>As an occasional user of reddit, this whole ordeal has confirmed the reason why I prefer not to hang out in its forums.
It's really been awful and hard to avoid. I saw more racism on reddit in a couple few weeks (while the police shootings were in the news) than I've seen in the rest of my life combined. That and the increasingly popular /fatpeoplehate and I was pretty close to never visiting even the small well-moderated subs, the leakage was too strong.
And this recent thing, where there have been days where 5 of the top 10 highest voted stories across the entire site were literally titled: "Ellen Pao is a cunt"
I'm a pretty regular user, but have unsubscribed from a number of the default subreddits. Still, there is often a feeding frenzy mentality that takes over there. The racism during Ferguson was appalling. I saw a Pao subthread where people were discussing how sexually unappealing she is. It degenerated from there. Pretty awful stuff.
one of the craziest things about all the racism is that much of it is trolling from non-racist or not normally racist people looking to get a rise out of people. I see the same thing on YouTube and Reddit all of these troll parody accounts created by ant-social 20-somethings in an attempt to get a reaction or "shock" people.
Reddit can be a great place. Subs like /r/webdev and many, many others are very informative and a great way to meet people. I don't think I've ever seen any kind of racism / hate on the subs I frequent because none of them are main line.
I doubt your last sentence, as I regularly use Reddit and never saw anything like the story you mention. Certainly there were bad comments in more sanely named threads, but no highly upvoted threads with that title like you mention here.
It's really been awful and hard to avoid. I saw more racism on reddit in a couple few weeks (while the police shootings were in the news) than I've seen in the rest of my life combined. That and the increasingly popular /fatpeoplehate and I was pretty close to never visiting even the small well-moderated subs, the leakage was too strong.
And this recent thing, where there have been days where 5 of the top 10 highest voted stories across the entire site were literally titled: "Ellen Pao is a cunt"