Why I don't like Reddit.

One of my friends asked me the other day why I dislike Reddit. As one of the more popular websites on the internet there aren't a whole lot of people that don't use Reddit at least once and awhile. I myself visit occasionally too, but as a whole I dislike it. The reason I usually give is that the layout is just terrible. Which, in my mind, is 100% true. I hate the layout for Reddit. But that is a shallow criticism I use to end the discussion because my real objections to the site are much more complex and harder to explain.

My first major problem with the site is the upvote/downvote/reddit gold system. I think comments and arguments should stand on their own merits, and not how popular they are. On Reddit, unpopular opinions, that break no rules, are downvoted to oblivion based on nothing other then their unpopularity. Compare that to other sites where unpopular opinions are left up and are not hidden. Instead of actual discussion, there is an echo chamber where no alternate voices are able to be heard. Now this doesn't matter for certain subreddits, such as the humor based ones, but for more serious topics you aren't allowed to stray to far from that particular subreddits internal politics. That kind of atmosphere is stifling and is not something I want to have a part off.

I'm also not a fan of how left the site is. And by left I don't mean "mainstream liberal thought". I can tolerate that, and even read many sites with a bias in that direction. I mean "far left, social justice warrior, these people are crazy and make Che Guevara look like George Bush Jr." left. Subreddits like SRS have considerable influence over the site and are on the opposite side of my personal political beliefs. Of course a lot of what SRS is reacting too is pretty gross and/or wrong but I still have major problems with the social justice movement. For me, outrage over disgusting/politically incorrect speech will always be much more offensive then the speech itself.

I generally don't like going onto sites where the social justice crowd is active. I think they should have a right to free speech like everyone else, and I am willing to fight for that right, but reading about how everything is racist and everything is sexist and how I am a terrible human being just because I happened to be born as the sex and ethnicity I am is, quite frankly, profoundly annoying and mentally exhausting. Like Twitter and Tumblr, social justice dominates the conversation, even in places where it shouldn't exist. I can only take so much of that before I have to go elsewhere. The social justice crowd talks a lot about "safe spaces" but sometimes I need to go to places that are safe spaces from them.

Though I know there are plenty of areas on Reddit where the social justice crowd does not have control, the fact that they are so active on the site makes me nervous. It is the same fear I have on Twitter. If I post something controversial or "problematic" on either site there is always a chance that one of the social justice people will see it, take it out of context, repost it across the internet, start a hashtag campaign against me and have hundreds of people try and ruin my life. I've seen it happen to so many other people before, and I don't want it to happen to me, which is a large reason why I have never posted anything from this blog on Reddit. I do post on Twitter even though the risk is the same or even greater because Twitter is a lot easier to take down if something bad happens. Plus combining the risk of the two sites seems dangerous.

By the way, getting targeted by social justice warriors is by far my biggest fear from this blog. To put that in perspective a decent portion of this blog is about how terrible ISIS is. I am much less afraid of offending ISIS then I am of social justice warriors. The worst ISIS can do is cut my head off. The social justice crowd can come after my job, my family and my friends. And while getting killed by ISIS would turn me into a martyr for free speech, getting doxed and having my life ruined by the social justice crowd would turn me into a pariah at best, and could cost me more then that. I know that that is a risk just from having this blog, and that other groups or even random trolls could do the same thing. However, there is a difference between hiding out in my own tiny corner of the internet and getting some bad luck with a random jerk and going into the den of the beast and poking the dragon in the eye. (By the way, if any social justice people read this and are tempted to come after me, please don't. I am really not worth the effort. My life already sucks!)

I could deal with all of that if it wasn't for one thing. Reddit is absolutely hypocritical when it comes to free speech. This goes far beyond the echo chamber issue I mentioned before. To some extent that is a problem with every internet forum. But beyond that Reddit has a very bad history of caving to people when they raise objections to questionable content. My philosophy is that if you want to be a champion of free speech you have to allow all of it, even the stuff most people think is evil. As long as it is legal in the United States, it should be allowed, otherwise you are a hypocrite if you say you support free speech but ban people that say things you don't like. A lot of that is because of the subreddit echo-chamber issue as well, because people who go against the culture of the subreddit are likely to banned as well, Sure, Reddit is a lot more open about content then many sites but they don't go nearly as far as they should if they really want to be considered the champions of free speech they claim to be.

I also don't like their stance on some of their major controversies  as well, largely due to the free speech issue. I won't go into many of them because there are too many to mention but I will mention the latest one. The amount of censorship over the latest internet controversy, Gamergate, which I have written about on this blog before, was just insane. Considering how trivial the actual issue was, I was shocked about how many people were banned on the site.

 And when you think about the stuff Reddit does allow it was incomprehensible to me that people were being banned for even mentioning  something as stupid as a sex/corruption scandal in the video games industry. It's just like Twitter going all out against anyone who is mean to a celebrity (on a platformed that is inherently confrontational) but letting ISIS recruit freely. It makes no sense whatsoever. I just don't understand why the Westboro Baptist Church can have a subreddit to spew their hate (I won't link to it but it does exist), but a user can be banned for asking Julian Assange what he thinks about Gamergate in an AMA. Sure the actual bad people who were harassing people should have been banned, from both sides of the controversy mind you, but not people who just wanted to talk about it.

Regardless of what you think of Gamergate (and I think the whole thing is pretty stupid, but with one side being MUCH worse then the other) the reaction to it was disproportionate. Actually, when I think about it, the entire internet's reaction to Gamergate was stupid as hell and everyone should be ashamed of themselves. Reddit was the front line in the controversy and remains a battleground today. To their credit Reddit did allow discussion of the issue after some time, but the whole incident left a bad taste in my mouth.

I could tolerate all of it if they weren't such utter and terrible hypocrites about free speech. If they just came out and said, "we don't believe in free speech and will censor opinions we don't like or any opinion that draws negative controversy to us" I would have a much better opinion of them. I don't like that as a policy but it is a fair one and isn't hypocritical. Either way, as long as they claim to be champions of free speech while at the same time supporting censorship on their site, I won't be a fan.

It's a shame too because Reddit does have some nicer points as well. They have some good discussions in the nicer parts of the site and it is a great place to check what is important to the internet at any given time. It's just that the awful outweighs the good.