> That said, from an administrative perspective, the intense hands-free policies are baffling. You'd expect a company based off the nature of community would engage with their community and their needs.
That's always the thing I liked about Reddit, and something I never found baffling at all. 'Here's our platform; please don't break the law' is a nice, easily understandable, easily followable policy. 'Here's our platform; please don't violate the social mores of this hour' is much trickier.
I hate many of the foul subreddits (like /r/ShitRedditSays), but I can easily ignore them. It's easy to ignore what one doesn't want, but much more difficult to use something one's not allowed to have. And then there are issues of fairness, e.g. will Reddit ban subreddits on one side of issues but not another? Does it selectively enforce its rules?
I think "platforms shouldn't censor" is arguably one of the core values of the early internet. For the first half of its life to date, reddit seemed to share that value.
Unfortunately, it's hard to take a strong stand on that position in the face of public pressure when the thing people want censored is something as close to child pornography as people can find without stepping over the legal line, or Nazis calling for innocents to be harmed. I think I'm in the majority when I say that those things are bad.
On the other hand, I firmly believe that the existence of uncensored platforms is good. A history of caving to demands to censor bad things says that censorship in on the table and demands to censor anything someone doesn't like might be successful. Already, reddit has ventured beyond banning things that are horrible to banning things that have some mild potential for regulatory issues (trading beer and selling firearms is not affected by FOSTA, so far as I am aware).
That's always the thing I liked about Reddit, and something I never found baffling at all. 'Here's our platform; please don't break the law' is a nice, easily understandable, easily followable policy. 'Here's our platform; please don't violate the social mores of this hour' is much trickier.
I hate many of the foul subreddits (like /r/ShitRedditSays), but I can easily ignore them. It's easy to ignore what one doesn't want, but much more difficult to use something one's not allowed to have. And then there are issues of fairness, e.g. will Reddit ban subreddits on one side of issues but not another? Does it selectively enforce its rules?