[ambler0]

Last I checked, Reddit was hosted on private servers. Hence, what you can say on their site is dictated by their TOS. The Internet is not a place where you can "say anything you want". It's a collection of servers. If you want the ability to say anything you want, start your own server. Reddit is not the government; it is not their obligation to protect free speech.

[unethical_ban]

I didn't claim it was my Constitutional right to say what I want on reddit. I just find it abhorrent that free speech is being attacked on Wired, regardless of host. And there are plenty of places on the Internet - large, small - where there are very liberal speech policies. That they are making mountains of molehills on reddit is frustrating.

[vacri]

The bigger an internet entity is, the harder it is for them to maintain free speech purism. The places with very liberal speech policies are small, niche places, sometimes mostly-abandoned places.

[copsarebastards]

Nor do they have the obligation to protect the delicate sensibilities of any person on the internet who feels "triggered".

The conflict here is that most of Reddit's users want Reddit to support free speech, while advertisers don't want to risk their brands by juxtaposing them with hate speech. Of course it's not about "rights", but Reddit's struggles are largely motivated by the fact that they're trying to keep everyone happy when that is an impossibility.

[ambler0]

"trying to keep everyone happy when that is an impossibility."

This is something I think we can all agree upon.

There's no need to denigrate people who may feel triggered or are offended, though. Reddit just needs to decide what's most important to them. If they want to give a platform to anyone, regardless of how vile their speech, that's totally fine! But, they should not also expect widespread adoption of their site. Most people are not vile and will be happy to move along to less hateful pastures.

[copsarebastards]

> There's no need to denigrate people who may feel triggered or are offended, though.

I think that's a misrepresentation of my opinion. I have nothing against people who feel triggered or offended. Frankly, a lot of the jokes on Reddit offend me. What I think is ridiculous is to try to force people to change what people are allowed to say just because you're offended.

Re: triggers: at a point in my life, there were certain sounds and words that could trigger me. But what I did was I fixed it: I got therapy and I avoided situations where I was likely to experience those things. I didn't go around trying to force everyone to participate in the treatment of my illness.

There are people who have immunodeficiency diseases that mean being around other people without a mask is dangerous to them: a sneeze could kill them. But we don't make everyone everywhere wear face masks to keep them safe, even though they have a much stronger argument for protection: a trigger word at worst causes you to go into mild shock or have a panic attack, while an infection is likely to kill someone with an autoimmune disease.

Of course there are places where it makes sense to limit free speech to inoffensive material. Rape support groups are a good example (and there are subreddits for that). But at least in its heyday, Reddit was a platform of communities, and that's most effective when you let those communities choose their own rules.

> But, they should not also expect widespread adoption of their site. Most people are not vile and will be happy to move along to less hateful pastures.

...like most subreddits?

This is what I really don't understand about this discussion; I feel like 99% of the people arguing about how bad Reddit is have little or no experience with Reddit. Most subreddits don't allow hate speech.

[mawburn]

>Last I checked, Reddit was hosted on private servers.

I'm pretty sure Reddit is hosted on AWS.

http://www.redditblog.com/2009/11/moving-to-cloud.html

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/09/20/amazon-web-services...

[Moeancurly]

Why is that distinction important?

[mawburn]

If you host on someone else's servers, you need to follow their TOS for what you can and can't host. For instance, lots of places don't like hosting porn.

I don't know Amazon's TOS very well, nor am I implying it comes in to play here. I just remembered seeing some posts about Reddit being hosted on AWS.

[Animats]

We need at least one big federated social network, so it's not "theirs".