Tag Archives: Reddit

Online Hate, Misogyny, and Racism: A Defense of Reddit’s Effort to Clean Up the Internet

I’m usually the first person to mount some sort of a defense on reddit’s behalf. When people mention the misogyny, the racism, the various strains on online hate and digital bullying, I’m quick to point out that the large majority of redditors are fairly decent people, that on a site with something like nine million daily users, it’s unfortunate that a vocal minority of losers are granted a megaphone with which it can spew a steady stream of garbage, tarnishing reddit’s reputation as a whole.

Yesterday the reddit admins made the long-overdue decision to ban several of its more toxic subreddits, most prominently, a group called /r/fatpeoplehate. As its title suggests, /r/fatpeoplehate served as nothing more than a petri dish of body-shaming and name-calling. And much like reddit’s infamous cardboard-boxed collection of various bodily fluids, /r/fatpeoplehate thrived in the darkness, amassing an army of followers who relished in the opportunity to share embarrassing photos and regurgitated hate-speech, all from the cowardly confines of their homes.

I spend a lot of time on reddit, but recent events have made it harder to say anything positive. If you were online yesterday, you know what I’m talking about. Instead of its usual stream of mildly interesting gifs and dank memes, reddit’s front page was filled with outrage, directed at the admins and especially at reddit CEO Ellen Pao. As we speak, some of the site’s most upvoted content is nothing more than insults to Pao, calling her a Nazi, the c-word, you name it.

What went down yesterday requires a little bit of backstory, which, even if you’re familiar with the front page of the Internet, it might not make too much sense. Like I said, I’m on reddit all the time, and I’m still trying to figure out where all of these lunatics came from.

I guess it’s important to state that the hate was always there. Maybe you won’t see its more overt face on mainstream web sites, but try typing even the most depraved fringe ideas into Google and you’re guaranteed to find a shadow Internet of likeminded bloggers and trolls. It’s there because it exists in the real world, it’s amplified by the anonymous nature of the Internet, and when you throw in a massive content aggregator like reddit, founded on the tenets of free speech, it’s natural that those venomous ideas will unfortunately find a place to multiply and be heard.

The hate exists on reddit. It’s not just /r/fatpeoplehate. There are the blatantly racist subreddits. There are dumb movements like The Red Pill or Men’s Rights which serve as a violent backlash against feminism. And then there are the more insidious hate groups, subs like /r/cringe or /r/punchablefaces, community boards that offer nothing more than a place to post a picture of a person thought to be ugly or different, all while the rest of the group spews out its vomit, unfortunately elevating its most upvoted content to reddit’s front page.

That’s how these groups get attention. Every once in a while the hate will whip itself into an especially frothy frenzy, and due to the nature of reddit’s system of upvoting and downvoting content, it’s possible for massively popular posts to break out of their respective subs and onto the front page.

/r/fatpeoplehate had been garnering more and more attention recently. The only reason that I became aware of its existence was because I’d increasingly see the wreckage of its diarrhea-like content spilling over into the more general, default subs. The mods of some of the larger defaults did a pretty good job of banning and deleting offensive users, but eventually the problem became so pronounced, the reddit admins took the unusual step of banning the entire sub.

The reaction was swift. Almost immediately after /r/fatpeoplehate was deleted, /r/fatpeoplehate2 sprung into existence, the same 150,000 users picking up exactly where they had left off. Only now they felt provoked, justified in their own nonsensical belief that they were the victims of censorship. “Free speech!” became the self-righteous rallying cry under which the scummiest of reddit’s slime lashed out against the admins, and against Ellen Pao in particular.

People might see the resulting hate and its prominence on reddit’s front page as proof that reddit was never anything better than a sugarcoated version of its bad reputation. And when you click onto the front page and see nothing but top post after top post celebrating the violent denigration of its woman CEO, it’s hard to make an argument otherwise.

I’m seeing arguments online like, “This is what you get when you poke the bear!” I guess the logic here is that it’s better to have the racism, misogyny, and hate all cordoned off in its own field. But all I can say is, I don’t think the hate on reddit is a bear as much as it is an infestation of cockroaches. Just like when you have a house overrun with insects, as soon as you try to confront the problem, as soon as you drop a bomb right in the heart of its nest, you’re going to see the bugs scatter everywhere. Sure, they’re going to crawl out of the woodwork and everything is going to look gross, and no, you’re not going to be able to kill every last bug. In fact, it’s only a matter of time before they crawl into some other dark hole and start the repopulation process once again. But just because the hate will always be here doesn’t mean that we have to stand idly by and honor its desire to exist. Reddit made exactly the right move in trying to clean up a long overgrown mess.

I tried to control a swarm of bees

I saw this clip on Reddit of a guy approaching a whole swarm of bees attached to a tree. He slowly puts his hand through the mass of squirming insects and removes it a few seconds later, totally unharmed. The next time, he goes back in, he pulls off a huge of bees, almost like the whole cluster was a liquid, like he was running his hands through a loosely cohesive whole.

Scrolling down through the comments, I hoped to find some sort of an explanation. And I found it. Someone wrote about how when you find bees attached to a tree or some other object, it means that they’re swarming, that they don’t have a queen to protect, and that they’re incredible docile. It all made sense as far as I could tell, I mean, I’m no beekeeper, but this was proof, right?

So when my wife called me outside a few months later, she was screaming, “Rob! Come outside, come quick!” I went out back and she was standing twenty feet away from the garage. “Look Rob, there’s some sort of a beehive.” And it was just like I saw on the video, there were tons of them, all clustered in the top left corner.

I said to my wife, “You want to see something cool?” and I was just going do it, like I’d run my hands through and my wife would be all scared but after a while she’d see that I wasn’t being hurt. How would she react? She’d probably start asking a bunch of half-questions, like, “But … how? This … what?” and I’d just laugh, making up some nonsense answer like, “It’s all about confidence. These bees are more afraid of you than you are of them. You need to project strong vibes, and they’ll understand that. They don’t speak English, but body language a universal means of communication.”

So I calmly walked toward the hive. “Rob? What are you doing, Rob?” to which I replied, “Hey, I’ve got it. Don’t worry.” And that whole confidence, posture, body language thing, it totally worked on my wife. She saw me chill out, she started chilling out herself. “All right, just be careful. What are you going to do?”

“Watch,” and, you know, even though I was fairly certain that this was going to go just as it did on the Internet, there was still a palpable sense of fear. I mean, even if you’re positive that something doesn’t pose a real threat, a swarm of bees is still pretty scary. I’m not even used to dealing with like one bee, but this? This was hundreds of bees. I got close and the buzzing, which I could hear from back at the house, it grew louder, deafening, I could feel it like a cloud of vibration surrounding the periphery of my being.

I raised my hand toward the swarm and I realized that I was fighting my bodily instincts. It was same feeling I had when I went to this adventure park over the summer. One of the attractions was called the Mega Jump, basically, you climb up to a really high platform, they attach you to this rope and pulley thing, and you jump off, confident that whatever it is they’ve tied you to will slow your descent before you touch ground. Again, even though I knew it was this controlled thing, I still experienced a very physical reaction, a terror really, as soon as I stepped up to the edge.

But this was all in my head, I told myself, and I knew that I couldn’t stand there hesitating for too long. I’d psych myself out, or worse, my wife might get the impression that I didn’t know what I was doing, she might get hysterical again and I’d back out if only to keep her from freaking out. I swallowed the lump down my throat and I reached into the mass.

And the stinging was immediate. I recoiled my hand instantly, it was covered in bees, they were all stinging me. The outer layer of the swarm broke off and started circling my body, my face. I wanted to swat them away, I instinctively started flailing around, hitting myself in the head, which, with my one hand still covered in bees, it was just spreading them to my head, my scalp, the ones that had already stung me and died, it was like they were glued on, and I crushed some of them against my skull.

My wife came over with a bucket of water and doused me, but it did little good. In a brief lapse in between bouts of panic and terror, I regained control of my faculties and ran toward the hose, sprayed as many of them as I could away from my body, and followed my wife who had escaped inside the house.

There were like ten or twelve bees that had made it inside, and right outside, it was just this cloud, a whole nest of angry pissed off bees looking for some revenge. My hand was bleeding, everything was starting to swell, my wife was swatting at the few intruders were still circling our heads trying to exact revenge. I looked at my ballooning hand, she looked at me, she said, “What the fuck Rob? What the fuck?”

I spend too much time on reddit

I’m on the Internet a lot, way too much really. It’s gotten to the point where I have an app installed on my computer that actually blocks the Internet for a preset amount of time. It’s kind of sad, that I can’t sit still for more than ten minutes without having my consciousness hijacked by the overwhelming urge to see what’s happening on Facebook (tip: nothing’s ever, ever happening on Facebook.) But it’s a real thing, the Internet sucking away minutes and hours of my productivity. Even when I’m not on the Internet, I’ll start thinking about the Internet.

It’s funny how certain trends get started online. For example, I’m on the web site reddit a lot. It took me a while to really figure out how it worked, but it’s basically a giant forum where people post links to pictures and articles. It’s a rabbit hole that’s easy to fall through and get lost. Under each post, users can add comments, other users can add comments to those comments. You’re given the option to upvote or downvote anything, with the idea being that the cream always rises to the top. There’s more to it than that … actually, I’m trying to think what more to it there is, and I don’t think there is any more to it. That’s it.

And with a ceaseless stream of new information and stupid jokes and cool pictures it’s easy to get lost, to have five minutes turn into two hours. I’ll pry my eyes away from the screen, I hadn’t noticed that the sun set while I was reading people dissect the different possible meanings of a stupid image macro, or watching like a voyeur as two online strangers engaged in a vicious verbal war over who best captained the USS Enterprise (tip: Picard.)

While there’s a lot of stuff out there to keep me entertained, there’s also a lot of nonsense. Like the grammar nazis who make it their virtual life’s mission to scour the web and tear apart the grammatical errors of complete strangers in the most condescending way possible. Or people who add nothing to discussions but copy and pasted segments of previous discussions.

It’s actually pretty cool when you find yourself reading certain forums and you’ll notice patterns begin to emerge, subtle inside jokes that would only make sense to certain people who happened to have been on reddit at the same time. For example, and this is totally going to be one of those stories that’s not at all entertaining when explained by someone else, a few months ago, this redditor posted a picture of a giant safe he found in the basement of a new house he just moved into.

“I wonder what’s in this safe?” he asked the Internet, and the Internet got interested, like yeah, what is in that safe? And that was it for a while, there wasn’t any more news about the safe. But people kept referencing the safe in random conversations about stuff that had nothing to do with the safe. It became the punch line to a joke that was never fully articulated, like any time a comment thread started to unravel, someone would link back to a link that had something to do with that safe. Subreddits popped up dedicated to figuring out what could possibly be hidden away inside. Other users created various hoaxes, claiming to have cracked the safe open.

I have no idea what eventually wound up happening, as much of the safe trend has subsided by this point, but every now and then something about the safe will pop up in random conversation, and I’ll sit there and laugh to myself at my computer, and the sound of my laughter snaps me out of my Internet, brings me back to reality. I’m like, what am I laughing at? A safe? I can’t even really explain why it’s at all funny or even worth my time. But I’m engaged, it’s so weird, this little online world that I spend way too much of my time in.

While I’m on the reddit topic, I just wanted to complain about two pretty annoying trends I’ve been noticing for a while now. The first one is the word “this.” It’s a lazy verbal trick that people use as an affirmation when seeing something that they agree with. Like if I see a funny picture on a subreddit and someone makes an interesting comment, it’s like everybody else has to write out the word “this” as a reply. Yes, this. I like this. This. It’s a waste of everybody’s time. If you like something enough that you’re actually moved to write out the word this, just click on the upvote button. Nothing’s more annoying that reading a thread where every other paragraph is littered with “this, this, this.”

The second annoying little tick is somewhat similar, although used to express a different sentiment: “nope.” People write out “nope” as a reply to something that’s scary or uncomfortable. Like if there’s a picture of a giant spider, or a story about a guy who goes down to his basement and thinks that saw a ghost, everybody’s like, “nope, nope, nope.” “I would have noped out of that basement fast.”

Anyway, I realize that the only thing more annoying than spending too much time on the Internet is then getting off the Internet and spending even more time writing about the Internet. This is like a big Internet circle jerk. It’s like I unplug myself but I’m still somehow wired in, my brain is still firing off thoughts and comments as if I were still online. I’m sure everybody deals with this problem in one way or another, like everybody’s got their favorite web sites that they spend too much time on. Or maybe it’s just me. How would Jesus have managed his life/virtual life balance? I have no idea. I should just get away from my computer for a while.

Internet problems

I got up really late this morning. And even after I woke up, I stayed in my bed for hours, just kind of tossing and turning, staring at the ceiling, not able to summon the will to stand up and get going. I reached for my cell phone and killed another hour or two on the mobile Internet. It’s gotten to the point where I can stay on the Internet indefinitely, not doing anything at all. I’ll go through my Facebook news feed, reading the statuses of my Facebook friends, a lot of people I haven’t even spoken to in years, just kind of indirectly keeping tabs on everybody’s lives.

And it’s weird because a lot of people don’t really use Facebook anymore. Or if they use it, they only lurk in the background, they’re not actually posting daily content. So it’s just this weird mix of friends, relatives, people that I went to school with twenty years ago, people that I’ve worked with ten years ago. And so I can always waste ten or fifteen minutes scrolling all the way the down, keep scrolling, keep loading more stories.

Then to Twitter. I’m really bad at Twitter. As in, I’m not really actively involved. I’m following something like seventy people, but I don’t really know how I chose those seventy. I’ll follow people on a whim, usually because Twitter suggests it. When I first started using it, I’d see a funny Twitter joke and I’d be like, “Ha! Follow!” only to realize that maybe that was the one funny thing that this person ever wrote in an otherwise boring list of daily nonsense. Like why am I following Ensign Wesley Crusher from Star Trek? If I ever tweeted out, “I’m drinking an IPA!” that would be a huge waste of everybody’s time. But Wil Wheaton does it and somehow I’m reading about it. I guess Twitter is really just like a backup Facebook, like if I’m very bored and I seriously just want time to disappear I’ll go through the feeds of all of these people that I really don’t have any connections to at all in real life.

And look at that, Reddit has a mobile app too. Whereas Facebook and Twitter are perfect for eliminating time in ten to fifteen minute chunks, Reddit is a great way to make a whole day vanish, as if you never had off in the first place. Let’s just look at stupid pictures and lame jokes, but indefinitely, a never ending sea of blue links to be clicked and mindlessly consumed. I sometimes have to make it a conscious activity just to refrain from even going to the home page, it’s that dangerous.

The worst part is, if and when I ever pry myself away from Reddit, I’ll get all anxious, looking at the clock, seeing how I’ve let the day totally slip away, something I had, time that I’ve lost that I’ll never get back. I’ll jump up, not standing up entirely, but I’ll leap up in bed and think, I’ve got to do something here, I’ve got to get going. But then I’ll look at my phone again. Well, after I check Facebook. I’ve been on Twitter and Reddit for so long that by now there has to be a whole new list of status updates to scroll through. And the process repeats itself.

There’s no escape. It’s not like I can just not have a phone. What am I supposed to do? How do I turn it all off? I can’t. I don’t know what else I’d do. And I can’t even turn to anybody or anything for any guidance. History doesn’t have any advice. We’re in new territory here. The great minds of humanity never had to deal with such bullshit problems like Facebook and Reddit. How can Plato or Socrates or any of the other great philosophers help me out when I can’t even get through a whole sentence without being distracted by the email sound going off on my iPhone? And look at that, it’s junk mail! What a surprise!

There’s no going back. We can’t turn off progress. But there’s got to be a better way.