Dave Farber
2018-06-16 21:09:08 UTC
Date: June 17, 2018 at 5:57:58 AM GMT+9
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet
Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet
How do we fix life online without limiting free speech?
By Andrew Marantz
Mar 19 2018
<https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/19/reddit-and-the-struggle-to-detoxify-the-internet>
Which Web sites get the most traffic? According to the ranking service Alexa, the top three sites in the United States, as of this writing, are Google, YouTube, and Facebook. (Porn, somewhat hearteningly, doesnât crack the top ten.) The rankings donât reflect everythingâthe dark Web, the nouveau-riche recluses harvesting bitcoinâbut, for the most part, people online go where youâd expect them to go. The only truly surprising entry, in fourth place, is Reddit, whose astronomical popularity seems at odds with the fact that many Americans have only vaguely heard of the site and have no real understanding of what it is. A link aggregator? A microblogging platform? A social network?
To its devotees, Reddit feels proudly untamed, one of the last Internet giants to resist homogeneity. Most Reddit pages have a throwback aesthetic, with a few crudely designed graphics and a tangle of text: an original post, comments on the post, responses to the comments, responses to the responses. Thatâs pretty much it. Reddit is made up of more than a million individual communities, or subreddits, some of which have three subscribers, some twenty million. Every subreddit is devoted to a specific kind of content, ranging from vital to trivial: r/News, r/Politics, r/Trees (for marijuana enthusiasts), r/MarijuanaEnthusiasts (for tree enthusiasts), r/MildlyInteresting (âfor photos that are, you know, mildly interestingâ). Some people end up on Reddit by accident, find it baffling, and never visit again. But people who do use itâredditors, as theyâre calledâoften use it all day long, to the near-exclusion of anything else. âFor a while, we called ourselves the front page of the Internet,â Steve Huffman, Redditâs C.E.O., said recently. âThese days, I tend to say that weâre a place for open and honest conversationsââopen and honestâ meaning authentic, meaning messy, meaning the best and worst and realest and weirdest parts of humanity.â
On November 23, 2016, shortly after President Trumpâs election, Huffman was at his desk, in San Francisco, perusing the site. It was the day before Thanksgiving. Redditâs administrators had just deleted a subreddit called r/Pizzagate, a forum for people who believed that high-ranking staffers of Hillary Clintonâs Presidential campaign, and possibly Clinton herself, were trafficking child sex slaves. The evidence, as extensive as it was unpersuasive, included satanic rituals, a map printed on a handkerchief, and an elaborate code involving the words âcheeseâ and âpizza.â In only fifteen days of existence, the Pizzagate subreddit had attracted twenty thousand subscribers. Now, in its place, was a scrubbed white page with the message âThis community has been banned.â
The reason for the ban, according to Redditâs administrators, was not the beliefs of people on the subreddit, but the way theyâd behavedâspecifically, their insistence on publishing their enemiesâ private phone numbers and addresses, a clear violation of Redditâs rules. The conspiracy theorists, in turn, claimed that theyâd been banned because Reddit administrators were part of the conspiracy. (Less than two weeks after Pizzagate was banned, a man fired a semiautomatic rifle inside a D.C. pizzeria called Comet Ping Pong, in an attempt to âself-investigateâ claims that the restaurantâs basement was a dungeon full of kidnapped children. Comet Ping Pong does not have a basement.)
Some of the conspiracy theorists left Reddit and reunited on Voat, a site made by and for the users that Reddit sloughs off. (Many social networks have such Bizarro networks, which brand themselves as strongholds of free speech and in practice are often used for hate speech. People banned from Twitter end up on Gab; people banned from Patreon end up on Hatreon.) Other Pizzagaters stayed and regrouped on r/The_Donald, a popular pro-Trump subreddit. Throughout the Presidential campaign, The_Donald was a hive of Trump boosterism. By this time, it had become a hermetic subculture, full of inside jokes and ugly rhetoric. The communityâs most frequent commenters, like the man theyâd helped propel to the Presidency, were experts at testing boundaries. Within minutes, they started to express their outrage that Pizzagate had been deleted.
[snip]
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-------------------------------------------Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet
Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet
How do we fix life online without limiting free speech?
By Andrew Marantz
Mar 19 2018
<https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/19/reddit-and-the-struggle-to-detoxify-the-internet>
Which Web sites get the most traffic? According to the ranking service Alexa, the top three sites in the United States, as of this writing, are Google, YouTube, and Facebook. (Porn, somewhat hearteningly, doesnât crack the top ten.) The rankings donât reflect everythingâthe dark Web, the nouveau-riche recluses harvesting bitcoinâbut, for the most part, people online go where youâd expect them to go. The only truly surprising entry, in fourth place, is Reddit, whose astronomical popularity seems at odds with the fact that many Americans have only vaguely heard of the site and have no real understanding of what it is. A link aggregator? A microblogging platform? A social network?
To its devotees, Reddit feels proudly untamed, one of the last Internet giants to resist homogeneity. Most Reddit pages have a throwback aesthetic, with a few crudely designed graphics and a tangle of text: an original post, comments on the post, responses to the comments, responses to the responses. Thatâs pretty much it. Reddit is made up of more than a million individual communities, or subreddits, some of which have three subscribers, some twenty million. Every subreddit is devoted to a specific kind of content, ranging from vital to trivial: r/News, r/Politics, r/Trees (for marijuana enthusiasts), r/MarijuanaEnthusiasts (for tree enthusiasts), r/MildlyInteresting (âfor photos that are, you know, mildly interestingâ). Some people end up on Reddit by accident, find it baffling, and never visit again. But people who do use itâredditors, as theyâre calledâoften use it all day long, to the near-exclusion of anything else. âFor a while, we called ourselves the front page of the Internet,â Steve Huffman, Redditâs C.E.O., said recently. âThese days, I tend to say that weâre a place for open and honest conversationsââopen and honestâ meaning authentic, meaning messy, meaning the best and worst and realest and weirdest parts of humanity.â
On November 23, 2016, shortly after President Trumpâs election, Huffman was at his desk, in San Francisco, perusing the site. It was the day before Thanksgiving. Redditâs administrators had just deleted a subreddit called r/Pizzagate, a forum for people who believed that high-ranking staffers of Hillary Clintonâs Presidential campaign, and possibly Clinton herself, were trafficking child sex slaves. The evidence, as extensive as it was unpersuasive, included satanic rituals, a map printed on a handkerchief, and an elaborate code involving the words âcheeseâ and âpizza.â In only fifteen days of existence, the Pizzagate subreddit had attracted twenty thousand subscribers. Now, in its place, was a scrubbed white page with the message âThis community has been banned.â
The reason for the ban, according to Redditâs administrators, was not the beliefs of people on the subreddit, but the way theyâd behavedâspecifically, their insistence on publishing their enemiesâ private phone numbers and addresses, a clear violation of Redditâs rules. The conspiracy theorists, in turn, claimed that theyâd been banned because Reddit administrators were part of the conspiracy. (Less than two weeks after Pizzagate was banned, a man fired a semiautomatic rifle inside a D.C. pizzeria called Comet Ping Pong, in an attempt to âself-investigateâ claims that the restaurantâs basement was a dungeon full of kidnapped children. Comet Ping Pong does not have a basement.)
Some of the conspiracy theorists left Reddit and reunited on Voat, a site made by and for the users that Reddit sloughs off. (Many social networks have such Bizarro networks, which brand themselves as strongholds of free speech and in practice are often used for hate speech. People banned from Twitter end up on Gab; people banned from Patreon end up on Hatreon.) Other Pizzagaters stayed and regrouped on r/The_Donald, a popular pro-Trump subreddit. Throughout the Presidential campaign, The_Donald was a hive of Trump boosterism. By this time, it had become a hermetic subculture, full of inside jokes and ugly rhetoric. The communityâs most frequent commenters, like the man theyâd helped propel to the Presidency, were experts at testing boundaries. Within minutes, they started to express their outrage that Pizzagate had been deleted.
[snip]
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