Reddit

Reddit isn’t the Reddit of 2011 for sure, but the complaints here seem to uniformly miss the point and indeed what “free speech” actually means.

Actual cons: Moderating a subreddit of any size can easily take up so much time and energy that it’s amazing that not more people quit the unpaid drudgery, even with the tools (most of which are written by mods to start with anyway). Almost everyone who modded subreddits with me in 2011-2013 have quit, and the few remaining are in charge of super niche subs. When you get over 10k subscribers the amount of drama and nonsense that gets put through mod mail gets insane. God help you if you didn’t get the offer to buy into their IPO at the rate offered, since that was almost like free money pretty much from the start, provided that you had money to invest. But that’s a one time thing and not everyone got the opportunity.

Search function remains suboptimal. It’s easier to use Google than the actual reddit search, which is fine on a computer but makes the experience on mobile clunky, and they had what, 15 years to fix this?

Management (well, really it’s Spez’s handiwork) doesn’t really understand how ad hoc communities work. Imposing prescriptive values inconsistent with the communities is something tried over and over and never really works. The point is not to be facebook-but-anonymous-if-you-know-what-you’re-doing. It’s a separate thing and the users, not the devs, really run the content and in turn, the show. Management though seem bewildered by this . I know that ad sales is part of the equation, but thanks to ublock I don’t see ads and a smart agency can use the quirks in effective, natural ways. Don’t treat your content creators or your customers as children, please.

Literally no actual lawyers will give advice in /r/legaladvice, which is obvious to actual lawyers and the generation that took the internet as implicitly BS-until-proven-otherwise. But at this point enough normies are on there that you have the blind leading the blind and potentially screw up people’s lives because they aren’t familiar with the cynical culture the site is predicated on. No need to actually censor, but a note of “you should probably not trust advice from internet randos farming karma” is long overdue on a site-wide level.

Why free speech isn’t an issue? Because free speech is a phrase that carries the implicit question “free from whom?” In the US, it’s from the state. Internet randos talk trash. The state shows up in SWAT gear and shoots people. Reddit is not a private platform anymore but it is not state media and therefore they are respecting free speech by not actively working with the government. You are free to open your own clone anyway. Nobody is forcing you to be on reddit. State moderation is far worse than private censorship/curation. I can’t come and paint over your bedroom walls just because you let me in the door, right? It’s expressive, but private entities are allowed to police within. Reddit isn’t going to barge down your door, but the US government did that aplenty. Those are the two sides of the speech issue when “free speech” is actually invoked in court or in the Constitution. Nazis are bad for ad sales is surely not news, right?

It used to be a platform for free speech, now like other social medias they have become a safe space so that they can stay advertiser friendly. If one of the founders of Reddit were still alive today, he would be disgraced by what it had become.

Reddit has banned many kinds of communities for "hate" speech, who knows what their definition of "hate" is. Recently they banned a community called /r/frenworld, a subreddit for memes of green frogs. They had broken no rules, they only had some drama with another subreddit called TopMindsOfReddit, where they branded them as nazis for using the green frog meme. It saddens me that today this is considered to be hateful.

Aaron Swartz would be rolling in his grave if he knew what the company he co-founded had become. Reddit was formerly a platform for free speech, now it is a safe space for leftists.