I was an early Reddit user. Very early Reddit was a popular spot for programming discussion because it was mostly tech people using it.
That quickly flipped, as /r/NSFW became the most popular subreddit. You could avoid it by browsing as a guest or by curating your feed, but porn was everywhere.
Early Reddit also had a strong attitude about minimal moderation. The early days were characterized by a feeling that anything goes as long as it wasn’t illegal or too extreme to defend. Combined with the popularity of porn on the website it created strange situations where a lot of subreddits were focused on things like legal-enough photos of underage children. There were also a lot of weird alt-right and white supremacist forums. There was an unofficial (if I recall correctly) “Subreddit of the Day” that attracted controversy because it actually highlighted one of the “jailbait” subreddits and even a white supremacist subreddit.
So if you were there at the time, it was obvious why Reddit wasn’t going to host their own images: It would have been a legal nightmare with all of the porn (copyrighted material), the creepy underage stuff, and white supremacist memes
Reddit did a decent job of containing this stuff out of view of the average user and later removing it from the site. It took many years.
If you peeked at /r/all or browsed new during the early days it would have been clear why image hosting would have been out of the question at the time.
> The early days were characterized by a feeling that anything goes as long as it wasn’t illegal or too extreme to defend.
Q: Wouldn't most of us want to defend the right to publish content that's "not illegal"?
On your own site or services? Of course.
I don’t want to host that content, though. That’s also my right.
As I discovered on the early days on Reddit, I don’t even want to be on a site where content is a free-for-all because you could go from scrolling through programming topics to encountering sexualized imagery of minors by scrolling if you weren’t careful.
This is the problem with every hardcore free speech platform: They attract the people who only come to post that content, while everyone else who doesn’t want to see it starts leaving. Then after some time, the majority of your content is catering to those niches.
This is a prisoner’s dilemma situation. You don’t want to host that content, which is your right. And neither does anyone else. So every place that does try ends up swamped with the undesirables and either stops trying, goes bust, or turns into a poisonous swamp. And thus all the “yes but not here” people collectively end up enforcing a degree of censorship beyond what the law actually requires, or (in other cases) effectively erasing opinions that a fair part of society does hold (thus effectively forcing that part of society to turn into a poisonous swamp).
(Neutral example: at some point in the past the clinics around me started requiring appointments to come in for doctor-prescribed tests. Recently, the closest one did that too, saying that they were the only one remaining and ended up being overloaded with all the people who wouldn’t or couldn’t make an appointment. And thus we’re all worse off now.)
> started requiring appointments
I fear we're headed this way generally. There's a kind of person who likes to plan everything ahead of time. As we hit capacity limits (e.g. overtourism), those planners are going to book all the available capacity. We're going to either have to adapt to be like them, or be locked out of experiences.
I'm very not happy about it.
That type mostly only wants the most shrinkwrapped and commercialized experiences.
Do something unique, something new, something odd. You won't have any competition from ahead bookers and you can have experiences they'll never imagine.
I would submit that many essential things are shrink wrapped and commercialized (fantastic phrase, by the way).
It’s not just the planners either. It’s the people who are unreasonable and it’s the people who lack any external center of concern. By way of example: it used to be easy to get in touch with my physician. As the practice she works for has grown, they’ve made it all but impossible for physicians and patients to have a conversation privately and without an intermediary, except when you’re in the exam room or a physician places an outgoing call.
As their practice grew, so too did the number of people who believed they should or could (defensibly) go directly to their doctor about every little thing. People made unreasonable demands. So the practice reacted to protect the physicians at the cost of their accessibility to patients, other than booking a visit.
It seems like you view free speech as "everyone should be provided a platform to speak their mind", more or less. With that view, what you speak of is arguably a problem, sure.
My view of free speech is simply: the government shouldn't arrest you for publishing most things (with only certain mostly-well-defined exceptions). If there are views which are not illegal but which no platform will let you publish, I really don't see the problem. If enough people share those views they can get together and make their own platform. It's not even hard to make a platform anymore, anyone can buy a domain and set up nginx on a raspberry pi.
Freedom from government persecution on the basis of speech is extremely important to me (again, with exceptions). Freedom to publish unsavoury-but-legal content on other people's platforms is completely unimportant to me.
I’ve never understood the “everyone is entitled to have their voice heard by the masses” idea.
It’s never been true before, let alone realistic. It’s only with the past several decades of networked computing that humans have been able to so vastly amplify the reach of an individual or group opinion.
Just because it’s easier than ever to publish speech doesn’t make having one’s speech published any kind of right.
> effectively erasing opinions that a fair part of society does hold
There is no widespread opinion that does not have countless corresponding platforms to share it.
I guarantee you cannot find an opinion that cannot be shared on at least one of the major social media platforms right now.
This extinction of free speech does not happen.
On the other hand, the presence of that kind of content in other subreddits functioned as a highly-effective anti-normie filter on the rest of the site. It kept the kind of people who shit up Twitter away.
I was there and I couldn't disagree more.
I see more parallels between the people who thrived in the early Reddit cesspool era and the same people who are spreading culture wars, misinfo, and other garbage on Twitter.
The early days of Reddit were a haven for culture war and misinfo people.
That's what he said: anti-normie.
No. I think plenty of us recognize that the law has to have rigidly defined lines that don’t always line up neatly with morality. A great example is the “jailbait” subreddit that was talked about above. It makes sense that it’s technically legal, but I’d rather not be associated with the site that hosts it or the people who frequent it.
Reddit’s eventual livelihood would be based on selling ads, so legality is not the line they were aiming for.
A right to publish it? Yes. An entitlement to a platform that will handle the publishing for you? Only if the owners of that platform freely agree to do so.
That's a popular equivocation when this topic comes up, but that's not quite what's going on (or at least not quite what happened). I'm sure that Reddit's current owners _do_ support censorship, and plenty of it, but the early Reddit owners, admins and even moderators did strongly oppose it. They were pushed into it by heavily implied threats of legal action if they didn't.
Did you know that movie ratings aren't based on any law? There's no law on any book, anywhere, that prevents theaters from allowing children under 18 to view R-rated movies. Instead, the MPAA and the theaters enforce a fairly rigid soft-censorship regime to avoid what would definitely be a legally mandated, government-run censorship regime.
So, while you are _strictly_ correct and Reddit is legally "allowed" to choose its current heavy handed censored approach, they were never really legally "allowed" to avoid it, either.
Sadly, no, not most of us. Not even a lot of us.
I didn't have an account at the time, but I tried to like Reddit when it was one of the new link aggregators on the block. The minimalist functionality appealed to me and there were no subreddits at the time. Unfortunately I give up on it after a few weeks because most of the links/discussions were usually about evenly split between Emacs, Ruby and magic mushrooms. None of which I ever got around to trying.
Perhaps its too late but mushrooms are totally worth it. The other two will destroy your brain and leave you a raving lunatic.
Perhaps it's too late but Ruby is totally worth it. The other two will destroy your brain and leave you a raving lunatic.
Perhaps its too late but Emacs is totally worth it. The other two will destroy your brain and leave you a raving lunatic.
(Thank you, MisterTea.)
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You can read a lot more about this on Wikipedia, most would be surprised at just how bad parts of it were -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...
Some that come to mind to me from the old days (some less old than others):
- "Street fashion" subs, where photos were NOTICEABLY of underage girls taken on the street candidly, usually from a long distance (telephoto lens), and everyone talked about "fashion" in ways you figured out pretty fast were not about fashion. There were a number operating at the same time as a sort of redundancy as they would vanish from time to time.
- CSAM investigation type subs, where users who REALLY knew the lingo and details of CSAM talked about how they were investigating CSAM elsewhere on the internet ... like they were amateur police, but it was kinda indistinguishable from them being connoisseurs. They also would tell each other very suspicious stories about their investigations, like something a jr. high student would make up because they don't know how the world works. It was like they thought they were setting up some sort of plausible deniability or something...
- Gamergate and that whole bizzaro world spanned subs but it was absolutely insane how emotionally charged the devotes were about something as inconsequential as ... video game reviews.
> how emotionally charged the devotes were about something as inconsequential as ... video game reviews.
There's a good reason the phrase "it's about ethics in games journalism" was used to mock gamergaters. It was so transparently not about that in the slightest. I'm not one of those "gamergate caused trumpism" domino meme people but they are related phenomena. GG was a revanchist political movement based on using the novel organization structures of social media to harass women and minorities out of gaming culture.
I'm pretty sure Gamergate was a Russian shitstirring test case. Seriously. All I ever saw was two groups of people talking past each other, talking about completely different things, until things started to settle down... and some new account would roll a flaming tire into the thread and keep it going. Over and over, across the web.
It certainly fits the “it doesn’t matter what the truth is I’m acting out here and I have feelings about girls and video games” kinda vibe.
Alexis's mom had cancer. He wanted her so see him succeed, so they sold it in the first year to Conde Nast (the published of Wired magazine). Conde had a popular blog called Webmonkey, and there was a reddit feed in the sidebar.
Early reddit skewed heavily towards people who make shit online; fitting for a site made by people making shit online.
Just to give you an idea of just how hands off Reddit moderation was at the start there used to be a /r/sexwithdogs subreddit. That was not fun seeing in /r/all one day.
Years ago, someone on r/datahoarder made a toy website that showed a “waterfall” of the newest images being posted to Imgur.
Initial comments of “oh neat!” quickly turned into “oh no!” and the toy site didn’t last long as it was. I think Imgur had some kind of detection (possibly automatic+manual) of illegal material going on, but it (the manual side of it?) would occur some time after posting.
I was a mod of a few semipopular subs back then and this is accurate. Understating it even.
One of my favorite early-reddit memory is a guy sharing his S3 bucket over a holiday. People were uploading and downloading so many things... I don't even want to know what that guy's bill looked like.
Also the old days of image hosting (and maybe now) was kinda unprofitable ... Reddit didn't have to do it / spend money on it when others were happy to lose money on their behalf.
/r/programming circa 2008 was full of interesting links and discussions, i can testify that