{"id":32064,"date":"2015-07-21T03:00:15","date_gmt":"2015-07-21T07:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=32064"},"modified":"2015-07-19T21:36:20","modified_gmt":"2015-07-20T01:36:20","slug":"would-reddit-even-be-reddit-without-the-trolls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/07\/21\/would-reddit-even-be-reddit-without-the-trolls\/","title":{"rendered":"Would <em>Reddit<\/em> even be <em>Reddit<\/em> without the trolls?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.bloombergview.com\/articles\/2015-07-17\/policing-reddit-could-kill-reddit\" target=\"_blank\">Megan McArdle<\/a> warns that &#8220;cleaning up&#8221; <em>Reddit <\/em>might end up killing the patient:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>On Monday, when I wrote about the travails of Ellen Pao at <em>Reddit<\/em>, I noted that cleaning up the troll-infested caves of its vast ecosystem will not be an easy task for anyone. Its freewheeling, &#8220;anything goes&#8221; culture is a big part of its appeal to users, and the large number of users is a big part of <em>Reddit<\/em>&#8216;s appeal to investors. It&#8217;s also worth noting that this approach is substantially cheaper than trying to keep a close eye on <em>Reddit<\/em>&#8216;s ever-expanding universe of subreddits.<\/p>\n<p>But <em>Reddit<\/em> really seems to want to tidy things up a bit, or at least force the trolls down to the basement where they won&#8217;t frighten the visitors. Steve Huffman, a <em>Reddit<\/em> co-founder who is returning as Pao&#8217;s successor, has announced that the company will continue to take steps to curtail undesirable content. Potentially offensive forums will require users to opt in, and anything that &#8220;harasses, bullies, or abuses&#8221; will be entirely off limits. So a forum whose title is a vile racist slur will be reclassified for opt-in status. But the &#8220;Raping Women&#8221; forum will be banned outright.<\/p>\n<p>Huffman is laying out some much clearer guidelines than Pao did, which is a good first step (and exactly what I said Pao should have done). On the other hand, that&#8217;s no guarantee that this will prevent users from staging a mass exodus.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Megan McArdle warns that &#8220;cleaning up&#8221; Reddit might end up killing the patient: On Monday, when I wrote about the travails of Ellen Pao at Reddit, I noted that cleaning up the troll-infested caves of its vast ecosystem will not be an easy task for anyone. Its freewheeling, &#8220;anything goes&#8221; culture is a big part [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,28,15],"tags":[459,186,58,593],"class_list":["post-32064","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","category-media","category-technology","tag-censorship","tag-freedomofspeech","tag-internet","tag-socialmedia"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8la","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32064","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32064"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32064\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32065,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32064\/revisions\/32065"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}