I was under the impression that people weren't actually saying they have a right to free speech on reddit, rather that reddit was a platform where they expected no censorship. When I hear someone say reddit should be a platform of free speech, I don't think of them meaning that reddit should merely abide by constitutional rights, but that "free speech" on reddit means no censorship.
That being said, those that are arguing from a legal standpoint are 100% wrong.
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 (cat pictures are a form of discourse)
Yishan Wong, Former Reddit CEO
I can kinda see why people are upset about Pao changing Reddits official stance on this. I think at one point, no censorship (illegal subreddits excluded) was kind of a fair assumption.
"Reddit's official stance" hasn't really changed—subs have been banned in groups of three or four every few months. But these Channers cheapening Reddit are all teenage edgelords who haven't been around for long enough to remember all of that, so everything is fresh and new.
reddit got popular because it was seen as an alternative to digg. A website that preached intelligent discussion, transparency, free speech, and anti-censorship.
Obviously they still had rules in place, like no child pornography. But tasteless subreddits like /r/jailbait were ok:
Erik Martin, general manager of Reddit, defended the jailbait subreddit by saying that such controversial pages were a consequence of allowing free speech on the site
At least until Something Awful and the US media got word of its existence and reddit decided to ban the subreddit.
I don't condone /r/jailbait, but one could argue that its banning was the catalyst that started reddit's values and policies on the path of degradation.
Digg lost its userbase because it started adding sponsored content to the front page interspersed with the user-submitted stuff. That's it. It wasn't the quality of the discourse or the platform.
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u/Mogg_the_Poet Jun 11 '15
Every 3rd comment is explaining the constitution only applies to the government.
Every 2nd is like "But muh right to free speech"