SXSW and Reddit’s Introspection Problem

http://skepchick.org/2013/03/sxsw-and-reddits-introspection-problem/

by tokenadult • 13 years ago

53 95 13 years ago

mynewwork• 13 years ago

This article seems to take SRS as a legitimate subreddit. I always thought SRS was a satire, an over-the-top parody of extremist feminist/minority groups.

Have I fallen victim to Poe's law or has the panelist? Is SRS mostly 'real' or mostly satire?

naner• 13 years ago

SRS is certainly not satire. It is a group of online activists, I'm not familiar enough to say whether or not they are extreme or not.

princess30002• 13 years ago

It's a legitimate subreddit. There's some humor involved (the bird, the silly Archangel names, and pretending that misogynist conspiracies are real) but the core of the subreddit is pointing out sexism, racism, and violentacrez-style exploitation on the rest of reddit.

eqdw8• 13 years ago

> There's some humor involved (the bird, the silly Archangel names, and pretending that misogynist conspiracies are real)

The reason I so strongly dislike them is because I know several people for whom it's not humour. They are dead serious.

likpok3• 13 years ago

SRS started as one guy who would post lists of quotes from Reddit (iirc, upvoted comments in mainstream subs) and Stormfront, with the object being to guess which quote came from which. It was harder than most Redditors would like to admit. Eventually, he quit the site entirely.

At some point a bunch of SA goons took over the then-defunct subreddit, to use it as a platform to take down the highly active /r/jailbait. The effort continued to hold a mirror up to some of the more racist/misogynistic/etc comments of reddit.

A lot of the criticism of SRS comes from the fact that people don't like being called racist. Nearly everyone agrees that racists are bad people who deserve terrible punishments for their actions. No one wants to accept culpability for the fact that by upvoting a racist comment they are supporting racism.

freehunter• 13 years ago

I would say a lot of the criticism comes from the fact that they commonly take quotes out of context, or take quotes meant as dark humor and use them to portray the poster as a horrible person. Combine that with their immature attitude and one-track mind and you're getting closer to understanding why even open-minded redditors don't support SRS.

Sure, there's plenty of legitimate cases where reddit needs to be called out and have a community effort around fixing some of their problems. But no one takes SRS seriously because, for all the good they have the potential to do, they're publicly harming their own image by crying wolf (or as they might say, crying poop).

woah• 13 years ago

Much of the criticism of SRS is because they game the discussion forum by coordinating posting and downvote rings.

In some ways, they have a laudable mission, but the way they go about it is without logic or regard for the rules of reddit. For SRS, it's not really about enforcing the standards of political correctness that they claim to stand for. It's more of a game where they choose someone to hate and then do whatever they can within the technical constraints of reddit to make life hard for that poster.

At one point, they were going after a guy who had posted a candid account of caring for his mentally disabled adult brother, because they felt he was being ableist. I went into the thread where they were coordinating the downvote ring, asked if he might not have some relevant real world experience, and was banned from SRS within minutes.

I think for most of them, its more about having an excuse to game the reddit commenting infrastructure, than any sort of moral cause. The reddit administration can't ban SRS like they do other voting rings, because of the negative publicity that would result.

mpyne3• 13 years ago

As far as I've been able to tell they're a legit subreddit, though mostly on the extreme side.

An interesting experiment would be to post Chris Rock or Dave Chapelle comedy routines to a reddit discussion and see how long it takes for SRS to flag the racist.

sadface• 13 years ago

SRS is more of a parody of reddit itself, turned on its head to the point where it's the white men who get ridiculed and shouted down instead of the women/minorities like elsewhere on reddit. Unsurprisingly, many redditors, instead of just "taking a joke", like they would have women do with misogynistic humor, get extremely upset at the thought of a relatively small and powerless group of people mocking them.

The irony is thick and delicious.

mpyne3• 13 years ago

Obviously you've never seen the entire threads which get downvoted into oblivion by the hit squads of the "small and powerless" group that is SRS.

No one cares about comments, you just downvote and move on. You can't even properly lurk in a thread where SRS has been active though as the whole point of downvoting ends up being so badly subverted.

kn0thing• 13 years ago

"To balance things out, Farhad invited Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian, but he dropped out, so it was just the three of us."

False. On 8/13/12, I got a Google News Alert showing my name listed on a panel on the SXSW Panel Picker that I had never even heard of, let alone agreed to.

The way SXSW works, people submit panel concepts (presumably with the knowledge of everyone involved) in order to get 'votes' that help the SXSW team decide which panels to approve. I have no idea how long that post was getting 'votes' with my name falsely associated with it.

I immediately emailed Farhad, who was listed as the organizer:

> my email to Farhad

I wasn't even planning on being at Sxsw interactive this year.

I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt but this appears to be remarkably unprofessional.

Please have my name removed from this immediately: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/3709

Let me know when it's done.

Thanks Alexis

> Farhad's reply (Jason, reddit's PR, CCed)

Hey Alexis,

I'm sorry, I guess there's been a misunderstanding. I asked Jason Bellinger at Reddit PR -- CCd here -- a couple months ago if you would do it; he said that either you or Erik Martin likely would be able to.

I thought that we were submitting a generic "Reddit representative" for the event, but apparently we put in your name. (This entry was being coordinated by Slate's PR company -- I didn't create it.) I'll contact them to get your name removed ASAP.

Jason, do you know if Erik will be able to take part -- should we switch his name in there?

> Jason (reddit PR)

Hey Farhad -

I had said that I'd get back to you if they were interested, and as they aren't going this year, I didn't confirm it with you. I'm sorry if there was a misunderstanding here.

> Farhad

Ah, it's my mistake, then; I understood that to be either/or. I do apologize and will get it taken care of.

---

I do believe there's a discussion to be had about promoting civility (and curbing bigotry, assholish behavior, etc) on social media -- these ills exist on wordpress, on youtube, on twitter, and yes, on reddit -- but when one can't even honestly invite participants, let alone frame the debate, we all miss an opportunity.

I've had & heard frank & thorough discussions on the subject with friends like Latoya Peterson (www.racialicious.com) and Christina Xu (www.awesomefoundation.org) so I know it's possible, but my concern is that there are people engaged who'd prefer pageviews over progress.

thwest4• 13 years ago

Why do you imply that the members of this panel are being disingenuous?

- Yes you never agreed to the panel, but how does this email chain not reflect an honest invitation?

- Of course the debate was framed; it is impossible for an event to not have context. Would you have preferred it framed differently? How so?

- Are you implying that these panelists prefer pageviews over progress? If not, who are the boogeymen you are invoking here?

EliAndrewC• 13 years ago

> Why do you imply that the members of this panel are being disingenuous?

The original article claimed, "To balance things out, Farhad invited Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian, but he dropped out, so it was just the three of us." Saying that Alexis "dropped out" is simply wrong, so the statement is disingenuous at best, dishonest at worst.

drpgq• 13 years ago

She did write:

"To balance things out, Farhad invited Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian, but he dropped out, so it was just the three of us."

"he dropped out" is clearly false.

supercanuck4• 13 years ago

>Are you implying that these panelists prefer pageviews over progress?

That was the view I came away with after reading the article.

ilovecomputers• 13 years ago

> Are you implying that these panelists prefer pageviews over progress? If not, who are the boogeymen you are invoking here?

My guess it was a stab against Gawker Media?

supercanuck4• 13 years ago

Violentacrez is like the gift that keeps on giving for Adrian's and this women's career.

She asked some interesting questions, It would be nice if she took the same amount of time that she took in shaming Redditors to answer her own questions.

theg2• 13 years ago

This really does match up with my current view of reddit as a brutal hivemind of anonymous posters with a true lack of moderation (lest mod's get the "free speech" card pulled on them).

I admit to being an active user there but there is a true lack of acceptance of criticism and the inability to see things from multiple points of view.

Unfortunately, it seems like getting an objective view on what happened at the panel would be impossible now but those tweets in response are pretty vicious and uncalled for.

asdfaoeu• 13 years ago

If she actually answered the questions she proposed the article might have some weight. But instead she spends most of the article complaining about the people criticizing her.

Unfortunately people like this make their money from stirring up controversy so it is a never ending cycle.

nollidge11• 13 years ago

Yeah, man, you just know she's buying private jets with her blog ad money.

mnicole5• 13 years ago

I preface this by saying I don't know the author and I don't recall ever having read anything by her previously before, so all of this drama about past things she's spoken about is new to me.

Regardless, this is a great example of how the challenges women face (particularly on the anonymous web) are even further worsened by inappropriate skepticism from those who claim those challenges don't exist at all. All of her points were unmistakably valid and yet she was publicly shamed, her Wiki vandalized (it says this happens 2-3 times a month, and that her page has been on a watchlist for years because of this), and most of these people weren't even at the talk.

And she's right; truly civil discourse just doesn't happen in most subreddits except in very rare instances where someone decides to take the high road. Regardless of gender, because karma exists, people'd rather not risk their worthless points over being the guy that says "Hey, that's not cool." Social janitorial work isn't pretty, but it needs to be done. If Reddit won't take responsibility for the direction of the discourse on the primary subreddits, users that value stimulating conversation over the same tired [pointlessly offensive] jokes will flock elsewhere.

revelation• 13 years ago

I'll have my web without "social janitorial work", thank you very much.

theorique2• 13 years ago

That would be /b/ on 4chan.

weareconvo6• 13 years ago

> Social janitorial work

This is the most hilarious euphemism for "censorship" I've ever heard.

mnicole5• 13 years ago

If you took it as such, sure. I'm talking about trying to recycle useless peanut gallery commentary into more productive conversation.

The guy that comes into her comment thread acknowledging he was one of the called out tweets goes on to say that he was admittedly kicking someone because they were down. What value does jumping on such a bandwagon add to the real issues besides reinforcing that behavior in others?

thwest4• 13 years ago

Your comment is wrong and rude.

Oh look, I just did some social janitorial work. Was your comment somehow deleted by my act?

Should I presume that Convo provides no moderation mechanisms because they would constitute censorship?

princess30002• 13 years ago

Disagree, there's a fair amount of "social janitorial work" that goes on here at HN. I mean, I just signed up to comment here today (have been reading for a while) and the community here is based on something similar:

"Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation."

People here are pretty strict about the types of comments that fly; for example, memes and dumb jokes are not something that the community here accepts. Personally I think that's great and the site is better for it, but it's not censorship to hold the other people in your forum or message board to certain standards of communication.

nollidge11• 13 years ago

I love how people deleting blog comments is labeled "censorship" as though it's morally similar to a government suppressing speech.

It is not remotely "censorship" for a private individual to stop you from producing content in the spaces they control. They owe you nothing.

eqdw8• 13 years ago

> I preface this by saying I don't know the author and I don't recall ever having read anything by her previously before, so all of this drama about past things she's spoken about is new to me.

RW has a reputation for courting controversy. As a result, people tend to be more critical of her than they normally would. Regardless of the validity of her post here, nobody operates in a vacuum.

I personally suspect that her public shaming, wikipedia vandalism, etc., are less a function of her being a woman, and more a function of her being a fairly unpleasant and somewhat dramatic person

nollidge11• 13 years ago

Funny. I'd say she has a reputation for not backing down from controversial topics in the face of continuous harassment.

mnicole5• 13 years ago

I'll just say that I think it is difficult to make the case that her gender has had less to do with the sum of her ongoing experiences than any other factors based on the types of attacks it looks like she gets hurled at her (based on Twitter, Encyclopedia Dramatica).

DanBC4• 13 years ago

> If Reddit won't take responsibility for the direction of the discourse on the primary subreddits, users that value stimulating conversation over the same tired [pointlessly offensive] jokes will flock elsewhere.

I thought it was common knowledge that the primary subreddits are cesspools of hate.

People migrate to vigorously moderated subreddits (/r/askscience is big but good) or to less vigorous subreddits which have an expectation of decent behaviour. (Eg, any of the /r/true* groups.)

> If Reddit won't take responsibility

What are they supposed to do? Hire teams of moderators?

mnicole5• 13 years ago

Common knowledge doesn't mean that people are unsubscribing at the rate people are joining, though. I'm not saying they need to hire moderators (I believe it is ultimately up to the community to effectively enforce the rules), but if that continues to be the gateway through which everyone enters, the problem will continue to grow. Responsibility could simply be offering a means after registration to find subs relative to your interest, rather than dumping everyone in the same, tainted pit and expecting them to do the legwork to get out of it.

dclowd99013• 13 years ago

I full-on ditched Reddit about 3 months ago and haven't looked back. Any sort of criticism I lodged against the site for its insipid circle-jerking nature, to the small-minded, deep-south like approach to cultural issues were met with extreme hostility, or simply downvotes, so as to keep unpopular opinions ignored.

I was a user of that site for 6 years. I had over 85k karma points for comments, and several thousand story karma points. It seems like the audience has changed greatly in more recent years, and I want no part of it.

The users who evangelize that site, or are so devoted to it as to attend meetups are pathetically biased, and contribute nothing to the advancement of internet culture, or the culture of idea exchange.

I feel very sad for the site, as I thought, at one point, it was a great bastion of freely-exchanged ideas. And now it's just a great place to espouse radical views for worthless internet points.

protomyth• 13 years ago

"small-minded, deep-south like approach to cultural issues"

stereotyping isn't really helping when talking about issues likes this

theorique2• 13 years ago

The site is huge and there's something for everyone.

If you want to go to /r/python or /r/ruby, you can discuss your favorite language intelligently.

If you want to go to ... other ... subreddits then you can share conversation and media of a different nature. Some of which is quite unacceptable to the mainstream.

It's like saying the internet is a bad influence on society because porn and phishing. Yes, that stuff is there, but you can avoid it if you want.

mattgreenrocks2• 13 years ago

There is no Internet culture, just a bunch of pop culture references that the Reddit/4chan/whomever groupthink have deemed fashionable to talk about. It's just like pop culture: everyone likes something because they think everyone else likes it. Sure, it has some intrinsic value (else it wouldn't have surfaced), but the real value is saying, "I'm a part of this group." It's entirely transient, and intended as a distraction, nothing more.

But, more to the point, any criticism of Reddit is potentially viewed as an insult to the precious 'culture' that has been so pain-stakingly upvoted and meme'd to death. Reddit, like most aggregators, makes it far too easy to comment, and far too easy to vote on comments and stories.

resu_nimda2• 13 years ago

> There is no Internet culture

Seriously? Your comment is largely hyperbolic animosity. Yeah, I get that endless image macros and memes are seen as a low-brow form of culture, but "internet culture" is very real and goes way beyond that. I don't understand why you've dismissed it entirely.

potatolicious3• 13 years ago

I still use reddit, but I have literally unsubscribed from every default subreddit (save /r/gaming since it tends to stay pretty light/fun).

Reddit sans the default subreddits is substantially more pleasant. I'd go as far as to say that subreddits like /r/politics, /r/atheism, /r/worldnews, and even /r/technology are just cesspits.

I'm not sure what causes large subreddits to spiral into utter shit, but it does. I'm also of the general opinion that most of the large subreddits are poorly moderated - mods will rarely take action even against egregious trolls, and there is no attempts at leadership.

The main subreddit I use, /r/photography, has a relatively new mod team that actually actively ban trolls and initiate weekly/monthly events to steer the conversation (e.g., "no talk about gear" threads, "weekly photographers that inspire you", etc).

jlgreco2• 13 years ago

> I'm not sure what causes large subreddits to spiral into utter shit, but it does.

My money? Karma systems.

I don't think they scale as well as many would like. When you get up to "default subreddit" sized karma systems just turn into some sort of currency system that rewards those who are ultimately detrimental to the conversation: specifically those making repeated boring puns/memes because they are easy and formulaic, and those making formulaic complaints about superficial elements of the post in question (flooding entire comment sections with complaints about grammar/spelling/limited vocabulary).

I don't think these behaviors would be nearly so prevalent without a karma system. Why would the 200th person to comment on an article make the 200th comment about a "there/their" error, if not because they thought they would get imaginary internet points?

Karma systems take the initial reward for discussion (intellectual satisfaction) and out-bid it with gamification induced endorphin rushes.

joshAg• 13 years ago

eternal september is what you're thinking of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

it's also why I've unsubscribed from almost all the default subreddits (i'm still subbed to default_gems and bestof).

drivebyacct2• 13 years ago

Those tweets are infuriating. That having been said SRS has a shit ton of baggage and as long as Laurelai roams there I have no problem disparaging it. Laurelai's behavior, and the cover-up and apologetic behavior of the mods of /r/lgbt are a stain upon the feminist movement and I hate that they're the snapshot of feminism on reddit, because they're not.

Take the top post in SRS right now as an example, there are things in that subreddit that are very obviously misogynistic and then there are things that they simply "don't like" or are unwilling to even have a discussion about. The comments in that subreddit are just as insidious and redunctionary as the commentary they proclaim to be against. It's done in some sort of tongue-in-cheek irony style, but it's not, it's gross and annoying to read.

The mob mentality is bad either way, and the tweets are a gross depiction of the dark side of reddit. But for every post in SRS, I encounter dozens of trolls every day that are downvoted for homophobia, racism and misogyny.

tibbon• 13 years ago

I normally expect trolls at certain events, especially cheaper ones. However, I'm utterly shocked at the behavior of some of these people at SXSW who are in all likelihood representing a company, and/or paid $1000+ for a badge. The comments that some of the attendees made at this were something I'd expect at a PAX or ROFLcon (due to the price and age of participants), not SXSW.

Also, its unfortunate to hear about how they tried to rope in Alexis.

bonzoesc• 13 years ago

People with money can be assholes too, and a social media conference with zillions of attendees is a great way to bully yourself into a soapbox with relative anonymity.

biotech_anon2• 13 years ago

Having money or connections does not transform one from being a jerk/troll/bigot. It's not surprising that there were such people at SXSW. It is somewhat surprising the panel did not have better moderation.

snake_plissken• 13 years ago

Your first mistake was using Reddit. Your second was going to South by Southwest.

That might be backwards, I am undecided.

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

Interesting discussion. I've looked at Reddit off and on over the years and to an outsider like me it seems to have become less and less civil over time. I've wondered about that.

Clearly the Internet gives the broken and angry people a voice they didn't have before. Sometimes that helps them, but often it seems to result in just a bunch bile being spewed around.

At what point does the combination of IP address + bile start to become a corpus for focusing our efforts at community remediation? Is there a common good to be had by finding out if these are communities of angry people or are they just scattered about in the general population. Can we help them? Should we?

DanBC4• 13 years ago

There is a problem where dysfunctional people can meet online and their behaviour feels more normal to them.

Thus, peeping toms would normally be alone and feel some kind of shame, and maybe want to seek help, but now they have /r/creepshots and a receptive audience and validation.

eqdw8• 13 years ago

Only Rebecca Watson would accuse someone of wink-nod ignoring child porn, and cite it with a link that says "We weren't aware of this content and our DNS host couldn't reach us to tell us because our contact info was out of date"

cbs• 13 years ago

What would an ideal question have been, in my mind? How about this: [...]

If they wanted to have that kind of discussion, why not use a panel moderator to ask those questions and invoke that conversation in the portion of the event the panelists were driving?

I didn't attend this, but based on Skepchick's own summary, the presence of Chen on the panel, relying on the audience to challenge their criticism, other posts online covering the panel and the fact MrGrimm felt the need to strait up "filibuster"; I get the impression they were there to recite well-known criticism rather than engage in analysis of reddit.

I wonder if, out of an audience of 300, nobody was able to meaningfully challenge the panel's position or if those that could just didn't bother. Why didn't they?

biotech_anon2• 13 years ago

It continues to amaze me how seriously people take Twitter comments--good or ill, and that we can have entire posts citing 140 character insults from assholes.

The jerks were in the wrong, but I think the wrong approach is to engage them in their own medium. They are vocalizing their beliefs because they know it will provoke a reaction. You'll never convince them, so the best thing is to ignore them and get on with your life. In the case of reddit, the problematic set is best left to fester and dealt with at higher levels (bans, filtering) or discussed out of band (as in the linked post). "Arguing with a fool only proves that there are two," as they say.

DanBC4• 13 years ago

SRS is a troll sub reddit. There are only two uses for SRS. i) A nice centralised location for the bigoted or otherwise idiotic thing that many people on reddit say. ii) trolling reddit.

There are plenty of other meta subreddits where criticism is welcome. Reddit's only problem with those other subreddits is "brigading".

SXSW and Reddit’s Introspection Problem

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