
Reddit Founder Alexis Ohanian Resigns from the Board of Reddit - dootah
https://twitter.com/alexisohanian/status/1268943033137053698
======
minimaxir
Relevant context: recently, former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao called out Reddit for
their policies after Reddit did a statement on Black Lives Matter:

> I am obligated to call you out: You should have shut down the_donald instead
> of amplifying it and its hate, racism, and violence. So much of what is
> happening now lies at your feet. You don't get to say BLM when reddit
> nurtures and monetizes white supremacy and hate all day long

[https://twitter.com/ekp/status/1267689503797342208](https://twitter.com/ekp/status/1267689503797342208)

~~~
purephase
Yeah, TD alone was huge in 2016-2017 and was a huge contributor to the dynamic
we have in the world today. Ellen is 100% right here and Alex did absolutely
nothing to address it.

Good on her for publicly calling it out.

~~~
meowface
I think if TD were banned in 2016, there's a decent chance the world would
look even worse and more polarized today, due to the backlash and chain
reactions that would have occurred.

Picture "TOP SOCIAL MEDIA COMPANY BANS SUPPORT OF THE PRESIDENT" headlines
running for months.

Picture Trump bringing it up in hundreds of speeches and tweets, demanding
regulation and saying how unfair it is that he and his supporters are being
censored and silenced and attacked by Silicon Valley and the left. (He's
already doing that, but this would give him way more ammo.)

Picture he and his supporters pointing to it as evidence that The Elites and
the liberals and the tech industry are out to get him and out to get half of
the country, and that only he can defend their liberties and bring our country
and corrupt establishment back from the brink.

Also, all of those users would just flock to alternative off-site communities
that make TD look like a bastion of reason and civility by comparison.

Huffman's not in an easy position, here.

~~~
GaryNumanVevo
And? De-platforming works very effectively. Look at 8chan, Gab and Voat. All
drowning in server costs trying to host "safe spaces" for certain opinions.

~~~
syshum
Yes.. Censorship is wonderful

and make no mistake "de-platforming" is censorship

~~~
GaryNumanVevo
We make value judgements all the time. Reddit puts a NSFW spoiler on violence,
porn, etc. Is that considered censorship?

Is it really censorship if r/t_d had violated numerous Reddit ToS rules? Rules
which all users agreed on when signing up.

Make no mistake, it's a no brainer to ban a community that is both outwardly
hateful, and regularly abuses the rules of the site they're hosted on.

~~~
syshum
>>Reddit puts a NSFW spoiler on violence, porn, etc. Is that considered
censorship?

yes and no. It is lesser because it empowers the user to self select if they
want to see NSFW items. That is the key.

I put the quarantine on the same level as this, so I have less of an issue
with that than if they just banned it outright.

>Is it really censorship if r/t_d had violated numerous Reddit ToS rules?

yes, let me be clear Reddit is perfectly in its legal rights to censor
anything they want. They can censor directly all Republicans if they want.

They however can not magically make it not censorship simply because they add
a line in their ToS.. that is not how free expression works.

a Website that only allows car related topics censors all speech not related
to cars

The problem for Reddit is for years they advertised themselves as a Open
Access forum for all topics and discussions, the point 6 font terms of service
not with standing.

If reddit has a BIG BOLD header on the HomePage that reads "Conservatives not
welcome here" then it would be a different discussion for me

>> outwardly hateful,

Ahh the old "hate speech" non-sense. I reject this premise as "hate speech" is
such a subjected term that if you ask 10 people what qualifies as "hate
speech" you will get 30 different answers based on context and other things

Further Reddit ignores their own policy on hate speech and promotion of
violence provided the speaker is the "correct" political affiliation and that
target is the "wrong" political affiliation

~~~
GaryNumanVevo
The Reddit ToS has always had restrictions on communities that brigade and
abuse other communities. They didn't need to add an exception for r/t_D.
Instead, they made an exception to keep the subreddit around, because it was
driving lots of traffic to the site.

I implore you to go to ceddit.com/r/the_donald and look at the mod log. See
how many slurs and calls to violence you see being manually approved by their
mods.

~~~
syshum
>>The Reddit ToS has always had restrictions on communities that brigade and
abuse other communities.

Reddits content policy, by their own admission today, is subjective and poorly
defined.

Further it is beyond denial that admin moderation and crack downs on
subreddits is often politically biased. for example it has been shown many
times Admins will crack down on "calls to violence" in conservative or "right"
subreddits but are hands off in progressive or "left" subreddits.

You ask me to go to ceddit or mod logs to see violence and racism, but what
about the left subreddits that have it on display with out having to visit an
external site or mod logs?

------
MarcellusDrum
Reddit got too mainstream for its own good. The company desperately wants to
become the new social media (think Facebook or Twitter), but many users are
standing in the way, making the change from a discussion website to a social
media website slow. What made me and many others use Reddit in the first place
is that it didn't really matter who you are and what's your political and
religious background, the only thing that mattered is what you are saying in
that particular thread in a particular subreddit. Now politics and
controversies can be seen in all subreddits, people are using the platform
just to post selfies of themselves, and with the addition of the "profile"
feature, there is an insentive to make a name for yourself there.

So yeah, while a lot of people, including me, hate the changes, it is
obviously better for the business, as it attracts a wider range of users. But
still, I'm starting to use Reddit less and less, and relying on RSS and HN to
get my daily dose of tech news and discussions.

~~~
disposekinetics
Do you know of any federated/distributed alternatives to reddit? Although,
maybe the argument is we don't actually need a social media platform at all
just RSS.

~~~
CM30
From what I can tell, Lemmy seems to be this:

[https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy](https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy)

Littr seems to be federated too:

[https://littr.me/](https://littr.me/)

That's about it for federated Reddit alternatives, at least that I can find.
And I don't think the federated aspect has caught on yet for either.

~~~
orthecreedence
Just a quick note that from what I understand, Lemmy is not yet federated but
they are actively pushing to implement the ActivityPub protocol.

------
tmpz22
“After making a shit ton of money, raising way more money then we needed to,
and ultimately handing the future of the platform to soulless investors, I’ve
decided to leave to better support people oppressed by police brutality” seems
like a more honest statement to me but I guess it doesn’t read as well.

Edit: Snark aside, his actions and financial commitments to various
organizations (as well as some of his future earnings) are commendable. If
more founders and executives took these actions the world would be a better
place. There's always more that can be done, but that shouldn't stop us from
committing smaller actions as well.

~~~
koheripbal
I think the bottom line is that he could never really make Reddit work as a
site for useful conversations, NOR as successful social media company.

I think this November is going to illustrate just how much of an echo chamber
it is, and it will go the way of so many other failed sites before it.

~~~
fullshark
It really does seem like the run up to this November is going to do lasting
damage to a lot of social media platforms. Friends are gonna turn on friends
on some platforms, and on others people are going to lather themselves into
blind uncontrollable rage. Beyond not being healthy I don't see users being
happy with spending their time doing this. The addictive rush of having your
biases confirmed can only provide so much joy.

------
DanielBMarkham
I am going to try to say something neutral, not related to current politics.
Frankly, I'm doing so because I'm curious if such a comment is even possible.

\- I applaud anybody who takes a moral stand, especially if it might cost them
something they hold dear.

\- Whenever people complain about social media, the usual response is "But
these are private properties. People can do what they like with them." I agree
that this is the role of private property

\- It's a fact that these social media networks operate because of the network
principle, that is, it's much easier to get into than to get out of. It's also
a fact that just a few media sites control the vast majority of online
conversation and commerce

\- Might it not have been useful for this moral stance to have been taken much
earlier? First, you made your money and built your company. Walking off now
isn't exactly standing in the soup line next week. Second, lots of folks are
stuck with your product that might now be changing its operating parameters.
Third, there's no way to predict what future event might cause even more
changes.

Once again, kudos for reaching inside and doing a gut check. Life is full of a
bunch of people, all with different opinions and points where they would
change their mind. That's a good thing, but is this just something that keeps
getting more and more restrictive over time? If so, might want to put that on
your sign-up page, perhaps periodically remind folks. (This is a rhetorical
question aimed at every service that does what reddit does online)

~~~
kbenson
> I applaud anybody who takes a moral stand, especially if it might cost them
> something they hold dear.

I also applaud anyone who takes a moral stand _about what they are willing to
do_ , especially if it might cost them something they hold dear.

If that moral stand involves enforcing a standard of conduct on others, then
it's anywhere from slightly to extremely more complicated. Enforcing behavior
on others for the perceived benefit of all has been responsible for some major
problems in the past (for example, not allowing people to express their
sexuality), so let's be careful how much we throw in with those pushing to
instill a level of behavior on those who want a place of their own to speak
freely (to take as an example another part of the comments here, where Ellen
Pao calls out Ohanian re: the_donald).

Many of us may support it in this case because it aligns with our values of
inclusion and tolerance towards others (even if it's sort of a catch-22), but
it's not like leaders of moral charges haven't been known to go too far
before, nor like movements haven't been co-opted by other interests before.

Edit: Clarified where the example I was referring to came from, since that
might have been confusing in isolation.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
I agree.

You can have a series of these things over a few decades and then suddenly end
up in a much different spot than when you started out. Humans have done this
before. More than once. In fact, it's probably the natural outcome of
situations like this and requires some sort of strong provisions to keep it
from naturally happening over and over again. It's not like any of this is
new.

A lot of people seem hell-bent that this is not the case, however. I'm curious
to see if they're able to look at their own actions from just a small remove.
If so, why? If not, why? These are technical, UX questions. They might involve
sensitive matters, but that's only the more important reason for working them
out.

All UI/UX issues shouldn't be about some version of wringing another .4% of
sign-ups out of the funnel. There are things that are more important by orders
of magnitude.

------
alphaomegacode
Let's be honest and realize that for some tech senior execs, they've been made
aware of these issues many times in the past.

I'm not getting into whether it's right or not to have a code of conduct, just
whether these statements or actions are really deserving of much if anything.

What I find most interesting about all of this "woke" behavior from Ellen Pao
and Alexis Ohanian is this:

A few years ago, when racism was brought up on social media during the 2016 US
election and a Canadian federal election, Alexis publicly pushed back.

Similarly, activists complained that Pao hired people who had worked at Reddit
and previously discounted policies against homophobic, bigoted, racist, etc
subreddits and comments/harassment.

People like these were in charge of a world famous, social media site where
they were more aware than many others in tech about the very things they are
now aghast over.

To me, it's a bit like if I'm telling a software manager about bugs in some
banking application that can sometimes deduct money from random accounts and
they're like "Ship it, ship it anyway!" lol.

------
jimbob45
Reddit mods wantonly abuse their power and I'm not even talking about
politics.

Ever been to r/science? 8/10 comments are deleted and those posts can't be
read ever again (I'm understating that number, if anything). Honestly, half
the reason I come here is because you can still view dead comments -
censorship is a surefire way to get me to leave your community.

~~~
forbiddenlake
> Ever been to r/science? 8/10 comments are deleted and those posts can't be
> read ever again

Note that this is clearly spelled out in the subreddit rules, and is by
design. 8/10 comments on reddit as a whole are jokes, anecdotes, off topic, or
simply low quality. /r/science tries to promote high-quality discussion of
actual science, does so by heavy moderation, and doesn't pretend they're not
deleting most comments.

Personally, I am very happy all the cruft is deleted there.

I'm not saying there's no abuse of power, but /r/science is bad example to put
forward when the rules are clearly spelled out and enforced.

~~~
rootusrootus
> 8/10 comments on reddit as a whole are jokes, anecdotes, off topic, or
> simply low quality.

I would guess that is a significant underestimate. I had one post become
reasonably popular, and I was amazed at how awful, low quality, and incredibly
redundant the replies were. 99% of all the top level replies were some version
of the same low-effort comment.

~~~
function_seven
This is what I miss from the old Slashdot. There you didn't just up- or down-
vote comments. You specified if it was "funny" or "insightful" or "redundant"
etc. [0]

I could then filter comments by what I was looking for. Between that and the
meta-moderation, they did a great job.

I would love to see something similar on reddit. Instead of mindless updoots.
Or maybe let me filter out comments that aren't at least _n_ characters long?

(Or, maybe train a classifier to detect puns and hide them :)

[0]
[https://slashdot.org/faq/metamod.shtml](https://slashdot.org/faq/metamod.shtml)

~~~
dunnevens
I liked the old Slashdot moderation system. I wonder how it would scale to
Reddit's traffic. My gut feeling is that it wouldn't scale well at all, but I
could easily be wrong about that.

The biggest problem would be bad actors. Internet discussions in the late 90's
probably had more good faith participants. People chosen for moderation would
be more likely to take it seriously. In ways both good and bad, the culture
was very different then.

I (possibly naively) still think the majority of people online are acting in
good faith according to whatever they believe. But, with the massive online
population increase comes an increase in the absolute numbers of people acting
in bad faith. Even if they're still a small percentage of the whole. A
Slashdot moderation system would give those trolls, bots, and astroturfers
some considerable power to shape the direction of a discussion. Probably would
increase the number of bot or sockpuppet accounts in order to snag a greater
percentage of the randomly assigned moderation slots.

But, that's just my assumption. Would be interesting to see it tried as an
experiment. Maybe for the next Reddit April Fool's project.

~~~
function_seven
> _Internet discussions in the late 90 's probably had more good faith
> participants_

Not probably. I think definitely. There were tons of trolls back then, but
they were trolling in good faith as well! (I mean that. They just posted
shocking and vile things, for the lulz. They didn't promote their corporate
brand or try to influence other nations' elections. They were good faith
assholes :)

I think you're right. It's a really hard problem to solve; anonymity and
reputation are difficult to combine. And meta-moderation itself could be seen
as giving even more influence to the power users of these platforms (i.e.
/u/gallowboob).

I kick around some ideas now and then about alternative rating and voting
systems. Usually in the context of fake Amazon reviews, but the same general
problem exists here.

What if users were limited to just 1 vote (up or down) each day? Or _x_ ups
and _y_ downs? Whatever. Would that limit the votes on silly one-liner puns
and encourage people to spend their precious vote on something more
interesting? If you combine that with minimum account ages and maybe some
minimum karma, I think it could work. Hell, you could vote more than once if
you're willing to spend it out of your own karma. I'm sure I'm missing some
aspect that tanks my idea. (Is there something for this like there is for
spam-fighting ideas? [0])

If I don't stop tying now, I'm liable to bring up some sort of blockchain
solution. And nobody wants that.

[0]
[https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt](https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt)

------
harryh
I think that resignation as a form of protest can be powerful when you are a
junior member of a team and you think senior members are doing the wrong
thing.

But when you are on the board of directors, you are the boss. In that case
resignation is an abdication of leadership and a tacit admission that you have
done a poor job.

~~~
xtracto
> But when you are on the board of directors, you are the boss.

Not if your board is comprised of 8 other people that own 80% of the company.

~~~
harryh
That's a fair point and I will confess to not being up to speed on the
machinations of the Reddit BoD.

I wish Alexis had been more clear about the issues in his statement.

------
nromiun
Reddit and 4Chan are the two sides of the same coin for me. Just their
ideologies are different. At least the people on 4Chan are self aware about
how toxic they are.

But the mods (at least on the popular subreddits) on reddit love to ban
anything that isn't far left.

I don't mind echo chambers but the lack of self awareness always rubs me the
wrong way.

~~~
sickygnar
4chan is unmoderated, reddit is _heavily_ moderated. how on earth are they 2
sides of the same coin?

nowadays, it seems like anything unmoderated starts going right. it used to be
the opposite.

mildly OT - the only thing they have in common is that they are infiltrated by
bots which just serve to amplify the extreme discourse. there are some
interesting bot-bait threads on 4chan where people communicate text via
obfuscated text images, but bait bots with text replies (i.e. "hillary bad
pizzagate"). the bot replies then become obvious because they reply to the
bait text which is off-subject, but the real people reply to the text images
with obfuscated text images. the bots were right wing extremist and comprised
maybe 60% of the replies.

i saw someone had an interesting idea to make a "deep fried" image board or
plugin, where text replies are posted as obfuscated images which are
unreadable by bots, so people can more easily distinguish bot replies from
human. i imagine discourse would improve considerably.

~~~
izzydata
4chan moderates illegal content, porn on non-porn boards and content unrelated
to the board such as cats on a dog board. Not completely unmoderated, but
pretty close.

------
whymauri
> _I’m saying this as a father who needs to be able to answer his black
> daughter when she asks: “What did you do?”_

Wow. I think this deserves highlighting. It's powerful and beautiful.

~~~
ceejayoz
It's also indicative of one aspect the problem, where we largely don't care
until we have a personal stake in things.

For another example:

[https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-
canada-21804506](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-21804506)

> Influential US Republican Senator Rob Portman has renounced his opposition
> to gay marriage. The Ohio senator said he began to change his mind in 2011
> after his son, Will, revealed he was gay.

It's great that people change. It's not great that it frequently takes a
direct familial relationship to cause it.

~~~
ripsawridge
Our aspirations might be vaunting past what humans are generally capable of. I
completely agree with you, but since I see over and over (and over) that only
direct relationships engender change, I finally conclude that this is where
humanity is at. We can call it a bug if we like, but it doesn't mean we can
change it.

It only looks like a bug now because we are insisting on building complex,
globalized societal configurations which don't play well with that limitation.

~~~
beamatronic
Doesn't globalizing promote the creation of more direct relationships, with a
broad diversity of people? Giving one a spectrum of ideas and experiences -
thereby engendering change?

------
logicslave
Reddit is so manipulated at this point. The front page always has a political
agenda, unbelievable what happened to that website.

~~~
alecb
What "political agenda"? If anything, the original core of the site was very
left-leaning or heterodox technophiles that didn't have a home on Slashdot.
The political parts of the site are now very much deadlocked in the center-
right frame of the Democratic party, pretty far away from what the site once
was.

~~~
commandlinefan
> the original core of the site was very left-leaning

I don't remember it that way. I remember it being very libertarian (Ron Paul
was the Bernie Sanders of 2000's reddit) for a very long time. I believed that
the shift to a left-wing orientation was organic and representative of the
general population UNTIL the whole T_D thing came along... T_D was doing the
same thing, pulling the site to the right, until Reddit's owners worked
overtime to make sure that didn't happen. That makes me suspect that the
liberalism was also artificial.

~~~
bitwize
Aaron Swartz was a huge Chomsky fan. Reddit leadership was always on the left.

------
BobbyJo
There are two problems with social media:

1) Group Isolation. You can be banned from groups and not the platform. This
allows for the notion of being toxic in a specific context, but not in the
broader context, which I don't believe is possible. Either you are a toxic
user, or not. If not, disagreeing with the zeitgeist of a specific group
should be a welcome part of the groups discourse, otherwise the group only
serves to radicalize.

2) Free for all discourse. If everyone gets an unlimited platform, the loudest
and most absurd will speak the most, and subsequently be heard the most. You
need level, artificial, limits to how much a single person can contribute to
any given discussion in order for it to be balanced.

When switching from a physical medium to discuss things, to a digital medium,
we lost key limiting factors which helped free speech be an effective way for
society to operate. You can only yell so loud and at so many people on a
street corner, and you can only avoid hearing others' opinions so much when
leaving your house. The internet has done away with both of those, and an
ideal platform for discussion needs some mechanism of providing both.

------
saos
> I believe resignation can actually be an act of leadership from people in
> power right now.

Yup. It starts from the top and trickles down. Thats why the U.S is so far
gone.

The funny thing is we will all be talking about a new case in the future. Then
another high profile person will be throwing money at the situation. Maybe
something different is needed?

Also how on earth are certain subreddits still up and running is just beyond
me.

------
haunter
>I have urged them to fill my seat with a black candidate

I'm not american but does racial quotas have any support? Say every company
should have X% of N races on the board? South Africa for example have
something like this in their (still majority white) sports teams.

~~~
cmdshiftf4
>I'm not american but does racial quotas have any support? Say every company
should have X% of N races on the board?

There's huge support for both it and gender quotas, but they're wrapped up in
"Diversity & Inclusion" initiatives that focus outcome equity over opportunity
equity.

Somewhat ironically you'll also find that the ranks of D&I in corporate and
academic America are overwhelmingly filled with white women.

------
d0m
I think the best way to filter/monitor social medias would be to:

A) Keep the core platform as open as possible, almost like a protocol (I.e.
http doesn't care who says what.)

B) Build/invest in community-driven monitoring tools that users can select to
filter the content.

------
s5300
Mostly irrelevant, but I got to meet and work with Alexis for two days back
in, holy shit, 2013 now, when I was still a teen and my brother had a startup
at the same place Imgur was made (haha, now I'm doxxing myself, and - I've
also met with Schaaf more than once)

I was in San Diego for some college stuff last Summer, and became friends with
a fairly eccentric/successful dude through an even more eccentric hobby we
shared... And out of nowhere, he starts dating Alexis's like... First cousin.

Anyways, Alexis seems like a great guy, family seems pretty great and well
rounded (I say this because of how she described their yearly reunions)...
yeah. Life's weird :O

------
op03
Social media will get much better when the reward/punishment mechanisms change
and evolves.

It's happening too slowly and at high cost to everyone.

~~~
dredmorbius
How, specifically?

Information- and systems-dynamics suggest to me strongly otherwise. Mencken
and Barnum seem validated.

~~~
op03
You can see it happening already with Trump's recent flagged tweet having its
likes, replies and retweets Disabled.

That's how society has evolved when a Norm is violated specifically in the
public square you get thrown in the Drunk Tank for a night to sober up.

------
stevebmark
Alex has stood by and defended years of Reddit bad behavior. Doxxing, openly
racist boards, planning raids, targeted hate campaigns, pretty much everything
you'd expect from an unmoderated online forum. And he's supported the
moderators that support those forums. Hiding behind the false cries of "free
speech" makes you a coward.

------
gdsdfe
So instead of fixing things, he walked away? I mean I get it if he was an
employee but a co-founder and a board member?

------
s9w
I really don't know what they want anymore. How much cleaner than Reddit does
it get? There is nothing left that is even remotely controversial. I'm so
confused.

The way he said BLACK candidate also feels really weird. We get it - you want
to virtue signal. Make it a little less obvious.

~~~
CydeWeys
Are you joking? There's a huge number of cesspools still on reddit. Stuff like
thedonald, theredpill, all sorts of blatantly racist/misogynistic communities.

~~~
cataphract
From what I can see the_donald is effectively dead and theredpill is also
quarantined so it might as well be, since quarantined subreddits are always
eventually banned.

~~~
minimaxir
/r/the_donald was quarantined _a year ago_ and hasn't been banned yet.

~~~
nilkn
No, it has effectively been banned. It was forcefully taken over by the
administration. While it technically still exists, it actually moved entirely
to its own dedicated website.

~~~
minimaxir
"Effectively banned" is not the same as banned, and it's these conspicuous
half-measures toward /r/the_donald that resulted in criticism from Ellen Pao
as noted above, among others.

------
dredmorbius
spez (Reddit CEO Steve Huffman) responds:

[https://old.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/gxas21/upcom...](https://old.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/gxas21/upcoming_changes_to_our_content_policy_our_board/)

------
hypewatch
Alexis is awesome! It’s commendable how grounded and humble he is after all
the wealth and fame.

------
jamisteven
"For my country.." LMAO is this guy serious? His net worth is how much? Him
leaving does what exactly?

~~~
MrZongle2
It signals he has determined that after this point in time, staying onboard
becomes less profitable.

The "for my country" part is just dramatic posturing.

------
gigatexal
The more and more I hear people debating what to do with the overt hate speak
on the internet the more I think that having it out in the open (and the harm
that follows for the groups that the hate is directed towards) allows the rest
of us in the system to offer correction and rebuttal that if censored or
deplatformed one is unable to do. I can't say it as clearly as Ben Thompson
did on his take on what Facebook did in regards to Trump's subversive tweets.

~~~
dredmorbius
[https://stratechery.com/2020/unmasking-
twitter/](https://stratechery.com/2020/unmasking-twitter/) ???

------
crb002
Ordering they have to hire a Latino or Asian would be just as bad.

Reddit thrived because it was a platform for all misfits - not just left wing
misfits.

Aaron Swartz is rolling in his grave. He felt it was better that extremists be
exposed in the light of day rather than be hidden on private chat boards. He
also would have been against dark patterns to make people install a phone app
so Reddit can spy on your telemetry for advertisers.

