Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: June 17, 2018 at 5:57:58 AM GMT+9
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet
> How do we fix life online without limiting free speech?
> By Andrew Marantz
> Mar 19 2018
> <https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/19/reddit-and-the-struggle-to-detoxify-the-internet>
>
> Which Web sites get the most traffic? According to the ranking service Alexa, the top three sites in the United 
> States, as of this writing, are Google, YouTube, and Facebook. (Porn, somewhat hearteningly, doesn’t crack the top 
> ten.) The rankings don’t reflect everything—the dark Web, the nouveau-riche recluses harvesting bitcoin—but, for the 
> most part, people online go where you’d expect them to go. The only truly surprising entry, in fourth place, is 
> Reddit, whose astronomical popularity seems at odds with the fact that many Americans have only vaguely heard of the 
> site and have no real understanding of what it is. A link aggregator? A microblogging platform? A social network?
>
> To its devotees, Reddit feels proudly untamed, one of the last Internet giants to resist homogeneity. Most Reddit 
> pages have a throwback aesthetic, with a few crudely designed graphics and a tangle of text: an original post, 
> comments on the post, responses to the comments, responses to the responses. That’s pretty much it. Reddit is made up 
> of more than a million individual communities, or subreddits, some of which have three subscribers, some twenty 
> million. Every subreddit is devoted to a specific kind of content, ranging from vital to trivial: r/News, r/Politics, 
> r/Trees (for marijuana enthusiasts), r/MarijuanaEnthusiasts (for tree enthusiasts), r/MildlyInteresting (“for photos 
> that are, you know, mildly interesting”). Some people end up on Reddit by accident, find it baffling, and never visit 
> again. But people who do use it—redditors, as they’re called—often use it all day long, to the near-exclusion of 
> anything else. “For a while, we called ourselves the front page of the Internet,” Steve Huffman, Reddit’s C.E.O., 
> said recently. “These days, I tend to say that we’re a place for open and honest conversations—‘open and honest’ 
> meaning authentic, meaning messy, meaning the best and worst and realest and weirdest parts of humanity.”
>
> On November 23, 2016, shortly after President Trump’s election, Huffman was at his desk, in San Francisco, perusing 
> the site. It was the day before Thanksgiving. Reddit’s administrators had just deleted a subreddit called 
> r/Pizzagate, a forum for people who believed that high-ranking staffers of Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign, 
> and possibly Clinton herself, were trafficking child sex slaves. The evidence, as extensive as it was unpersuasive, 
> included satanic rituals, a map printed on a handkerchief, and an elaborate code involving the words “cheese” and 
> “pizza.” In only fifteen days of existence, the Pizzagate subreddit had attracted twenty thousand subscribers. Now, 
> in its place, was a scrubbed white page with the message “This community has been banned.”
>
> The reason for the ban, according to Reddit’s administrators, was not the beliefs of people on the subreddit, but the 
> way they’d behaved—specifically, their insistence on publishing their enemies’ private phone numbers and addresses, a 
> clear violation of Reddit’s rules. The conspiracy theorists, in turn, claimed that they’d been banned because Reddit 
> administrators were part of the conspiracy. (Less than two weeks after Pizzagate was banned, a man fired a 
> semiautomatic rifle inside a D.C. pizzeria called Comet Ping Pong, in an attempt to “self-investigate” claims that 
> the restaurant’s basement was a dungeon full of kidnapped children. Comet Ping Pong does not have a basement.)
>
> Some of the conspiracy theorists left Reddit and reunited on Voat, a site made by and for the users that Reddit 
> sloughs off. (Many social networks have such Bizarro networks, which brand themselves as strongholds of free speech 
> and in practice are often used for hate speech. People banned from Twitter end up on Gab; people banned from Patreon 
> end up on Hatreon.) Other Pizzagaters stayed and regrouped on r/The_Donald, a popular pro-Trump subreddit. Throughout 
> the Presidential campaign, The_Donald was a hive of Trump boosterism. By this time, it had become a hermetic 
> subculture, full of inside jokes and ugly rhetoric. The community’s most frequent commenters, like the man they’d 
> helped propel to the Presidency, were experts at testing boundaries. Within minutes, they started to express their 
> outrage that Pizzagate had been deleted.
>
> Redditors are pseudonymous, and their pseudonyms are sometimes prefaced by “u,” for “username.” Huffman’s is Spez. As 
> he scanned The_Donald, he noticed that hundreds of the most popular comments were about him:
>
> [snip]
>
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