[skrowl]

Reddit only used free speech as a draw until it got enough user to make money by pushing agendas. It's been agenda-pushing high censorship for years now, but some people just started noticing around the 2016 US election where they didn't even try to hide their obvious bias anymore.

In an age where any opposing opinions are consider "toxic" by some, I don't think trying to "detoxify" should be a goal. If you don't like the opinions of a subreddit, don't go to that one.

[intended]

People attribute to malice what is best attributed to entropy

The old reddit, allowed actual pedophiles to describe their issues in ask reddit threads.

Theres even a dark ama where a relation which would make people ill, was discussed.

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Unfortunately what social media is exposing, is weaknesses in how human beings agglomerate.

If someone makes a forum for dead baby jokes - distasteful to many, but not harmful in private - it eventually attracts people who think that dead baby jokes are the norm.

Or in worse terms - a sub for making offcolor jokes soon gets overrun by people who think off color jokes are not a risque deviation from normal behavior, but is actually normal behavior.

----

On top of this, the internet and social communities are extremely low on contextual information - which is critical for most people to understand a conversation in real life.

This means that the only way someone can know what you mean when you are being vague, is if you make an constant effort for tonal and idea accuracy in your comments.

Obviously this is challenging, leading to a cascade of misunderstandings, which only serve to polarize groups more.

----

Theres a lot of research being done on how people behave online, and its just a grim picture.

How Community Feedback Shapes User Behavior (https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.1429)

The spreading of misinformation online( http://www.pnas.org/content/113/3/554.full)

The effect of the ban on hate subs on reddit (http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf)

[taurath]

Its been relatively rare that unpopular opinions offered in good faith are punished with anything other than downvotes on reddit. People don't post opinions with the intent to convince, they post with the intent to deceive or create a reaction, IE trolling. That has been the big wave that has taken over, its just taken the conservative political sphere over far quicker.

The other wave is the circle-jerk - a relentless and all-encompassing embrace of confirmation bias, institutionalized to keep a fundamentalist purity of thought. This is beyond a normal echo chamber, these are high powered ideology amplifiers.

We've never had the concept of unlimited freedom of speech, and most of the time that its been curtailed, it has been to protect against those who use it in bad faith (fire in a crowded theater, etc). That is the toxicity - IMO Reddit is going to learn this lesson far too late, and allow a group that doesn't want to be there anyway take down the whole site when they leave.

[skrowl]

It's not at all rare, and it's endorsed by the admins. They LITERALLY changed their algorithm to keep the Donald Trump fan subreddit from appearing in the /all filter and their posts from ever reaching the front page.

When you change your searching and indexing algorithms to suppress fans of a specific politician but not fans of other politicians, that's not really good faith.