[gottam]

The comments here have this mentality of "there are people with different opinions from me, why don't these websites deal with these opinions". It's dangerous thinking that can be applied to your opinions.

The internet always worked this way. There are the cesspools, maybe things you don't like, but if you don't feel like engaging with these communities you simply keep going. Problem with these social media forum sites is that as much as you don't want to engage/debate with these communities they still use the same website as you so its unavoidable.

This is why centralizing these forums onto one website was a bad idea, blame that. Because now, there's too much money involved and excluding people of certain political ideas or whatever means you lose a substantial chunk of userbase, which means users would depart to another website.

[partiallypro]

Reddit once was a good place to engage in things like politics, but now it is a cesspool of left leaning people. /r/politics turning into a largely left platform has helped to give rise to the more extreme groups that feel ostracized. It is my opinion that effectively banning views that can at times be extreme (though non-violent and not inherently bigoted) only draws more people to them.

I don't blame Reddit for being too hands off, if anything I often blame them for being too hands on. That may not be a popular opinion; but I have in my any years in active online forums/newsgroups/message boards from the early 2000s, to now, seen this happen so many times.

A overactive admin/mod group always has a blowback, which generally ends in another community forming with more extreme views than what was originally the cause of the bans.

[CM30]

Yeah, exactly this. Many of the communities on platforms like Reddit simply cannot co-exist, and having independent forums for them meant they could operate peacefully without those who dislike the fundamental premise of the community worrying or complaining about their existence.

You could probably even compare social media sites to schools or prisons really. Tons of people with different, wildly incompatible viewpoints or philosophies stuck in a place they don't really care for.

[youdontknowtho]

To be fair, some of the "speech" on Reddit is actually dangerous. Like, get people hurt dangerous.

[partiallypro]

I've never seen an active threat on Reddit, what do you define as dangerous? Can you give an example? I've been on Reddit almost since the beginning and I've never come across a post that I felt posed any danger. Maybe I'm in the wrong subreddits.

[youdontknowtho]

You are in the wrong subreddits. EDIT: AND your anecdotal experience isn't conclusive.

[Karunamon]

So you have no examples? Bare assertions don't make for very good discussion.

[youdontknowtho]

Yeah, this is a discussion. That's what it is.

[projektir]

> The comments here have this mentality of "there are people with different opinions from me, why don't these websites deal with these opinions". It's dangerous thinking that can be applied to your opinions.

It has nothing to do with opinions. It has never been about opinions, and you know it.

It has to do with antisocial behavior. Antisocial behavior is inherently hostile and doesn't deserve a platform, which has been known to anyone who has ever ran any kind of social space for a long time. If you don't moderate antisocial behavior, you create a community where only that behavior thrives.

This is not news, and the real dangerous trend that I'm seeing is that antisocial behavior doesn't matter and should be protected. No, it shouldn't.

> There are the cesspools, maybe things you don't like, but if you don't feel like engaging with these communities you simply keep going.

Yes, except thanks to aggregators all the communities got, well, aggregated, and now there's really nowhere else to go. A cesspool used to compete with other non-cesspools, now we're all in just one big cesspool, because the quality of trash is that it affects everything it's in.

Thank god for programming IRC communities.

[haberman]

> It has never been about opinions, and you know it. It has to do with antisocial behavior.

It is my genuine belief that presuming bad faith (as you have done here) is one of the most common antisocial behaviors that people don't even admit is antisocial. It is toxic to the civil exchange of ideas. It's even mentioned in the Hacker News Guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html): "Assume good faith."

The other antisocial behaviors mentioned in this article (animal cruelty, r/jailbait, etc) are certainly worse. But they are also committed by people who know that what they are doing is socially unacceptable. They know this but don't care.

When people presume bad faith, they often do so completely convinced that they are the good guys. I am sure I have fallen prey to this myself plenty of times.

But this is why the attitude is so dangerous: "Antisocial behavior is bad, and I know it when I see it. I can be trusted to identify what is acceptable, and who deserves a platform." Well, probably you notice it when you see it in other people. But we as humans are really good at rationalizing our own actions.

For the record, I completely agree that moderation is necessary to keep communities healthy. But I think it's harder than people think to apply moderation in a way that isn't just reinforcing the beliefs and taboos of whoever is in charge. For example, I see too many greyed-out comments on HN whose tone is the same as other highly-moderated comments. The only difference is the opinion being expressed.

[projektir]

> It is my genuine belief that presuming bad faith (as you have done here) is one of the most common antisocial behaviors that people don't even admit is antisocial.

The bad faith is on the person responding. The post literally starts with "The comments here have this mentality", how is that not bad faith? Then they construct a strawman.

You want to give that power by acknowledging it with a response? It's the same problem as "it was about ethics in journalism".

Someone implying ignorance on a topic they should not have any ignorance on is acting in bad faith. There's no way people do not realize, at this point, in such large numbers, who is being kept out, or meant to be kept out. It was never unique, special opinions. It was always trolls, sexist and homophobic language, etc.

The issue is that some people think that language IS valid and SHOULD be included but can't straight up say that because nobody would support them in that case.

But this has never been about free speech, nobody prevents you from starting up your own website and promoting your agenda on there, if anything, that has gotten easier, as has already been obvious from the proliferation of problematic fringe communities (in case I need to define these think Stormfront or flat earthers).

[haberman]

"Bad faith" doesn't mean "I think this person is being unfair." It means "I think this person is being intentionally deceitful."

If a person genuinely believes what they are saying, it is not bad faith, no matter how wrong or misguided you think they are. You may disagree with the way this person characterized the other comments. But that's not the same as your accusation, which is that the poster is making an argument that they know is wrong.

> There's no way people do not realize, at this point, in such large numbers, who is being kept out, or meant to be kept out. It was never unique, special opinions. It was always trolls, sexist and homophobic language, etc.

I think this statement is at least as unfair as the one that originally offended you ("The comments here have this mentality...."). But I can tell that you genuinely believe this so I wouldn't accuse you of bad faith for saying this.

[jochung]

Man, where to begin.

The presumption of bad faith is both a lack of imagination and a lack of information. The person cannot imagine how a reasonable person might believe something, and why they might believe it.

The accusation of sexism is a perfectly good example, with James Damore as the case study. His words were twisted into things he didn't say, because his uncharitable opponents couldn't imagine that he was simply saying what he was saying. No, no, he must be dogwhistling something far worse, it cannot simply be that their own premises are too narrow, that their own value judgements are coloring their reading.

As for ethics in journalism, I'm one of those "deplorables" too, and you know why? Because there were 100x more people talking and emailing about that then were causing amok on Twitter. If the black bloc shows up at a protest, you don't suddenly dismiss everyone else as car torchers and bus stop smashers. But that's exactly what the press did to gamers, and that's why they were so pissed off. And the more they wanted to be heard, the more fringe behavior there was to point to to support the foregone conclusion. When the police does it at the G20 and calls it kettling, the progressives don't like it, but when they do it, it's just fine.

What's particularly galling is that none of this was new: the online harassment, the doxing, the stalking, that was pioneered on Something Awful's leftie forums like Helldump and LF. And lo and behold, those people ended up in media cliques like Weird Twitter. Pots calling kettles black is not a new concept, it's just amazing they fooled so many into defending their incestuous little circle. History has been rewritten, and now apparently online trolls never existed until 2014, when the fire nation attacked, and everyone of import got amnesia.

Here is what I saw. To change my mind, you'd have to prove that there was a massive invisible shadow campaign that could somehow eclipse hundreds of thousands of views, posts and tweets:

https://medium.com/@KingFrostFive/gamergate-august-2014-revi...

[SlowRobotAhead]

>Antisocial behavior is inherently hostile and doesn't deserve a platform

How many posts would we need to go back and forth for you to tell me who gets to decide what “Antisocial behavior” is?

[ThrustVectoring]

How do you deal with anti-social behavior that uses "stamping out anti-social behavior" as its justification?

[projektir]

You can't reason with any party that has already decided to be corrupt. So, in short: you don't.

You deal with this whole problem by not creating all-powerful giant aggregators like reddit that eat all other communities.

You deal with it how we did in the past: by creating zillions of competing communities and people choosing which ones they found palatable, or creating their own with their own set of rules. This usually results in a number of fairly diverse communities somewhat competing with each other.

[naasking]

> It has to do with antisocial behavior. Antisocial behavior is inherently hostile and doesn't deserve a platform

Can you define "antisocial behaviour"?

[MadSudaca]

Behavior that follows from opinions I don't share.

[projektir]

There's a wealth of literature on the topic that you could examine at your leisure.

[naasking]

So you're suggesting reddit admins, mods or some algorithm should diagnose antisocial behaviour using the DSM-V based only on a user's written words? This is genuinely what you believe?

[projektir]

I think I genuinely believe only things I claim to genuinely believe, not things someone's attempting to put into my mouth.

[naasking]

Then point to this copious literature of which you speak, and describe how you would employ it impartially in a forum setting to diagnose antisocial behaviour. Frankly, I think I've been more than charitable to your claims so far, and you're just avoiding answering the question.

[dsfyu404ed]

>This is not news, and the real dangerous trend that I'm seeing is that antisocial behavior doesn't matter and should be protected. No, it shouldn't.

There was a time when approving of gay marriage or suggesting that women are equal to men in most regards would have been considered "antisocial" by a good chunk of the population.

There was also a time when it was not antisocial at all to suggest that certain races of people are superior to others.

Times change. Today's acceptable could very well be tomorrows antisocial and vise-versa.

[projektir]

I am not sure what is the point you're trying to make.

If we define a behavioral set, such as "antisocial", meaning, behavior not welcome in a society, why does the fact that we later expand this set indicate a problem with using the set?

[ahartman00]

because at one point the people arguing that certain races, genders, or sexualities are equal would have been the ones banned. That is the problem. Today's antisocial behavior could be tomorrow's norm. Unless you prevent them from making their case. That is to say, we also contract the set, we do not only expand it.

In addition, there is the problem of who 'we' is here. Today, the fringe on one side seems to feel it is self evident that they get to decide what is antisocial. They seem to be unaware that ~50% of the population is on the opposite side. And even more, they seem to be unaware that not everyone on their side takes it to such an extreme.