Now, now. You're starting to sound like Basil Fawlty.
Posted on 07/21/2015 5:15:17 PM PDT by BuckeyeTexan
Decades of upgrades to the Internet have yet to fix one nagging problem: the people on it.
The recent drama at Reddit is just the latest example. The managers of that expansive archipelago of forums have apparently just realized that the site provides a platform for some singularly hateful people. And yet they don’t seem sure what to do about it, beyond hiding some of the site’s uglier neighborhoods from public view.
But let’s be fair to co-founder and now chief executive Steve Huffman (whose predecessor Ellen Pao resigned under fire after removing a community leader and banning some hate-mongering “subreddits”): People have been banging their heads against this problem for a long time.
Last Thursday, Huffman said (via Reddit post, of course) that the site would bury but not ban “content that violates a common sense of decency.” The most common response to that was: What about yourcommitment to free speech?
But Reddit is neither the government nor the Internet at large. It’s a for-profit firm that racked up $50 million in financing last fall and sells ads to name-brand companies.
For any company in that kind of business, unsupervised comments represent a risk. When some people inevitably act like jerks online, others may flee, and advertisers may not stick around either.
Twitter, for example, has proudly labeled itself “the free speech wing of the free speech party.” But after realizing that it was enabling online harassment, the service has had to come up with better tools for fighting abuse. The Islamic State’s use of tweets to broadcast mass-murder multimedia led Twitter to ban the promotion of terrorism.
Nonprofit forums can also collapse from trolling. The distributed system of message boards called Usenet foundered in the late ’90s largely because some of the unmoderated “newsgroups” became ungovernable.
(Excerpt) Read more at yahoo.com ...
Agreed.
Free speech is one of the reasons reddit is so popular, but I suppose you’ve got to draw the line somewhere. Problem is liberals want to draw the line against anything that disagrees with them.
Now, now. You're starting to sound like Basil Fawlty.
Wow. The possibilities are mind boggling. Where would one begin?
Malibu.
” It’s a for-profit firm that racked up $50 million in financing last fall and sells ads to name-brand companies.”
The question is: Has it ever turned a profit, or is it just a leftist subsidized festering sore?
When Ted Kennedy died I remember the 900+ comments at the Mpls Star & Tribune website with most saying negative things about him. They were true statements but the next day they were all replaced by positive comments. The site changed their policy by having you subscribe to the paper and also deciding when not to allow any comments for stories they know will generate a lot of negative comments.
Dear Mr. Huffman: Sod off, Swampy.
Freedom of speech is a God-given right; and all the more precious when it sends little snowflakes like you into a full-fledged case of the vapours.
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