>The sad truth is (in the case of Reddit anyway) that allowing people to freely publish their opinions on your platform hurts your brand and your advertising revenue.
They're a user generated site (UGC). Truth is that their brand was mostly in the hands of their users from day one. And it's extremely hard to wrestle that control out of the hands of your users without suffering some pushback. In come cases, this pushback can even kill a site by making community disenfranchised.
Reddit has been doing a lot of censorship lately and people are slowly leaving that site. By exerting more free speech restrictions, they're starting to alienate large swaths of their userbase.
This behavior has still alienated people who hate every one of the subreddits that has been tanked, and were never a member. There are people of the opinion that a place like Reddit should as a policy extend the same kind of freedom of speech that many enjoy (or at least in principle should enjoy) from government interference. I don't always agree with them, but they have a logic that has nothing to do with secretly loving racists, woman-haters, or pedophiles.
Personally as long as Stormfront, etc.'s ISPs don't get hit by government orders to shut them down I don't mind Reddit deciding to nix such stuff on their site. Social pressure is in some instances a good way to push change that we for whatever reason don't want to mandate legally. But if the discourse surrounding the recent political upheavals that the US and UK have experienced has demonstrated anything, it's that immediately accusing anyone who even considers disagreeing with you of secret racism does nothing but preclude anything productive from happening.
Even if you think such tactics are fair game, they are consistently ineffective. Save such things for people you actually know enough about to know they are racist, sexist, etc.
Although I detest that incident, I haven't seen any evidence that this went further up the chain than renegade moderator(s). This doesn't seem like the kind of thing Reddit's staff would get involved in so quickly and so heavy-handedly.
Have you seen the threads before the deletion? There was a huge brigade of "DEPORT ISLAM" and "Yes all muslims" comments – over 90% of the comments were that, and /r/the_donald ensured they would be constantly upvoted, too.
If such a thread happened here, you can be sure @dang would nuke them, too.
Yes, but belief is not something that is supposed to be on that subreddit. The subreddit is for a balanced discussion about news.
(And that belief is very similar to "The Third Wave" experiment – I recommend reading the books or movies to try to understand the right-populist movement in many countries today)
It’s an experiment from the US from the 60s I think of a teacher trying to understand how the general population could support the nazis – the events really happened, but the book differs from the reality in most parts except the ending, while the movie differs only in the ending, but there it’s very different from what really happened.
After all, though, it’s well worth it, and should be standard material in all schools.
If you want a more technical view, there’s also scientific writeups about "The Third Wave".
They're a user generated site (UGC). Truth is that their brand was mostly in the hands of their users from day one. And it's extremely hard to wrestle that control out of the hands of your users without suffering some pushback. In come cases, this pushback can even kill a site by making community disenfranchised.
Reddit has been doing a lot of censorship lately and people are slowly leaving that site. By exerting more free speech restrictions, they're starting to alienate large swaths of their userbase.
Here's an example of Reddit censorship in action: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/06...
And then there's this: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/06...
And this is just creepy:
‘We know your dark secrets. We know everything.’ Boasts Reddit CEO Steve Huffman
http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2016/05/30/reddit-knows-yo...