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morbius | 10 years ago

> now predictable narrative of '50 white male racist misogynist neck beards' who want to chase women out of tech again

This is a pretty accurate narrative. You may not agree, but casual misogyny is incredibly pervasive on most defaults, and it's fairly prevalent within the smaller, community-based subs as well.

> small group of militant activists trying to silence people who they disagree with

If you're referring to SRS, they're annoying and take themselves far too seriously, but as far as I know they don't try to silence anyone.

> The most critical things against Pao and her husband I have seen are posts about there phony extortion sexism and racism law suits.

I'm not even going to address how laughably absurd your characterization of consistent harassment, abuse, and terrifyingly legitimate rape and death threats as "criticism" is. Most people were upset with Pao because she was part of an executive decision to shut down FatPeopleHate and a couple of other abusive subreddits. It's quite a stretch to say that she was solely responsible for this decision, and even then, it's sobering that people would respond with scathing, fiery, and highly toxic personal and threatening attacks on a decision that was intended to help people be kinder to each other -- and worse, lobbed on someone that had at most 2/5ths of the executive power to make that decision.

The media didn't turn the shaky relationship between reddit's users and their administrators into a black-and-white affair. Reddit itself did, by using Pao as a scapegoat to attack everything they saw as antithetical to freedom of hatred and abuse under the guise of "free speech."

discuss

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sroerick|10 years ago

> If you're referring to SRS, they're annoying and take themselves far too seriously, but as far as I know they don't try to silence anyone.

I'm a feminist,and can't stand a lot of the stuff that goes on on reddit.

That said, censorship on that website is rampant. Reddit is trying to monetize, and that means stifling speech, especially that speech critical of corporate governance.

The issue isn't as black and white as you make it. There are people with legitimate grievances. And there are people who are being sexist pigs.

Reddit will tell their userbase that the whole fiasco was Pao's fault. They will tell the board and investors that the userbase is sexist.

They think it's win win, but they are on a sinking ship.

morbius|10 years ago

But Reddit wasn't attacking corporatocracy or actual censorship. They were just trying to defend their right to be dicks to other people through abusive and hateful subs.

The right to free speech is not the right to speech without consequence. And what obligation does reddit have to preserve "free speech" in the first place? They run the website and it is fully up to them what gets filtered through and what sticks. It's not beholden to the first amendment.

monksy|10 years ago

> but as far as I know they don't try to silence anyone.

See:

Project Panda, PREDDITORs, Their brigades (https://www.reddit.com/r/SRSsucks/comments/14iwvx/its_that_t...), the fact that they are "exempt from the non participation" requirement when linking to other subs.

morbius|10 years ago

That's a two year old link to a sub whose whole intent is to be as diametrically opposed to the SRS sub as possible. If you're trying to strike a point here, I think it'd be much more effective to link to something that's more impartial and up-to-date.

npizzolato|10 years ago

I really detest the term "casual misogyny", as if everyone is living their lives just "casually" having this deep hatred for women. It so easily deflects any criticism or real discussion because well obviously they're all just casual misogynists.

I think people confuse making some jokes about women with "casual misogyny." People make jokes about everything, including stereotypes of women. Maybe that's in poor taste, and maybe they deserve to be called out for that if it's inappropriate, but it certainly doesn't mean they hate women.

zxcvcxz|10 years ago

Didn't Ellen Pao her self claim that the racists and misogynists are a small minority?

saryant|10 years ago

Regardless of the actual numbers (I have no idea what they are), I wouldn't expect the CEO of Reddit to effectively announce to prospective advertisers that their user base was a bunch of racists.