The notion of group responsibility for individual actions is insidious, because it's too easy to mount a circular-logic based offense and also because it leads to humanity's favorite game, us v. them.
Humans aren't really individuals, though they labor under the illusion of such.
They're weak hiveminds. Individuals, if they exist at all, are rare and want nothing to do with the rest of you.
When foreign hiveminds come into contact, one attempts to absorb the other, and failing that, to destroy the other. Memes are highly infectious, and so it's often important to police memes to make sure no foreign ones disrupt the hivemind's self.
One or another hivemind sent off a few spurious signals, and a few highly excited human units acted on those. The hiveminds in question don't feel responsible because they didn't intend to send those signals (or want to pretend they didn't).
That's fairly cynical, and I don't have that experience at all, and I do not agree with you, and I do not know of any evidence backing a single one of your statements.
This wasn't an accusation of group responsibility. In fact, they specifically state in their announcement that
> Ellen asked me to point out that the sweeping majority of redditors didn’t do this, and many were incredibly supportive. Although the incredible power of the Internet is the amplification of voices, unfortunately sometimes those voices are hateful.
Like any popular site, Reddit attracts everything from enlightened discussions to 4chan-level casual trolls (and worse). Pointing out the issues with threats and indicating that the community could be better without individuals who would publicly threaten the life of another person seems very reasonable to me.
I have no problem with the notion that those running reddit suffer from extreme cognitive dissonance over this issue. They've been acting in extremely odd ways for some time now.
Actions like the banning of subreddits for the actions of a few bad actors belie the notion that this is how you and they describe it.
The subreddit was filled with photographs that were either a) creepshots taken off the street without the subject's permission and b) friends-only Facebook posts shared with the public without the subject's permission (which is a violation of Facebook's TOS).
Then, on top of that, they were harassing imgur staff members for enforcing their ToS.
CoonTown, as disgusting as it is, wasn't doing that, at least not in the sheer volumes of numbers FPH was. Most of that sub consisted of making racist statements about news articles and misinterpreted statistics.
Sorry, I don't buy it. Was anything happening in FPH illegal? If not, then there's no rational basis for treating it any differently than any other hate-oriented subreddit.
If there were in fact some legal concerns, then I stand corrected.
Reddits stated policy was to remove harassment (and harrassing subs). So fph harrassed users and broke that policy. Coontown, while also racist and imo worse, stays in its box, doesn't brigade, doesn't target specific people, and generally just says racist stuff about news articles and posts memes.
Fatpeople hate was banned for brigading - for actions not ideas - because fatpeople hate would link to real world people and real world profiles and thousands over users would visit and vote and hundreds of users would leave harassing messages.
Ellen got so much shot for the "we're banning actions not ideas" quote (in this thread even) yet here's an example of it being used - leaving absolutely vile subs live because they don't brigade and banning subs when they do brigade and she's getting shit for that too.
They did, but I don't think most people realised that FPH brigaded because the details didn't make it into the news and weren't mentioned in the admin response. So for anyone who didn't dig deeply into it themselves, it looked like the admins had just banned it at random. Then rather than explaining it, the admins made a bullshit PR non-statement about how they were "banning actions not ideas". Really badly handled.
Reddit's original policy, for better or for worse, was "anything that isn't illegal." They had to add one or two things to that over the years but they stuck to that.
Reddit's policy then became, unofficially, "trust us to get rid of the crap." That sounds fine, but it has problems:
1. it's not the original policy. HN has a "trust us" policy and it works great but it's always had that. HN has never been billed as "come say what you want." Changing the policy is a bait and switch to the old community.
2. It was never admitted to. While switching to the new policy, the official line was that the old policy was still in place.
3. It requires positive social capital. Remember Philip Greenspun's infamous article describing the VCs at ArsDigita as "a group of nursery school children who've stolen a Boeing 747 and are now flipping all the switches trying to get it to take off"[1]? That's what the reddit admin has been like for months, and it leads to negative social capital. Some guy was shadowbanned but didn't know it for years, patiently posting in subreddits all along. The CEO didn't use the company's only product.
If you've ever experienced a dysfunctional internet community -- and who hasn't -- you recognize the patterns of decisions made in a hurry to stop whomever is immediately yelling at you and then trying to justify it with whatever they can cobble together afterwards, and that explanation will be completely unsuitable for the next crisis which will require yet another made up explanation.
I agree that they're changing their policy, and that it has been—and always was going to be—a painful process. But the failures of their original policy get splashed across the Internet every few months. So they can either stick their head in the sand, pretend it's not the problem it always has been, and watch their community get turned into the world's largest bastion of hate speech, or they can fix their mistakes and clean house. Are they doing a good job? Not particularly. I don't think they really know how. But they'll figure it out eventually. Hopefully meanwhile not fucking everything else up, too.
This isn't responsive to anything I said. It's a response to a different comment that says "they should only get rid of all toxic communities, not just some of them."
Building a community requires trust from the community members, especially the community members who are volunteers donating their time to help the long-term health of it. If the people in charge consistently act like they don't know what the fuck they are doing the volunteers quickly feel put upon.
The hardest part of managing a user community is dealing with all the users.
No, it isn't. Given that there was no blatantly illegal content involved, there are only two possible reasons for not treating these two subreddits the same. Either the admins are a) clueless nitwits who don't know what's going on with their own site, or b) sympathetic to one but not the other.
Which do you believe is the correct explanation? Can you see any other possibilities?
If you're in my house, I'm going to hold you to a much higher standard than "not blatantly illegal". If you resent Reddit doing the same, well, the Internet isn't lacking for dank underbellies.
> Because that's what the admins have basically said, by their actions.
Nope, the Reddit admins just haven't closed those subreddits yet. But they will. They've closed the child porn subreddits, they've closed the revenge porn subreddits, they've closed the hate groups that bleed out into the larger internet. r/coontown will be closed, too. It hasn't yet, which is a shame, but if you read into that fact that the reddit admins approve of it, then be prepared to be disappointed in a few months when it gets closed, too.
I probably sound more vested in the issue than I am. I probably also sound like I'm piling on with unhelpful feedback at a difficult time. I don't intend either -- I'm just a bit perplexed at why some forms of controversial, hate-oriented, and/or immature speech are considered OK on Reddit while others aren't.
