1 upvotes, 0 direct replies (showing 0)
I like your opinion here, but I'm not sure I agree with it. He, and the others at reddit hq, are in positions of no small amount of power, forced to balance the age old continuum of freedom vs. security. It's a recurring Superman problem. You have the power to make people play nice, but forcing your will on people is also bad.
Many, if not most guardians of free speech have to defend speech they might find deplorable. If the Westborough Baptist Church were stifled, the ACLU would absolutely line up to oppose that, but do you think for a second the lawyer in charge wouldn't wonder if the world would be a better place if they were shut up? If someone came to me and asked me to decide to keep beatingwomen or whatever, I honestly don't know what I'd do. Reddit is great because of the amount of freedom it has, but it's made so, so much worse by the existence of these subs. And honestly, if it were JUST me in charge, I'd probably ban it. I know the difference between an unpopular idea (a subreddit for creationism) and a harmful one (again, the above) or deplorable one (pics of bodies or dedicatedly aggressively racist subs). Those clearly don't have societal value, at least by any modern interpretation. But when I have to answer to someone else, or set precedent for another, it's a decision that would bother me either way. Letting me use my opinion to set rules means others who might not be so benign or open to criticism/other opinions as me.
It's an age old question: force the world to be good, or let it choose, knowing it won't always make the right choice? You're too far deep into one of those fields if you don't see the dilemma there. The admins aren't just there to grease the wheels, they have a job to keep reddit going. Sometimes, a part of that is going to be asking whether something is really the best thing for reddit. Free speech stuff is just one factor. Keeping an unpopular sub could one day tank reddit, and the administrators are obviously keenly aware of that.
They want it to be a good site. Part of that means being friendly, accessible, and inoffensive, but part of that is being open. They know exactly what they want, and the two aren't incompatible, but here they were forced to chip away at one of the two. That doesn't mean they don't know which they want.
There's nothing here!