Meh. IMHO, the real conspiracy here is Reddit's attempting to make it more palatable for advertisers so they can at least make an attempt at making money.
I would never want my business to boil down to a collective of people who will undoubtedly be on the wrong side of history. It's bad mojo all around, not just bad money.
I can't imagine how this could happen to Reddit - if some category of people is "on the wrong side of history", they are either a minority (however vocal) or are about to become a minority very soon - otherwise we couldn't really say the history is going against them, right? If the site is not a niche site but a broad host-all ad-supported site like Reddit, their income can't depend exclusively on a minority of users, statistically speaking. They may suffer a hit for alienating part of the audience, but they should still keep most of it, so it can't "boil down to" just "wrong side" people.
Quite the contrary - people who want government to ban speech because they feel bad hearing it are on the wrong side. "Hate speech" is just another way of saying "I don't like this speech", nothing more. Which is fine - nobody should be forced to listen to something one doesn't like. But when this term is abused to justify violence and coercion - governmental and private - as is frequently the case - then it's the wrong site of history. Of course, Reddit or anybody has the right to choose which speech to host - but one doesn't need to invent special category of "hate speech" to express this simple thought.
I respectfully deny your simplified definition of "hate speech" and reassert that history has decided that hate speech is to be prevented (unless we regress completely to a pre-civil rights society). Your supposed "justification of violence and coercion" seems misinformed, and I'd like to hear more about these instances of injustice.
"history has decided" - what is this? Who is "history"? In US, for example, there is First Amendment, which guarantees every US person the basic right for free speech. Of course, not all countries are as eager to protect the rights of their citizens as United States are, and over the course of history there were many governments that infringed on those rights. However, declaring that these infringements somehow come from "history" and not from a bunch of misguided individuals that have no regard to their compatriot's rights I can only attribute to supreme arrogance or unwillingness to take responsibility for their own crimes.
The willingness of the government to infringe on rights of the free speech by definition can not be any part of "civil rights society" - quite the contrary, it is the opposite of it, as one of the most basic rights - right to speak freely - is being violated.
is /r/fph and relevant subreddit affecting reddit's advertising income that much that they needed to be shut down? if the subreddits were such a huge issue it's kind of interesting that I've never realized it till this thing broke today
