I saw a tweet the other day from Jeremy Keith which piqued my interest:
http://twitter.com/mattpointblank/statuses/476453724991537154
You can see my reply below, which went unanswered. Alexis Ohanian himself, though, co-founder of Reddit, did respond to point out the breadth of the site:
https://twitter.com/alexisohanian/status/476561714910334976
This must've been the impetus for a subsequent blogpost by Jeremy later that week. In the entry he makes a link between the No More Page 3 campaign and Reddit's hosting of misogynist content. It's an interesting argument and I agree with his core point, which was: "I just want some awareness that what we think of as normal is what we collectively decide is normal".
I think this is a valuable and important idea. Evgeny Morozov has written in-depth on the problematic nature of internet advocates who act as though the medium is some untouchable utopia of free speech and democracy, which shouldn't be restricted or policed in case its mystical power is sapped. I applaud any efforts to publicly challenge unacceptable behaviour and root it out of the communities we're building.
That said, though, I had some problems with the way Jeremy argued this point. I think his article makes some rather imaginative leaps of association and sets up a hefty straw man to make an emotive issue bend to his argument.
More specifically, the part where he quotes the awful abuse given to Relly Annett-Baker after a conference talk contains a rather weasel-y segue in this section:
[the abusive message is] a horrible thing for anyone to say. But I can understand how someone would think nothing of making a remark like that …if they began their day by reading Reddit or Hacker News. If you make a remark like that there, nobody bats an eyelid. It’s normal.
That's quite a jump: to take a comment left by a user of an IRC-like chatroom and suddenly link it to anyone who begins the day looking at Reddit feels quite forced, to me. Secondly, for a self-confessed user who finds Reddit "socially unacceptable", it seems to me that Jeremy has a pretty well-defined idea of what "normal" is there. This is a huge generalisation of an enormous community.
Reddit doesn't have editors, like the Sun newspaper. Its front page is a collection of what the users themselves have voted to the top – 133m unique users, last month, in fact. The festering underbelly of Reddit definitely exists, and in unfortunate circumstances it becomes exposed to the wider web – often to the shock and disgust of regular Redditors who have no idea these things are happening on the platform they use to discuss their favourite sports team or programming language. I suspect that Twitter suffers from the same problem, too – there's a persistent and dedicated cadre of trolls and abusers constantly threatening and harassing people via that medium. There's a wider issue here that comes down to how we can moderate and police enormously-sized digital communities.
Speaking of which, I also found Jeremy's attempts to sympathise (?) with Reddit's situation a little bizarre, too:
It’s hard work. I get that. Heck, I run an online community myself and I know just how hard it is to maintain civility (and I’ve done a pretty terrible job of it in the past). But it’s not impossible. Metafilter is a testament to that.
With all the love and respect in the world to Jeremy's traditional Irish music website, it's hardly hosting Q&As with presidents or pushing 5bn pageviews a month. To say "it's not impossible [to maintain civility]" feels a bit glib when compared to the teeming masses of Reddit. MetaFilter, too, averages 15,000 active users per month. Like Facebook and Twitter, Reddit is playing in a different league here and I think it's a bit silly to compare it to minnows like this. None of this means that fixing these issues is impossible, but I do believe it's unrealistic to expect a community of this size and scale to be civil at all times – I'd love to hear Jeremy's ideas on how that could conceivably be implemented at this scale.
Ultimately I agree with Jeremy: the internet should be an inclusive and diverse place and we should speak out and challenge things when we feel that respect and compassion have been forgotten. His article, though, veers (for me) too much towards a rant against a community he seems to have already judged as being "socially [un]acceptable" and doesn't attempt to engage with the actual problem at hand. I'm in agreement that we get to define what "normal" is and we can't let a determined subset of aggressive abusers dictate how we get to experience the web. But when challenging the issues of running an enormous community I think we need to play on their level and scale the argument to match.
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Endnotes:
1. In before "I bet you're a Redditor": yep. Five year old account, paid-up Reddit Gold member. I also start many of my days by browsing the Reddit homepage to see what's new in the world of tech, journalism and music. I don't believe – as Jeremy seems to be suggesting – that this is a one-way route to becoming an abusive arsehole online.
2. Yep, I'm a man rushing in to defend Reddit, as Jeremy also pre-empted. I don't think anybody seriously needs to be told that Reddit doesn't entirely consist of communities of women-hating abusers who "don't bat an eyelid". My aim here is to point out that some large generalisations are being made in a way that I don't think is helpful to solving the problem. How can we work with communities of this size to make them safe spaces? This is a key point and it is really, really difficult to answer.
3. ... so where are my solutions? Well: Reddit already supports reporting of comments/posts, which go to moderators. Likewise users have a karma score that indicates their repuation. In /r/london, a subreddit I frequently use, there's a persistent racist user who pops up with alternate accounts to post things about Islam and immigrants. Without fail his points are systematically deconstructed, challenged and voted down. This reflects the voice of the /r/london community: diverse, tolerant (albeit not of racism...) and happy to police their community to reflect their values. This is mirrored across thousands of other communities. Perhaps a new feature which could show a user's moderated posts/comments, or the number of banned/abusive things they've shared, which could be appended to their karma score? The difficulty here is that much of the questionable material on Reddit happens in secretive, often private subreddits which most "normal" users don't frequent. It doesn't help that Jeremy doesn't publish specifics of what he finds objectionable: I wonder how much of the awful things posted on the mainstream, heavily-read portions of the site are treated with acceptance by the userbase.
4. Being a dick on the internet sucks and I wish we could just make it not happen. Let's think harder about how to get there.