Why I am deeply alarmed by reddit censorship

submitted by Jizera from (self.MeanwhileOnReddit)

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[–]oneinchterror 9 insightful - 1 fun9 insightful - 0 fun10 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

IMO a big problem is that most people don't truly believe in unfettered free speech. Take Voat, for instance. After the Ellen Pao fiasco in 2015 and Reddit's first major banwave, Voat exploded in popularity and actually thrived as an all around decent website for a while (intermittent server issues notwithstanding). The thing is, a fairly significant segment of Voat's new userbase was made up of unsavory Reddit rejects from places like /r/FatPeopleHate and /r/CoonTown. Many people soon realized that Voat was dead serious about free speech, and a consequence of that is endlessly being called "kike" and "niggerfaggot" by spergs and seeing racial slurs on the front page. This inevitably lead many people to conclude: "maybe some restrictions on acceptable speech are actually good or necessary". More and more people left the site until only those who were okay with that sort of content remained. It's not at all conducive to building popular competitors. If a website doesn't censor, it turns into 4chan or Voat. If the site does censor, then why leave Reddit?

Better rules/moderation seems to be the answer, (but who decides what that means?) and there are still serious barriers to entry for new contenders - just look at what fucking VISA did to the founder of Gab.

[–][deleted] 6 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 0 fun7 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

this is why free speech sites need to make it easy for the user to filter the content too. you need both. a good block button like on the fediverse, notabug.io's delegated moderation, whatever the solution is.

or a way to positively filter content, like saidit's "friends" feed feature.

[–]thebonkest 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

You know what would be a viable solution? An algorithm that allows the user him or herself to filter out racist content from their feeds instead of the site censoring everybody.

I'm sure that would be abused somehow, but if it were made as like an add-on or a separate app the user could remove at any time, guaranteeing the truly unfettered nature of the site underneath, that would allow every faction to coexist on the same website in relative harmony by simply erasing the existence of the other from their view.