Because it is the only tenable position. As much as we want it to exist, there is not a set of hard, bright-line rules possible for governing literally all possible topics of discussion in all contexts in all communities. The expectation that we can make simple, universal rules and have it succeed is part of the problem.

Governance is unavoidably complex and resistant to simplistic applications of ideology, in many places its rules must necessarily be vague because its reach is vast and the rule's interactions with the community is hard to predict. Room must be preserved for in-context judgment.

> "I feel like voat.co is going to see a very huge increase in numbers during the next few months."

Excellent. I can't wait, so long as voat's traffic increase is coupled with a commensurate decrease in reddit traffic from the same people ;)

> Because it is the only tenable position.

Is it not tenable to avoid taking a specific position as a website individually, and to simply comply with the laws of the broader society? NearlyFreeSpeech.net seems to have been taking this stance successfully for years, for example. It would not allow them to dodge criticism, since plenty of people wish to manipulate Reddit and other Internet sites into implementing or achieving whatever social objective they have in mind, but it seems as though it ought to be tenable while simplifying the issue and putting it to rest.

That's about as clear cut as it's going to get, agreed. As originally suggested there are really no other reasons Reddit has this rule other than "making scary/ugly things go away." Regardless of whether it's for advertising or personal closed mindedness on behalf of the admins/staff.

Really? Reddit seems to have even more racists and sexists since they all supposedly "left" for voat. But hey.. if that's what you like.

Because reddit's popularity is built on the illusion of being the complete opposite! One of the first large influxes of users came from Digg, who had their own revolt over censoring a 16 byte number.

Centralized sites have been given a pass for way too long. Let us hope the pendulum swings back the other way hard. Restricting communication, no matter how repulsive one finds the content, does not make the "world ... a better place".

It also makes good sense to me that certain types of speech, such as harassment, result in less freedom overall. (In the case of harassment, because it suppresses speech from the harassed party.)

I would choose freedom of speech rather than destroy it to prevent some uncomfort. Society will adapt to not seeing such publishing as harmful.

EDIT: Downvotes. Yall feeling a bit salty? Look, unmoderated "free" discussions exist on the internet in many places. I'm an internet "veteran", I've seen over the years the rise and fall of moderated and unmoderated social networks starting back at Usenet.

Between there and now, there have been an "Exodus" from GameFAQs (LUEsers), Digg, Something Awful, Slashdot and more as each of these communities grew. The "free speech" guys always find another place to take their discussions, and the previous communities usually begin to shrink to some degree.

Reddit is simply going through the _same_ stages. The free speech argument comes up, toxic is spewed forth to test exactly how far the mods / owners are willing to let things go... some back and forth happens and eventually, the "free speech" guys are going to form a new community elsewhere and Reddit's role on the internet will solidify.

Its how it happens. Its how it _always_ happens.

As much as people get outraged by the content, there is no doubting that Reddit has done well for itself due to its radically permissive policies up until now.

/r/ShitRedditSays has really called into question exactly what "free speech" means. Its like "downvote brigades" are anything new these days. Does anybody remember "message board invasions"???

Its fine to say whatever you like, except you have no right to assemble a downvote brigade. Which is speech. You have complete free speech, except you aren't allowed to make /r/picsofdeadkids, /r/HurtingAnimals, or /r/rapingwomen. Even then, the Reddit owners are looking for a way to cut back on the downvote brigades, which really is the "invasion" problem that has always been eternal on these forums.

There is _always_ a limit to free speech. And when a community figures out exactly what that limit is, then the "free speech" nutters leave. I dunno, maybe they'll leave for 8chan or some "more free" place. Whether or not that causes death for the site... its a question.

The Gamefaqs LUEsers were neutered because of message board invasions, as well as the "shock sites" of Goatse and Tubgirl. Reddit is "free-er" and seems to be accepting of internet shock humor like Goatse and Tubgirl (As well as grossly / weirdly pornographic material like /r/clopclop). But there will be a day when the Reddit admins draw a line and say "No, you aren't allowed to talk about that here".

This is particularly true when you consider that NSFW sub-reddits almost never make it to the front page, where the presence of offensive content could threaten traffic.

But that's all just idle thinking with no code to back it up.

So like Usenet, then.

Few news servers carries every Usenet group. No news server carries every newsgroup, because many of them are private, on private NNTP servers. It's decentralised: Anyone can run a NNTP server, and each NNTP server can take feeds of whatever subset they want, and add whatever additional groups they want for local use, or for distribution.

It has ownership through moderation, though there are certainly weaknesses there in the level of reliance on trust.

And the peering could do with some level of automation.

IIRC, there was an interesting study of decentralising git, that suggested an application of bitcoin's system for deciding who "owned" a name.

Now I do prefer a distributed system like Usenet, where individuals maintained their own killfiles of whose bullshit they'd like to screen out and NNTP administrative overhead was relatively flat (ie it wasn't too difficult to set up a new newsgroup, or if I remember correctly anyone could set one up under the alt.* hierarchy).

But Usenet/NNTP ran into a huge tragedy of the commons problem, most famously from Canter & Siegel's 'Make.money.fast' posting which they crossposted to every newsgroup, resorting to a capitalism/free speech defense when everyone else took them to task for it. You could also point to the abuses of anonymous remailer systems like penet.fi by bad actors (who were obviously able to easily outrun killfile entries) and trolls - I was still active in a couple of Usenet grousp until a year or two back and I could point out people who have been persistently targeting individuals and communities for over a decade. I'm sure many people with roots in Usenet could point to similar individuals.

I don't feel like going on a research dive right now, but I'm thinking of a social science paper I read a few years back about tipping points in social networks, which mainly exxamined persuasive campaigns, but you could see by the same logic how trolls could easily wreck an otherwise productive forum by lowering the signal-to-noise ratio below a certain threshold. I think it was from RAND corporation but the title escapes me right now.

In my comment, publishing any data is communication. But to answer in your framework, still yes. For example, some incivility will necessarily arise in proportion to groupthink (to counter). Classifying this type of incivility as "not communication" is bog standard anti-free-speech.

> If you're at a party in my house and you start behaving obnoxiously towards one of the other guests, I'm going to throw you out

This is always brought up as a justification for censorship because it is technically correct in the small sense.

But reddit's fundamental "asset" is its community, which came about (both implicitly and explicitly) from the idea that reddit is simply a technical platform and actual administration was done by subreddits (modulo the government-imposed censorship of any centralized site).

To continue your analogy, your parties got popular because they were awesome. When you switch to restricting people to 3 beers and ending at 10pm, it's entirely appropriate for people to denounce you as uncool and urge their friends to stop going.

> trolls could easily wreck an otherwise productive forum by lowering the signal-to-noise ratio below a certain threshold

> usenet ... tragedy of the commons

Don't find the citation for my sake, as my intuition agrees (it may have been posted to HN, too). FWIW, I think the same thing happens from low-quality non-trolling users.

For a decentralized system, users need their own filters and interesting configurable policies for unknown nyms (eg: be vouched for by other users, probabilistic viewing, requiring an anonymous bearer token). And there could certainly be opt-in voluntary aggregation points with differing policies, but they wouldn't own the users.

In relation to reddit, this problem only arises for the whole site due to the conflation of meta-forum and forum.

But reddit's fundamental "asset" is its community, which came about (both implicitly and explicitly) from the idea that reddit is simply a technical platform and actual administration was done by subreddits (modulo the government-imposed censorship of any centralized site).

I can't remember the title of the article, but Jacquesm or some other HNer had a great post a year or two back along the lines of 'I can't afford the cost of your free platform.' There's a big difference between a platform and a protocol, and it's essentially one of property rights. Reddit's a platform, and they can change the rules or deny service arbitrarily.

For a decentralized system, users need their own filters and interesting configurable policies for unknown nyms

I would love to see an NNTP2 that incorporated some developments like optional blockchain identity verification and so on.

> There's a big difference between a platform and a protocol

Yeah, which is why we're even discussing this topic. But by the same logic, users are rightly free to judge and complain based on their expectations - Reddit Inc isn't entitled to the community. All centralized forums eventually die (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9867142), but that doesn't mean we should condone their locally-optimal actions while they're doing so.

Furthermore, community moderation is actually irrelevant to this discussion, as moderation (apart from government censorship) was supposed to be left up to the individual subreddits.

As far as decentralized protocols, "identity verification" is much stronger than what's needed and would be the path to madness (open to legal extortion, etc). What's essentially needed is a proof of work so that bad actors (whether one defines that as spammers or your standard youtube commenter) have finite amount of "energy", while nyms that prove worthwhile are unencumbered.

All centralized forums eventually die (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9867142), but that doesn't mean we should condone their locally-optimal actions while they're doing so.

Here we disagree (a little). In economic terms, when the platform is open and unregulated and anything goes, there is a large consumer surplus. People go to a centralized discussion platform because it offers some sort of technical surplus (ease-of-use, attractive appearance, social proof in the form of karma points or whatever) which they don't get otherwise. But as a platform becomes popular, there's a larger and larger cost in operating it, so you charge or add adverts or something. But now the people who are paying want additional value for their outlay over and above the basic consumer surplus, and usually that value is in the form of security from unwanted interaction, whether for their persona or their commercial brand. So for the producer to recoup the costs of operating the platform and reap some producer surplus from doing so (or why bother), the goal is to find a equilibrium between the degree of security provided and the partial loss of the original consumer surplus (of unrestricted communication).

Now it seems to me that this is a two-part thing. A site like Reddit dies a little if they institute behavior standards...but only a little bit. Trolls may leave altogether and the community becomes a bit more homogeneous, but then it can run for ages and ages. For example, people still log into AOL and many other moribund platforms - if there are enough people talking who are OK with the behavior standards it will keep going. What really kills it is the emergence of a new platform which offers substantial technical advantages in its turn (way better UI, super speed, brilliant new threading mechanism or whatever).

Because most of the effort on the new platform is technological, there may not be any behavior standards in place and so the first people onto that platform enjoy the freedom of saying/doing whatever they want, and the platform producers probably don't mind as they want to get people onboard to take advantage of the network effect. But only a percentage of the people are attracted to the new platform because of the behavioral freedom, whereas the majority are attracted by a combination of technical superiority and network effects.

I think Tor is a good example of this; you can fire up Tor and freely explore all sorts of contraband stuff if you're so inclined and not too paranoid. But if you're not after forbidden fruit, then the user experience of Tor is pretty bad (not due to some fundamental flaw of Tor, but the .onion ecosystem). The privacy benefits don't offer sufficient utility for most people to justify the awful UX unless you are looking for something very obscure (<5%) or just illegal (>95%). Probably 80% of the onion links I click don't even load, and since I'm not looking to buy drugs or criminal services exploring the .onion domain is generally a complete waste of time.

As far as decentralized protocols, "identity verification" is much stronger than what's needed and would be the path to madness (open to legal extortion, etc). What's essentially needed is a proof of work so that bad actors (whether one defines that as spammers or your standard youtube commenter) have finite amount of "energy", while nyms that prove worthwhile are unencumbered.

Oh, I was thinking more of the way that on 4chan you can post as anonymous and say anything you want or use a nym if you prefer. So if I thought 4chan cared what I thought and I wanted to get the credit for my brilliant ideas, I could post under my name. Of course on 4chan so can anyone else, so I'd like to be able to 'own' that name for as long as I am using it - not in the property sense but int he sense of distinguishing my authorship from imitators.

It makes Reddit a better place and brings it closer to the original site before all the latecomers from the digg exodus. Why do you think curation exists?

But it certainly makes the site a better place. No one wants to read that repulsive content. Allow it and people do not want to visit the site.

The only people I want to enforce free speech against is the government. In private I prefer restricted speech, specifically stupid and immature comments that just waste time and derail conversations into idiocity.

I just don't get it. If you were a part of those subreddits, and they get banned, take your bullshit elsewhere.

If you're worried about slippery slope, then maybe just relax a bit and recognise what type of behaviour they want to prevent on their site. Or find somewhere else to have your discussions.

Or, y'know, talk about it, try and get reddit to give a clear policy so that the slippery slope stops and it's very concrete what is allowed and what isn't? Like people are doing?

Yishan [ "Not our problem" ] -> Pao [ "Remove" ] -> Spez [ "Hide"]

That seems to the be evolution at the moment, and honestly, I think "Hide" is the right answer. People have a right to avoid content that offends them.

Voat's problem [honestly] is as drama-filled as this transition has been...Voat really isn't offering anything other than "Reddit with more transparency". Assuming Spez doesn't screw this up, I'm not seeing how Voat.co will benefit.

As for vagueness, I'm not surprised...its like the legal definition of Obscenity or Pornography, its a community-tested definition based on social norms. You can't really quantify it the way you can numbers on a spreadsheet or "Marijuana is illegal".

As long as Spez is transparent, communicates effectively, and doesn't come across as arbitrary I think it'll work out fine.

https://pay.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3dautm/conte...

I'm pretty sure Pao's "remove" was going to be a tiny fraction of what will end up hidden and she was closer to Yishan's "Do whatever" position than Huffman will be.

Do they though?

EDIT:

Meant that seriously. Do we have a right to avoid all of the people complaining about discrimination in tech, for example?

On places like Reddit (or HN, for that matter) though that would suggest hiding users you don't like or avoiding subforums you find disgusting...not griping to management to remove them for you and everyone else!

I really really wish more people would get this. Too many people in Bob's position try to go beyond just coving their own ears. And that extends beyond Reddit.

The hazy term is "right". Perhaps it means "People [on reddit] have a right to avoid content that offends them."

For example, on Twitter, users are harassed, but short of leaving the service they don't have an easy way to avoid their mentions being cluttered by hate speech. It devalues the service for them and puts hate speech directly in their face. Blocking tools are improving, but people who want to harass others claim such tools are against free speech.

From the sounds of it many subreddits "branched out" onto personal Facebook pages and other places to attack users — to put offensive speech in front of the people who would find it offensive. It complicates the ideal scenario you put forward because while these are public places where anyone can post, there is a malicious intent behind much of the speech. To put that offensive content in front of a person's friends and family in a way that they can't avoid, or have to work to avoid, is very different from reciting that speech in your own private area of the Internet. Yet defence of one is often blurred with defence of the other. How do you stop such hate groups from "branching out" without shutting down the source and being accused of stifling free speech?

It's a nice ideal to say that one person is free to speak while another is free not to listen, but one is able to make a physical (or virtual) location distinctly uncomfortable and scary for another person. This sort of harassment is often defended under the guise of "free speech."

To clarify, are you are suggesting that some people are harassed more easily than others, or lie about being harassed? I don't believe that happens very often.

> And if free speech doesn't include the right to say things that other people disagree with then it's meaningless.

It's not about disagreement. I find it very hard to believe that people are making false claims of harassment because they simply disagree with others.

I'm not an expert on psychology and wouldn't want to speculate on other people's internal mental states. But certainly I have seen people claim that they feel harassed in situations that are, to my mind, a million miles away from harassment; that seem to me like nothing more than simple disagreement.

The division of subreddits mostly handles that already and is likely a good chunk of its original purpose. Narrow, interest-based groups. Its just that on steroids really.

I'm sure they'd prefer a more mature community, but when you embrace youth culture as a way of life you get what you get, and need to lie accordingly.

Rather: The distaste for advertising is as old as the WWW itself.

Go to Snapzu if you want more than a clone that has some rules (no hate) and a solid community, but most importantly tries to innovate and not just copy reddit.

Go to Hubski if you want a civil place to discuss things without all the flashy pictures and what not.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=w8c_m6U1f9o

"The Power Of Selling Out: Your Customers As Political Capital - Onion Talks"

NOTE: The illegal stuff obviously falls outside this, as the internet (and a corporation) clearly have to operate within the relevant laws.

That's exactly what they're doing, is it not? They're providing opt in controls for the less savoury content:

> Similar to NSFW, another type of content that is difficult to define, but you know it when you see it, is the content that violates a common sense of decency. This classification will require a login, must be opted into, will not appear in search results or public listings, and will generate no revenue for Reddit.

And the few subreddits that incite abuse are getting shuttered. I feel that's more than reasonable.

He's made it clear in the thread that he's still working on the wording and the rules aren't going live until he has much more precise wording than this.

https://np.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3djjxw/lets_t...

Did you ever think that maybe it's true? I could easily see a motive of pushing offensive content behind opt-ins, vs banning, without thinking so much about advertisers.

If he had said 5% or 20% would you have jumped all over him about being beholden to advertisers?

Enforcing harassment laws has always been problematic both online and offline.

This is precisely why every major publisher uses human curation rather than purely algorithmic.

I believe Gabe Newell said it best "You can't lie on reddit".

People get so excited when they catch a liar and think "See you can't lie", not realizing just how many lies pass right by without being caught.