This is the problem that so many people miss when they extol the virtues of a customized Reddit. If you make a site that is attractive to racists, bigots, sexists, and homophobes, those people are going to be using the whole site and not just their tiny vile corners.
This phenomenon might be easier to understand with a specific example like the recent Ghostbusters remake. It was by most accounts a bad movie. If you browse any movie related subreddit you will see plenty of valid criticism of that movie. Mixed in with that are comments about how that movie never should have been made with an all female cast and that is what caused the movie to be unsuccessful because women aren't funny. It is easy for some naive kid to see that and think "yeah, I saw that movie and it wasn't funny, maybe that comment has a point". Meanwhile it might never occur to them the user who originally left that comment came to Reddit to be a member of an incel community that is notoriously sexist and anti-women. This allows these communities to grow their size by spreading hate and feeding off the rest of the site.
I kinda think if the balance can be maintained instead of reaching a tipping point that the interactions between those bigots etc. and the rest of us may actually ward off their bigotry. A bigot having a conversation with a non-bigot in a context that doesn't start off adversarial is probably the best context we can get for people to slowly drop their bigotry.
Sure, it can go the other way too, and that's scary.
Now, I dunno. Clearly we can't expect independent well-meaning anti-racists to be as effective as extremely carefully crafted propaganda appealing to baser tribalist instincts. It's already uphill battle to get people to be open-minded. Those who argue for reinforcing people's existing biases have it easier.
But if there's any chance of getting the bigots to change their views, it seems it will be in respectful conversation with others, which Reddit at least is capable of, though I guess it doesn't seem the trend, unfortunately…
I agree with your premise, but I don't think that is something that realistically happens very often on the internet, especially on social media. The discourse dissolves too quickly once a comment has been called out for being hateful.
Another part of the issue is that not all hateful content has a big blinking sign on it saying "I am being hateful". It is often a lot subtler than that. One big example is how the Reddit community has handled the Me Too movement. If the big subreddits are your only source of news you might think that Terry Crews is the primary victim of Hollywood's sexual misconduct. There is nothing wrong with telling Crew's story. He is clearly a victim and he deserves for his voice to be heard. A single post or comment about Crews is not sexist, however he has been the primary focus of this discussion on Reddit. It is important to think about it deeper and why his story dominates this topic. Maybe it is because a sizable portion of Reddit simply doesn't care about female victims the way they care about male victims. This type of bias is only visible holistically and therefore is much harder to combat with open debate as you describe.
Well, FWIW, internet communication is still pretty damn new. No grown people are the kids of internet-natives even (i.e. no adults today were raised by parents and teachers who themselves grew up with the internet). So, in the long-run, we can see that this is pretty new still.
I am myself aware of all sorts of ideal communication habits that address the common failings. Perhaps there's some slim hope that this wisdom will eventually reach far more people and become dominant to where we actually learn how to communicate better than we do today.
I think of the cases where people met their trolls in real-life and had reconciliation of sorts, or that woman who grew up in the Westboro Baptist Church and got convinced to leave after someone on Twitter responded empathically and intelligently instead of antagonistically, leading to long-term exchange of perspectives… these stories are the exception today, but we have that at least…
This phenomenon might be easier to understand with a specific example like the recent Ghostbusters remake. It was by most accounts a bad movie. If you browse any movie related subreddit you will see plenty of valid criticism of that movie. Mixed in with that are comments about how that movie never should have been made with an all female cast and that is what caused the movie to be unsuccessful because women aren't funny. It is easy for some naive kid to see that and think "yeah, I saw that movie and it wasn't funny, maybe that comment has a point". Meanwhile it might never occur to them the user who originally left that comment came to Reddit to be a member of an incel community that is notoriously sexist and anti-women. This allows these communities to grow their size by spreading hate and feeding off the rest of the site.