"Reddit’s problem stems from an executive decision to ban five subreddits for abusive behavior and harassment. It’s the flipside of its usual travail — precisely because it did attempt to prune those toxic offshoots, the site’s odious nether regions are once again getting dragged into the spotlight. And that’s largely because the community has reacted so negatively to the pruning, which it interprets as censorious; anathema to its ethos of free speech. And that’s the problem in a nutshell. The site is loudly committed to the free and open exchange of ideas. Yet that commitment means that utterly horrible things will be said and done there. This was fine in its early years — or at least OK. But as Reddit has become a cornerstone of the internet — or even the front page of the internet, as it likes to call itself — its problems become everyone’s problems. What we now see in Reddit is the crash of internet utopian idealism against the rocks of human reality...
There’s some evidence to suggest that Reddit is committed to growing up earnestly and to letting its users, advertisers, and investors know that it is a place where women, minority groups of all kinds, and the underage can feel some semblance of safety. That’s a difficult road that involves redefining the site’s identity and, in the process, could alienate hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of devoted and often vindictive users who built it into what it is today."
I'm definitely in the category of people who is freaked out by Reddit. It really wasn't built for me. And it makes me think about the different models we have for finding community online and for finding a voice online, and how segregated those models can be. Structures are interesting.
Related: Free Speech Isn't Free; and the metaphor from this essay (credit to JL):
"To carry this visualization to Reddit, what you have is a really large, multi-floor building with a large ground-floor common space and a huge bar area filled with a wide variety of people. Much of the rest of the building are community rooms that people can use for their organizations and meetups to get together and interact. it’s a huge — and very successful — community space.
Reddit, however, has a basement, and in all honesty, the owners of this building would prefer nobody look down there, because again, it’s a big space full of community rooms as well, but down there are the groups Reddit feel are part of the community but would prefer most of us would stay avoid. In some ways Reddit should be lauded for being inclusive of all community groups, even the uncomfortable ones, but down in that basement is a big part of the ultimate death of Reddit."
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