[Aozi]

>It wasn't a magnet for extreme content back then. That happened as a result of subreddits.

This.

And it's not just reddit. As long as you can create subgroups within communities you're eventually going to attract some problematic people. While something like CP on tumblr really brought it to light, tumblr was and still is home to some insanely extreme ideologies. Ideologies that some people find completely idiotic but which others truly believe in.

It's the same with other places, in case you weren't aware, Instagram has a ton of CP as well. With tags you can find dedicated groups of various different ideologies, a lot of them extremely problematic.

Same with Facebook and its tags/groups/whatever.

And of course Reddit and its subs.

This all stems from the fact that separating content into categories and tags that people can freely define, means that for people looking for extreme ideologies, it's trivial to find an echo chamber with just a tag or two.

[arkh]

What is the problem with having extreme or dumb ideologies?

Without extreme views you can't have progress: in a lot of countries, being for homosexual rights or abortion is extreme.

[UserIsUnused]

The problem is isolation. Usually those are isolated, which means that it won't get neither exposure if it's actual a good thing, nor backlash if it's bad. That's the problem with "infinite" divisions, you get those very little bubbles.

[foldr]

Try imagining that you're hosting reddit yourself. Pretty easy to see what the problem is from that point of view. Do you want to be hosting and enabling child porn, hate speech, terrorism, etc. etc.?

[arkh]

I'd like people to remember that some people's terrorists are other people's freedom fighters. Same thing with hate speech. And the age of consent is not the same everywhere: maybe (I hope not) people against child porn will be labeled bigots somewhere one day.

[foldr]

Well, if you're happy to host all that, why not just set up your own reddit? The software is open source.

I think you might find that dealing with the legal consequences isn't a lot of fun. And I wonder if you'd really be so blasé about enabling that kind of content once you were actually looking at it on a daily basis.

[UserIsUnused]

Tbh that's what I think is great about 4chan compared to others, it's just has those very few and limited groups/boards, rather than infinite.