As much drama that's been going on recently.. I still love reddit.

Alright. Back up here. Look at this:

"Protecting diverse communication is the essence of free speech, and at the very least this announcement acknowledges that free speech is compromised when the loudest, grossest assholes get to set the tone," Whitney Phillips, a researcher at Humboldt State University who studies online trolling told me.

a researcher at Humboldt State University who studies online trolling

That is the craziest thing that I don't know why I'm surprised exists. It's true though. The internet is an anthropological, sociological, and psychological gold mine. We've seen an extremely broad and strong culture that has developed in a couple decades. It's actually really fascinating. And this entire reddit debacle has really shown it. Social codes that many people on reddit believed inherent were broken and there are others who are reacting and trying to remove these social codes. And these are online protests that really happen in the same way that it happens in real life, but this time with virtual entities. The internet is what happens when brains interact but don't have the actual have the actual physical world to change how things interact.

Really interesting read to see some of their viewpoints. What bothered me the most about the whole thing is that it really had Pao written all over the decisions. When you look at her comments about free speech, the fact that there are a lot of subreddits that should have been taken down along with the original 5, and that any comments surrounding her/her husband and their court cases leads to shadow bans, it seems pretty obvious she is taking control of the site. The purpose of community based anything is to allow the members influence how things are managed and decided (to an extent of course). As soon as that is taken away (like what happened here), all hell is going to break loose.

I find it annoying when people bring up the fact that Reddit is a private company to shoot down those who complain about their "free speech" on the site. When discussing free speech in the context of Reddit, we're not talking about the constitution. We're talking about Reddit's own self-proclaimed core value. Therefore, when people criticize admin decisions from that standpoint, they're arguing Reddit is not sticking to their own ideals and is, in essence, being hypocritical. It is certainly a valid argument as well. They can't ban content they deem offensive and at the same time self-righteously proclaim they're a bastion of open and free speech. They have every right to do what they want with their site, but it should agree with their own values lest their hypocrisy damages their credibility.

Most of the protestors don't hate fat people, of course. But they saw Reddit's crackdown on harassment as a fundamental shift in the foundation of the site, a move to take away their "free speech."

Gotta love those quotation marks around free speech, as if what's going on Reddit isn't about that. Fatpeoplehate was a shitty sub, but according to it's mods they were following the rules set down by reddit. Supporting free speech, in my opinion, has the most meaning and importance when you vehemently disagree with the speaker, or even find their opinion distasteful, but believe in their right to speak.

Furthermore, from what I've read r/Fatpeoplehate was more about poking at the excessive lengths the Fat Acceptance movement has taken, with some going beyond the initial goals of preventing bullying and moving on to say, without much medical proof, that being grossly overweight is a healthy lifestyle.