“Does free speech mean literally anyone can say anything at any time? Or is it actually more conducive to the free exchange of ideas if we create a platform where women and people of color can say what they want without thousands of people screaming, ‘Fuck you, light yourself on fire, I know where you live’? If your entire answer to that very difficult question is ‘Free speech,’ then, I’m sorry, that tells me that you’re not really paying attention.” —Reddit gen. counsel
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/19/reddit-and-the-struggle-to-detoxify-the-internet
@scott Let me know what you find. Bethanye Blount left after only two months. I've never asked her about it but I have a huge amount of respect for her (I worked with her at Linden Lab and Facebook) so if she doesn't have confidence in the company after having been that far inside, they have an uphill battle to earn any kind of trust from me.
@seanl Ah, thanks. Well a handful of people (some of them on vis.social here) always urge me to check out r/DataIsBeautiful (or something). I hope that hate speech etc. are minimal in that forum, but frankly I find the whole interface overwhelming and unsightly. Like Craigslist but, um, less structured. :)
@scott I use Reddit on a daily basis, and it's actually quite pleasant once you unsubscribe from a lot of the default subs and find the smaller communities. Happy to recommend a few if you're interested in that second look!
@duncangeere OK, please do, and thanks for the advice. :)
@scott These are quite interest-based, but I particularly enjoy /r/breadit, /r/indieheads, /r/photography, /r/askculinary, and /r/askhistorians. Geographical subreddits are also often pretty good, /r/europe is fantastic, for example. Viz stuff is a bit weak there - /r/dataisbeautiful is the biggest, but varies wildly in quality, and post seem to either get 20 or 20,000 upvotes and nothing in between.
@duncangeere I will take a look. Thanks!
@scott Like you (perhaps?), I try very hard to avoid Reddit, only visiting it when DuckDuckGo says that's the only place with the answer, and even when I'm there, I can feel the sleaze and slime oozing from around the browser window borders, so I try to quickly close the tab. No doubt I sound silly and dramatic, but knowing of the dens of iniquities the company gives safe harbor to, combined with how so many "reasonable" people see no harm in "providing a platform" to the wicked, makes me flee 🤮
@scott (I do fully appreciate how hard it is to draw a line between the just seedy and the downright evil, and that it's probably not feasible to ask a tech company to find or enforce that line, and how it's a reasonable legal–engineering decision to say "Screw it, everything goes except the worst of the worst, now let's make some cash". Life is hard and there's no good answers, which is of course what Melissa Tidwell was saying in that bit you quoted originally.)
@22 That emojo is pretty strong. :) Well I think I'll spend 10 minutes exploring some cleaner parts of Reddit and then decide. :)
@scott I feel the same! I don't think I would ever post. I just read, or click on links. I don't usually find dataisbeautiful thaaaat good tbh. Some of the visualisations are actually horrific but I guess it's about people trying different things, so maybe I'm being cruel
@sophiewarnes @scott It would definitely be more accurately named "dataisinteresting". Rarely are the actual visualisations that nice to look at.
@scott This excellent snippet reminds me of Zeynep Tufekci's https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-issue-tech-turmoil-new-censorship/ that shook me to my core, by giving me permission to question what free speech stood for today, in contrast to what it stood for to the Founding Fathers and over the subsequent centuries of the liberal-enlightenment tradition: "What we are seeing now is that when free speech is treated as an end and not a means, it is all too possible to thwart and distort everything it is supposed to deliver".
Great find!
@22 Absolutely — love that piece and all of Zeynep's critiques. :)
Wow, that is a fantastic article — perhaps the clearest news media writing I’ve seen on these large, systemic issues with social media platforms.
So far Reddit has been anathema to me, but now knowing how thoughtful some of the people behind it are (not the people *on* it), maybe I should give it a second look.