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The Reddit founders had very strong ideas about censorship and freedom of speech, and so as a matter of principle, they refused to censor...

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.

Posted by nostrademons on Jul 10, 2015, 10:40 PM

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The Reddit founders had very strong ideas about censorship and freedom of speech, and so as a matter of principle, they refused to censor...

nostrademonsJul 10, 2015, 10:40 PM

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.

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