Reddit Is A Shrine To The Internet We Wanted And That’s A Problem - BuzzFeed News
▻http://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/reddit-is-a-shrine-to-the-internet-we-wanted-and-thats-a-pro
The site is loudly committed to the free and open exchange of ideas. Yet that commitment means that utterly horrible things will be said and done there. This was fine in its early years — or at least OK. But as Reddit has become a cornerstone of the internet — or even the front page of the internet, as it likes to call itself — its problems become everyone’s problems. What we now see in Reddit is the crash of internet utopian idealism against the rocks of human reality.
Last week, the site shut down r/hamplanethatred, r/transfags, r/neofag, r/shitniggerssay, and r/fatpeoplehate (FPH), which alone boasted over 150,000 subscribers. (150,000!) The ban was a rare attempt by Reddit’s leadership, which has set out very publicly this year to curb harassment and revenge porn, to stop a problem before it is publicly pressured to do so by the media. Yet Reddit argues that this was not a clampdown on speech.
In the words of Reddit CEO Ellen Pao, the idea was to “ban behavior, not ideas,” meaning that, while there are plenty of atrocious subreddits still in operation (the racist community r/coontown has 13,000 subscribers), the banned communities created a toxic environment of harassment that bled from Reddit’s forums into the real world. Multiple women have reported being antagonized and threatened by FPH redditors on YouTube, and others have watched as photos tracking their weight gains were posted and used to publicly mock and harass in front of tens of thousands of commenters.