I’m sharing this old article because it’s useful to contrast the situation back then (protests against hate speech) and now (protests due to the APIcalypse).
Here are a few highlights:
- Back then, the admins were already eager to shift their discourse back and forth, depending on the convenience. Reddit was always about free speech, then it never was.
- Former CEO Yishan Wong’s “[shutting down subreddits] won’t become a regular occurrence”
- If you try to follow the link sourcing the quote above, you’ll notice that most Reddit blog official communications towards users are gone. Instead you’ll find a blog clearly geared towards investors, vulture capital, and corporate.
Any other old piece of news that you guys feel like sharing, that can be contextualised to show Reddit going downhill?
Peak Reddit
“We stand for free speech. This means we are not going to ban distasteful subreddits. We will not ban legal content even if we find it odious or if we personally condemn it. Not because that’s the law in the United States — because as many people have pointed out, privately-owned forums are under no obligation to uphold it — but because we believe in that ideal independently, and that’s what we want to promote on our platform. We are clarifying that now because in the past it wasn’t clear, and (to be honest) in the past we were not completely independent and there were other pressures acting on Reddit. Now it’s just Reddit, and we serve the community, we serve the ideals of free speech, and we hope to ultimately be a universal platform for human discourse.”