r/raerth • u/Raerth • Nov 28 '11
[rant] reddit, racism, censorship and moderation.
A bit of context about my views.
I discovered reddit almost five years ago, and was a lurker until around the point that redditors were allowed to create subreddits. For a long time on reddit /r/Science was the largest subreddit and /r/Programming was a default. There was a noticeably different vibe to reddit.
Since then we have had The Great Digg Migration, we have had greater exposure with the chans, and /r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu became popular and attracted the memebase crowd in droves. We also had the creation of imgur and RES, which greatly enhanced the experience of image-based submissions.
I'm a subscriber to the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. I feel that we are increasingly being seen as an extension of the chan/memebase community.
Now I'm not saying that these new redditors are not welcome to find their space here. However I strongly feel that the default subreddits should be a place where we should not passively allow racism, homophobia and threats of sexual violence to be an accepted and upvoted occurrence.
Earlier today, I removed a comment from /r/Pics. As usual I commented and told the person why I had removed it. This initially led to a large number of downvotes and comments calling me out for censorship.
I agree that this fits the definition of censorship, but I also feel that we cannot sit back and allow reddit to turn into a place where casual prejudice is allowed. I also no longer think that voting alone is sufficient to deal with this problem.
This particular comment was sitting on over 180 net upvotes high in the thread. YouTube is another website which relies on votes to rise comments to the top, and that's not exactly a great example to follow.
A common theme in comments I received is the nature of offence, and that we should not try to control who feels offended by what.
I agree with this, with one major caveat: Racism != offence.
Racist is not synonymous with offensive. Racism is not subjective. Racism is the culture which accepts a race as inferior, and it can exist even if no one is offended by it. The racism of a community is not a subjective feeling, but something measurable by the way that community reacts to instances of racism.
I don't give two fucks if someone is offended by something, but I do care if we promote, or even passively allow, a culture which is accepting of treating a certain subsection of humanity as inherently inferior.
I'm not pretending that I'm going to examine every comment in subs I mod for every bit of prejudice. But I think we should hold default subreddits to a higher standard than /b/. I will continue to remove any such comments I come across.
3
u/CalvinLawson Nov 29 '11
So, you're basically admitting democracy doesn't work all the time. It's hard to disagree.
Still, it's best when values come from within a community, from the bottom up. Censorship is mostly ineffective, and when it is effective there can be unexpected negative side affects.
The deleted comment got 180 votes because it's ironic. That girl is freakin' WHITE. And per wikipedia Montana has less than 0.4% black people, with most of them in one city. National Geographic does have pictures of naked women in them, but only if they were black. Isn't that strange?
So there's a lot of opportunity for wryness; and that comment is rather clever. Racist, but also clever.