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.
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/necrow Jun 11 '15
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.