This is an excerpt from the book We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory, which comes out in a couple of weeks. It seems like it's going to be...
This is an excerpt from the book We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory, which comes out in a couple of weeks. It seems like it's going to be a pretty positively-framed book, so as someone that's... somewhat more cynical, I'm looking forward to reading it to see how the story looks from that angle compared to my own.
The fireside chat that I saw at RightsCon was a talk with the legal person at Reddit and Huffman were the two participants along with some questions from a moderator and the audience. It wasn't...
Yeah, I had some limited interaction with the author on Twitter when she was interviewing Steve Huffman at SXSW and ot was really clear that she was just going to give him some kind of glowing review. I would not be surprised if the whole book idea was some kind of semi sponsored promotion for reddit.
The fireside chat that I saw at RightsCon was a talk with the legal person at Reddit and Huffman were the two participants along with some questions from a moderator and the audience. It wasn't very positive but it definitely seemed like they tried to keep the narrative contained to "we are working on tools to fight trolls, better mod tools, and better policies to fight trolls" and the phrase "we can ban behaviours, not speech" was key (I'm not sure if that's the exact phrase Huffman used) as in they can ban someone calling for direct violence but not speech full of dog whistles. On the face of it, it makes sense, but then you think about it for a second, and Reddit isn't a democracy, it's a business and trolls can go elsewhere to host their content. If Reddit wants to be a democracy then they'd go non-profit and actually act in user best interests.
Given how popular reddit is at something like the fifth most trafficked site in the US, it feels like the media for the most part treats it with kid gloves, especially compared to Twitter, Facebook, and google.
Haha, at the fireside chat, Huffman was saying Reddit gets treated badly while Facebook escapes scrutiny because sub-reddits that are offensive/illegal are public while on Facebook those groups can be completely private which makes it harder to report on them in the press. But I don't see Huffman in front of Congress, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This is an excerpt from the book We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory, which comes out in a couple of weeks. It seems like it's going to be a pretty positively-framed book, so as someone that's... somewhat more cynical, I'm looking forward to reading it to see how the story looks from that angle compared to my own.
The fireside chat that I saw at RightsCon was a talk with the legal person at Reddit and Huffman were the two participants along with some questions from a moderator and the audience. It wasn't very positive but it definitely seemed like they tried to keep the narrative contained to "we are working on tools to fight trolls, better mod tools, and better policies to fight trolls" and the phrase "we can ban behaviours, not speech" was key (I'm not sure if that's the exact phrase Huffman used) as in they can ban someone calling for direct violence but not speech full of dog whistles. On the face of it, it makes sense, but then you think about it for a second, and Reddit isn't a democracy, it's a business and trolls can go elsewhere to host their content. If Reddit wants to be a democracy then they'd go non-profit and actually act in user best interests.
Haha, at the fireside chat, Huffman was saying Reddit gets treated badly while Facebook escapes scrutiny because sub-reddits that are offensive/illegal are public while on Facebook those groups can be completely private which makes it harder to report on them in the press. But I don't see Huffman in front of Congress, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯