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.