Reddit makes SPLC for "most violent racist internet content",replacing Stormfront.

[sufrommich]

One section of the Web forum is dedicated to watching black men die, while another is called “CoonTown” and features users wondering if there are any states left that are “nigger free.” One conversation focuses on the state of being “Negro Free,” while another is about how best to bring attention to the assertion that black people are more prone to commit sexual assaults than whites.

But these discussions aren’t happening on Stormfront, which since its founding in 1995 by a former Alabama Klan leader has been the largest hate forum on the Web. They’re taking place on Reddit, a huge online bulletin board recently spun off into its own independent entity from Advance Publications, the parent company of Condé Nast. Reddit has been hailed as the last bastion of free speech on the Internet, an unregulated and vibrant community of users who post whatever they want and rely on the community around them to police their content.

The world of online hate, long dominated by website forums like Stormfront and its smaller neo-Nazi rival Vanguard News Network (VNN), has found a new — and wildly popular — home on the Internet. Reddit boasts the 9th highest Alexa Internet traffic ranking in the United States and the 36th worldwide. Many of Reddit’s racist subreddits are among its most popular.

Reddit is a news site that hosts user-submitted links and discussion, organized into specific communities of interest comprised of “subreddits,” which are ranked by votes from users. If a reader believes content is a constructive contribution, he or she can “upvote” it, pushing the content further up the page. Conversely, if a user thinks that content is either off-topic or is not constructive, it can be “downvoted,” causing it to sink further down the page.


http://www.splcenter.org/Black-Hole

[NuclearDem]

1. At least Ellen Pao's been kicked out.

Priorities, people.

[sufrommich]

3. +1. nt

[roody]

2. Glad I've never been there.

[closeupready]

4. This development is going to be a problem for Reddit, IMO.

A big one. If condemnations like this continue to pile up, then they are opening themselves up to obscenity and defamation lawsuits.

[951-Riverside]

5. Blame ICANN for allowing these racist domains to exist

If you host racist content you should have your domain confiscated and put up for auction by ICANN.

[dairydog91]

6. "among its most popular"? Really?

/r/CoonTown apparently has around 20,000 subscribers at the moment, and it's the biggest racist subreddit I know of. By way of comparison, each of the top 50 subreddits has at least 3 million subscribers per subreddit, with the biggest having over 9 million subscribers.

Hell, /r/Frugal is a subreddit devoted exclusively to the fine art of being a cheap bastard, and it manages to have 25 times as many subscribers as /r/CoonTown. Once you get down into subreddits with a subscriber count in the 5 digits, you are thoroughly in the weird little fringe subreddits. At 16,000 subscribers, /r/ClopClop is roughly in the same league as /r/Coontown, and ClopClop is a subreddit devoted exclusively to pornographic cartoon images of (adult-aged) My Little Pony characters. Then there's /r/DragonsFuckingCars (self-explanatory), which has almost 14,000 subscribers.

[Prism]

7. They don't care how Reddit works

It has been decided that Reddit is this year's Devil Site, and no amount of having no idea how the site functions is going to stop people from opining on how terrible it is. When your desire is to be angry about stuff, you will find something.

I have the greatest gif of all time from DFC on my phone. Every time I need a laugh, I open it. It's sublime.

[alarimer]

8. If they don't want to be tarred with this brush, they need to lose the hate threads.

People whining that nobody understands Reddit are missing the point. The site is identified as the armpit of the internet because it allows such things to exist. It keeps people who might otherwise contribute and find value from contributing, because they don't want to run the risk of being attacked by the assholes of Reddit.

So if Reddit wants to lose this reputation, they need to clean it up, get rid of the assholes and moderate more effectively. The assholes gravitate there because they can. Just like Discussionist proved the same thing. Asshole are ruining the internet.

[Capt. Obvious]

9. "It keeps people who might otherwise contribute and find value from contributing"

To be specific, here we are after:

10 years, 0 months, 0 days
(ok, fine, technically it’s 9 years, 11 months, 30 days, 22 hours, and 16 minutes at time of posting this at 10 am PDT)

1,715,454,785 comments
(.36% of which mention cats)

334,626,161 monthly page views per Reddit engineer
(also 7,637,686 unique monthly visitors per engineer, at 30 engineers—we're hiring more!)
190,227,552 posts
(36% self posts vs link)

36,136,190 user accounts
(26,222 of which include some variation of “pm me” or “don’t pm me” requests)

853,824 subreddits created
(9,601 of which were active yesterday)


http://www.redditblog.com/2015/06/happy-10th-birthday-to-us-celebrating.html

[Prism]

10. Who did the identifying?

People whose life's work seems to be wandering the internet finding things to dislike about it.

Well, congratulations to them. They have succeeded in the world's easiest and most useless task.

Millions of users, tens of thousands of subreddits, and we're supposed to be buggered because there's a vanishingly small bit of crap in some corner somewhere? The posters above just provided the stats on just how minuscule this problem is. But to hear tell of it, it's practically The Entirety of Reddit.

Someone's being very dishonest here.

You have to work to find these dark corners. They even made it harder, making it so you have to actually enter your account information in to even see the worst bits.

And people still aren't happy.

It's like watching people pay to enter a porno theater on a daily basis while bewailing how disgusting it is, and won't someone do something about this travesty?!

[Prism]

13. It reminds me of right-winger Peter LaBarbera

I'm not sure if the guy is still around, but in the early 2000s, he worked for right-wing, anti-gay, anti-woman outfit Concerned Women for America. He really, really hated gay people. He wrote article after article about how unhealthy our "lifestyles" were. And to prove it, he and surrogates would obtain, view, and describe various bit of gay porn. Always the really extreme stuff. Furthermore, either he or surrogates would attend BDSM functions - the kind with sex parties. Just to tell us how awful they were!

Over and over and over again.

I once had a side conversation with a decloseted assistant of his years ago. His description of the office over there was . . . very interesting.

[Prism]

15. That is exactly what happened

I've used Reddit for years. I read it daily.

Want to guess how I first learned /coontown existed?

Yup. Outraged people who broadcast the place everywhere. In day to day reading of tens of thousands of posts, it never came up. Now everyone knows about it and others.

Streisand Effect writ large. Racists are probably overjoyed at the exposure.

[chalmers]

16. facebook has just as meny hate sites

but for some reason it gets a pass?