in defense of reddit’s toxic cesspools
Gawker really has it out for reddit and has for years. Blithely ignoring the many millions of users who’ll browse everything from makeup tips and funny pictures of animals, to relationship advice and startup ideas, engaging in perfectly civil exchanges of stories and perspectives, every post they publish goes after a small, seedy underbelly of the enormous site and pretends that every single subreddit is full of nothing but racists, bigots, misogynists, and trolls. From the very same site which slut-shamed a punchline of a politician it didn’t like, published celebrity revenge porn, and in general behaves like the TMZ of social media, recently came a high and mighty treatise of a man whose poor soul can’t bear to enjoy a million programmers trading tips on a site which can’t shut down recurring white supremacist forums with thousands of subscribers. Right. As all of us who spent any time on the internet know, deleting stuff on the web once means it forever vanished, never to return. It’s not like the white supremacists of reddit just set up new subs and new alts every time they get banned or their subreddits get shut down. Oh wait, they do.
Really, not only does Gawker seem to be willfully unable to understand how large websites for sharing user-generated content work, which is suspicious enough, but it also used this sudden moral epiphany as a prelude to their conspiracy theory about Pao’s outster as CEO. As usual, I wouldn’t trust Nick Denton to report that two plus two still equals four without fact-checking it on my own, so my very strong recommendation would be to take this reddit bashing as simply one more hypocritical salvo at a site he uses as a punching bag and a repository of scandals when his existing well runs dry. Directing users to the very worst of an enormous set of forums just to pretend that the entire community is like that, or prime readers to go into the site looking for an evil bigoted misogynist to fight only sets them up for a terrible experience. Jezebel will tell you a swarm of MRAs trawl the site looking for any excuse to post something awful about women and yes, you’ll find a few every once in a while. What it conveniently omits is that they will quickly get voted down into oblivion, their offending comments requiring action on your part to view.
This pattern applies to homophobes, racists, and every other kind of bigot. Among hundreds of millions of voices, the statistical probability of running into some user with regressive or hateful opinions he or she is proud to voice is high enough to be a certainty. There are simply way too many people surfing the site to avoid it. However, they’re either a punchline or a subject of very vocal derision among the biggest, most trafficked, and most visible subreddits, which is why the average reddit MRA, or white supremacist, or homophobe, has to stick to small communities in which he could preach to his choir. He’ll be run out of any other one. Could reddit delete these evil subreddits then? If they’re aware of what they’re currently being called, yes. But think about it from the following perspective: why should they? They’ll just come back. Hate is like a zombie, its only urge is to perpetuate itself through assaults on the rest of us. Deleting a subreddit that’s dedicated to insulting women like r/redpill is not going to make the misogynists within suddenly have an epiphany and recant their tracts on why women should be abused and manipulated. It will just give them another annoyance in life to blame on women. Same idea with racists.
Sure, we can employ armies of moderators in the Philippines who are getting PTSD from trying to fight humanity’s darkest impulses on the web, and keep hitting the delete button. Then, we’d pat ourselves on the back for creating “safe spaces” with the mentally scarring work of a digital day labor sweatshop that will have to continue in perpetuity to keep them that way, and pretend that after sanitizing a few big sites we now live in a post-racial, gender-equal, sex-positive world where the sun is always shining and the clouds are a fluffy virgin white. This is what Europe has done with its criminal statutes against racist and bigoted speech. It still has just as many racists and bigots as ever, and its policies still encourage subtle but constant segregation between the natives and immigrants advocated by very popular right wing parties. Censoring hate speech is not doing them any favors and neither will it for reddit, or even Americans at large. When we let those with regressive, archaic, and downright repugnant viewpoints speak their minds, they will never be able to claim the mantle of free speech martyrs speaking truth to power.
They will just self-identify as people with whom we don’t want to associate and let the hate filling their minds speak for itself. It won’t be “safe” or “respectful,” but it will let us know exactly where we stand as a society in regards to race, gender, and sexual attitudes. We can police the most egregious, threatening, and out of control hatred because we do need a mechanism to prevent hate form turning into real world violence, and either censor our way to deluding ourselves into thinking that we’ve done away with bigotry and hate, or choose to face the harsh truth. We can choose to be mad at reddit for not playing whack-a-mole with its worst members, or we can be happy that among the tens of millions of members, these tens of thousands are pariahs whose fanatical hatred is mocked, downvoted, and chased from subreddits they try to infest, limited to the very fringes where they’re constantly ostracized from the outside. And we can even use the hateful content they generate as a perfect counterpoint to the raving ex-girlfriend’s best friend’s cousin’s uncle on Facebook preaching that there’s no such thing as racism anymore with a few links showing racists he claims don’t exist celebrating behaviors he claims are no more…
