Reddit: why you should find a new r/place.
Five years ago, Reddit first hosted r/place, a collaborative artwork project and social experiment where users of the site could make images on a public canvas by changing the colour of a singular pixel once every 5 to 20 minutes.
The project lasted 3 days, and the final canvas included a number of images including multiple country flags, the Mona Lisa, logos of brands and sports teams, video game characters from Scott Pilgrim to Undertale, and much, much more.
It was heavily praised for the depiction of the site's community, Internet culture overall, and creating an entertaining means for users of the site to work together in representing themselves.
A few days ago, r/place was revived, becoming the talk of the town on Reddit and the Internet as a whole. Communities centred around games, franchises, initiatives, hobbies and so forth decided to try and get a piece of the pie, attempting to make their own characters, items, and logos in sprite art.
And of course, the subreddit couldn't make it halfway through it's intended lifespan this year without creating a mess.
Rundown of the mess
On the second day of r/place's revival, a video surfaced of Reddit employee Chtorr drawing on the canvas with seconds between each pixel being placed, bypassing the 5 minute wait time for users with verified email.
When the video was first posted to r/place, the initial poster was banned from the subreddit, despite not having broken any of the outlined rules of the community. Users then started reposting the video, asking for explanation, only for their new posts to be removed.
On top of Reddit's admin team breaking their own rules and silencing anybody who pointed out the fact, people also started to take notice of how quickly and efficiently flags in the mural would be reconstructed after vandalism. After Twitch streamer xQc started brigading the canvas with over 100,000 viewers, the question as to whether these parts of r/place were being sustained by botted accounts came to effect. If that were to be the case, that would mean that little has been done to prevent botting on the canvas since the complaint was brought up back in 2017.
Late to the party
Reddit's lack of addressing issues on their platform on time spans a long history, and overall, automated pixel placement lies on the lowest tier of severity in regards to their inaction.
r/NoNewNormal
Back in September the subreddit r/NoNewNormal was banned from the site for brigading other communities that would criticize it. The subreddit was home to a variety of content that spread misinformation and fake news about vaccines, social distancing, and masks, as well as several conspiracy theories regarding the COVID-19 pandemic.
While the ban sounds justified and reasonable, the community had been harbouring this content for over a year. Nowhere in Reddit's Content Policy is misinformation mentioned. In comparison, this is mentioned in the content policies of Facebook and Twitter and accompanied by content warnings on posts that may be misleading. Before r/NoNewNormal began to brigade other communities on the site, the most they faced from Reddit was a quarantine that was issued a month prior.
r/The_Donald
The_Donald was a subreddit that was created in 2015 in response to Donald Trump's announcement of running for president.
While online, the community hosted an endless amount of content that was Islamophobic, racist, antisemetic, or plain bigoted.
The fun part? This content was all allowed as Reddit's Content Policy didn't mention issues such as racism, homophobia, misogyny, xenophobia, religious bigotry, etc. until the George Floyd protests of 2020. Reddit allowed the community's hatred to thrive for five years before deciding it wanted brownie points from the media and only banned The_Donald in their June 2020 banwave when they didn't comply with the new Content Policy.
These two subreddits were kept in Reddit due to the site's emphasis on “Freedom of Speech”. If Freedom of Speech is supposedly something the platform strives for, then why does it stop at site admins, and until recently, nobody else?
Admin Hijinks
In 2016, evidence was posted to The_Donald of CEO Steve Huffman (u/spez) editing user's messages in order to make it appear that insults directed towards him such as “fuck u/spez”, were instead being directed towards moderators of the subreddit. Huffman apologized for the incident, stating that he did so out of frustration over being constantly called things like a pedophile. He expressed that the community team was frustrated with him over the incident, and that he'd learn not to do so again.
Pretty childish behaviour from a CEO for a company that proclaims it's for “free speech”, but things don't end there. Around the same time, chat logs from Slack were leaked involving Huffman revealing that he had actually turned his notifications from The_Donald off long before the interaction.
In the same chat logs, Huffman expressed he wished Ellen Pao was back. Pao, who was CEO before Huffman, also had her issues with being criticized. After the firing of director of talent Victoria Taylor, moderators and community members of Reddit began to voice disapproval of Pao. Posts and comments were deleted for being critical of Pao's gender discrimination lawsuit against her former employer Kleiner Perkins, a venture capital firm. Posts that were critical of her husband's hedge fund also met the same fate. Oddly and interestingly enough, however, was the fact that content racially profiling her and comparing her to Hitler was, at the time, untouched.
Even past the site's “free speech” days where hateful content would run rampant, Reddit's admins don't fail to censor their userbase upon mention of their team, especially when they have nobody to blame but themselves.
In March of last year, Reddit hired Aimee Chanellor to the admin team. Shortly after, a moderator of r/ukpolitics was banned from the site for sharing an article of Chanellor's past work in British politics. Chanellor had been dismissed from the Green and Labour parties, the former for hiring her father who had been charged with 22 sexual offences including raping and torturing a ten year old girl, and the latter for tweets by her partner describing sexual fantasies he had with children.
In the wake of this, posts and comments mentioning Challenor by name were deleted, with the posting accounts being banned. Steve Huffman came out to state later on that Challenor had not been “properly vetted” in the hiring process, something one would think would be the case if a job candidate had a political background.
That's not all
Between 2008 and 2017, Reddit was an open-sourced project with it's repos hosted on GitHub. However, this was changed due to lack of updates, part of the reasoning being explained that they didn't want their long-term plans being out in the clear. This move to closing to source code essentially gave the middle finger to many volunteer devs who contributed their time and work into it.
In 2021, Reddit started selling “CryptoSnoos”, a series of NFTs for the site.
In 2018, Huffman was found to be hiding the amount of Russian troll activity on the site.
In 2021, Tencent invested $150 million into the site.
Witch hunts on the site have lead to many issues off-platform, such as when a subreddit dedicated to identifying the Boston marathon bombers wrongfully attributed a missing, suicidal man as a perpetrator. In more recent years, some communities have brigaded and harassed users on TikTok for things as simple as enjoying a game.
In Reddit's earlier years, they allowed “jailbait” content (sexual images of minors) on the platform, going so far as to defend the posters of said content under their “free speech” initiative, with the jailbait subreddit at one point being crowned “subreddit of the year”.
Lastly, Reddit collects a lot of data of users through trackers and cookies.
Reddit's bad, but what else is there?
To start off, if you're willing to delete your Reddit account, there's two front-ends you can use that are privacy-respecting, ad-free and FOSS, the first of these is Libreddit, which has a look and feel more along the lines of the new layout. However, for those who like the site's old-style layout, there's also Teddit, which is also great in it's own right.
If you want to find a new site entirely, there's Lemmy. I personally enjoy the idea of Lemmy because it's FOSS, and anybody can host their own instance, much in the same way Mastodon works, which really helps to prevent the entire problem of censorship. If you want to see a list of instances, feel free to check it out here.