it's relatively easy to maintain and grow a community there. By denying them that tool, you make it harder for them to do that.
I'm sure most people here who are old enough can think of some old forum they used to love that isn't around anymore. When that one died out, it wasn't simply a matter of everyone going to another one and everything was the same. It works the same way for negative things as it does for positive ones.
True but then it's not Reddit's problem. Reddit can't solve every ill, but it can cover its own ass.
You don’t sell walkie talkies to Nazis hoping that they will talk themselves out of being Nazis. You take away their voice until the bad idea dies down. Now, if you want to argue that some of these things are good ideas, I am all ears on how you’d want to justify racism, sexism, and xenophobia as valuable to our society. Unless you can successfully do that, your point isn’t valid.
Essentially it reduces the ability to detect bad actors, is what I'm saying.
Also, please keep in mind that for fringe groups like these Reddit is not their primary form of communication. That is, the community leaders don't just PM each other on Reddit or communicate via posts and comments. If there is any kind of organized effort here to effect real world change, it is coordinated by private chat, often times with assistance of anonymizing networks like Tor. Reddit is where people come into this world, but it's only floor 1 of the a vast underground bunker (for the communities where these things exist). Take 4chan as another internet dumpster fire. Anonymous periodically puts on their own campaigns like pridefall which can absolutely create real world problems. But they don't communicate through memes. When stuff starts working on that level, they are coordinating these things via better channels and that's happening today. If 4chan was to disappear, I firmly believe that core group would still be in touch and looking to set up another dumpster fire on another social media site, be it a private Facebook group, a Twitter community, a Discord server, or something else. But I'd rather they spend their time chasing their tail trying to get back to having external visibility than to have them do it in the open.
Also, they already have the opportunity to act more covertly, and they do. I am getting pretty good at spotting bad actors, but I'm sure I miss more. Some are pretty clever in their online interactions. Kicking them off Reddit doesn't give them any better tools to do this. They already can and already are doing this today.
If you want further proof of this, consider why the members of the KKK wear hoods. Could they do what they do in the open? Maybe. But because they are your neighbors, your politicians, your police officers, and your friends, they need a level of anonymity. Take that away and you make it harder for them to do what they do. Reddit provides the means for that open yet semi-anonymous MO. Taking it away doesn't mean they change their beliefs, but it makes it harder for them to do what they do.
I get it that Reddit doesn't want extremism on its site, and I don't have an opinion either way on the bans. But I think it's naive to assume that people won't just hop to another, possibly more extreme, platform.
If a bunch of assholes showed up to your front lawn and started doing asshole things, do you kick them out knowing that they might go to your neighbor’s lawn? Or do you keep them on yours to protect your neighbor? I guarantee you that you’ll kick them out and then likely help your neighbor kick them out too, not shelter them and help them do the asshole things by providing your lawn as a platform. How is this different?
Other larger banned subs include /r/GenderCritical (anti-Trans) and /r/ConsumeProduct which was ostensibly for criticism of consumerism and product promotion, but hid a large strain of antisemitism below the surface in a similar though less-direct fashion to previously banned /r/clownworld (barely-veiled antisemitic and racist cartoons/commentary). Also banned is /r/chapotraphouse, notably the biggest (only?) left-leaning sub on the list. Its users were known to be relatively cantankerous and tended to kick off a lot of brigading on Twitter and such; though some will say its banning was a "both sides" maneuver from the management.
In my own opinion this was a long time coming, and Reddit has long since shown that the original hands-off model is woefully inadequate in the face of communities that are willing to expend the effort to argue continuously in bad faith, organize to influence and control opinion in other communities, and attack the platform itself in their campaigns for hateful speech. Just ask /r/BlackLadies if you think these users "stay in their containment areas". Hopefully Reddit is turning the page to better empower its communities to protect their users and keep hate off the platform.