Honestly I'm so disappointed that Reddit's management allowed such a crappy culture to evolve in their forums for so long. I remember signing on in 2010 and just feeling really uncomfortable browsing any of the major subreddits. Why did it take so long to deal with characters like violentacrez?
The Reddit founders had very strong ideas about censorship and freedom of speech, and so as a matter of principle, they refused to censor subreddits unless the latter were breaking the law. As far as growth goes, this was probably the right choice, as a lot of Reddit's userbase came from previously marginalized groups who now had a forum for their interests on the Internet.
Note that Hacker News made the opposite choice: it has a variety of mechanisms (slow-banning, hell-banning, quarantine, explicit moderation) that makes it very clear to certain users that they are not welcome here. And it gets shit for it too: if you browse the New page with showdead turned on, you'll see pretty frequent posts from people who are hellbanned complaining about the fascist moderators of this site.
Ultimately, the problem is that for any given slice of humanity, there are significant other slices of humanity that the former find repugnant. And usually vice versa. As a community grows bigger, there's no way to avoid running into the bad apples. I actually think the subreddit system is about as good as it can currently get for a public, open forum.
a variety of mechanisms (slow-banning, hell-banning, quarantine, explicit moderation) that makes it very clear to certain users that they are not welcome here.
Are you kidding? None of those make it the least bit clear to the users. HN is the most passive-aggressively moderated site I've ever seen. Also, hell-banning non-spammers is about the most cruel thing you can do. By extension of holding Pao responsible for all actions taken under her charge, I declare PG to be sociopathic, if not outright evil.
That wasn't what was said, though. It wasn't particularly coherent, but it was a comparison between two prominent figures in two prominent online forums.
I don't think it's hyperbolic to say that both sites have an element of sociopathic and downright evil people influencing the culture. And reasonable people can still disagree about the level of accountability for the actions and inactions of Pao and Graham.
There are plenty of details that don't line up well when making that comparison, but I read the comment as intending to illustrate all the hyperbole around Ellen Pao. There are a lot of people on the Internet talking past each other this week.
Haven't been around here long, but this place seems to me to be much better than reddit for what I'm looking for. To each his/her own, I guess, but so much of reddit was such utter and total shit for so long that the enjoyment evaporated.
>Why did it take so long to deal with characters like violentacrez?
He wasn't dealt with. He deleted his account in a frantic and futile attempt to avoid exposure.
Violentacres/Violentacrez (had to block him twice) set himself up as king of the reddit underworld. The admins cast a blind eye to his antics, and in return he prevented the raw sewage from gushing onto the clean streets of the reddit front page.
He was a troll from the start, and deliberately so, even in his choice of username which he had stolen from a popular blogger at the time. This illustrates the kind of brinkmanship that was his trademark - it is not quite impersonation to steal someone else's anonymous handle, but it is not quite ethical either.
His one good point was that he kept the other reddit trolls busy via interminable (literally) troll-fights.
I meant that the reddit admins didn't 'deal with' Violentacrez. Chen doxxed him, destroying his career, despite the full knowledge that Violentacrez had innocent dependants who would also be hurt badly. If Violentacrez deserved to be 'punished', then whatever punishment was meted out should have fallen exclusively on him.
>It doesn't become 'exposure'.
Bad choice of words. I intended the term in a literal sense, not a judgemental one. It was revolting how Chen made Violentacrez crawl in the false hope he could salvage some part of his livelihood.
>...when people you like do it.
I dislike the people who doxxed Violentacrez very much. I disagree with the use of doxxing as a tactic.
The special icon was subreddit CSS added most likely by himself. Give me five minutes and a subreddit and I'll make your username 72px. The admins didn't bless him with a flag at any time.
It's a common meme that violentacrez was "special," had some kind of sway with the admins beyond any other moderator, received instruction from the admins that was unique and not the usual ban threats that many subs get in modmail, and so on. Most people who say these things heard it from someone else, because the actual story is that he was barely tolerated. He even says so himself in your linked thread.
I don't get the elevation of violentacrez to something special. I see it a lot (friendly with the admins! The admins asked him to help with creepshots! it's all over this thread) and I don't get it. He was a power mod. So are hundreds of others. There are a bunch of Reddit yarns that put the Kubrick lunar landing to shame; some of them are making an appearance in this thread.
> Why did it take so long to deal with characters like violentacrez?
The admins asked violentacrez to help with the /r/creepshots. Later history got rewritten to say that he had created it, maybe to throw him under the bus.
Hard to explain objectively; I think the things that turned me off to reddit back then (now it's more mainstream) were people's willingness to assume tons of knowledge of topics they didn't really know about, the general white, upper middle class male from the burbs tastes of things like r/music and other cultural subreddits. It felt like walking into a videogame fraternity and realizing I didn't belong there.
That's a highly subjective opinion...but it's how I felt. r/shitredditsays probably captures a bit of what made me uncomfortable.
There's certainly a white fraternity feel in a lot of reddits, so I can imagine how people can feel disconnect to it. But /r/shitredditsays, well... I was subscribed to it for some time, and the posts themselves do a good job at noticing really bad behaviour on reddit sometimes — but then I discovered the comments there, and I must say, it feels like half of the users of this sub are trolls who pretend to be THE worst strawmen feminists/SJW (I hate this term, but since we're talking about strawmen, I think it fits) ever. Just saying.
The SRS sidebar makes it pretty clear that the whole SJW façade is exactly that: a façade. They obviously have legitimate complaints but hyperbolise everything to poke fun at it.
On IRC plenty of people who cry about getting a ban or K-line are ridiculed and told to go elsewhere. There is drama there as well, but it's a smaller and less exposed thing.
I know what you mean. I logged into /r/funny one day and someone had used the "b" word. I was just really concerned and uncomfortable with how things were going. What did you end up doing?
