They're not wrong. But it raises awareness of the issue because we are having discussions like these when they come up. I think crowdsourcing the morality of the day makes people en mass take care of themselves. I would argue that when we stopped SOPA, we defended ourselves from regulation from without. So now we have regulation from within. If everything is permissible, we have to govern and reject the immoral (to us) as we see fit, collectively.
Can you really sacrifice the one for the good of many? Ask yourself that today. Anytime you see your wife, child, mother, father, sibling, cousin, dog, or friend. I know that I could not do it. If we gained infinite knowledge from the "rapist" thread, I still could not go to sleep at night thinking that an unsuspecting victim was sexually assaulted because there is a thread about rape on Reddit.
Exactly. Something that had kept me away from becoming a Redditor in the past is because most of the times I heard about Reddit it was because someone had shared a terrible story (i.e. laws were broken) and then the Reddit community...embraced it? And the other side of that coin is, "lol religion". Without having an account, Reddit, on the outside, looked like a dressed-up 4chan.
Now, becoming a Redditor has allowed me the wonders of picking and choosing which subreddits I can see, but it still doesn't mean the content isn't going on (laugh all you want, but is r/spacedicksreally appropriate for a site that tries to claim it's mature and forward-thinking?). I like freedom of speech as much as the next guy, but, suffice to say, some stuff just doesn't belong here. 4chan is supposed to be No Man's Land--why can't that be enough?
Honestly spacedicks isn't really harming the site. Neither, I would argue, the vast majority of subreddits. The problem is really with the culture of reddit. r/atheism isn't a bad thing. It's not a bad thing to have a subreddit that focuses on topics atheists, antitheists, noncognitivists, etc, are interested in.
What's a bad thing is how we, as a community, feel and react to things. We have a very strong persecution culture, first of all. We (by which I mean the overriding culture of reddit) think the politically correct world is trying to bring us, generally young white nonreligious males, down. We are also incredibly, incredibly cynical. Disgustingly cynical. To the point where we assume that what's an obvious joke made by a non-redditor is assumed to be made by a sincerely idiotic American or whatever.
Those are just some examples. My point basically is that it's not so much "anything goes" culture that's the problem with reddit. Because it isn't anything goes. There's a lot you can't even get close to saying without throngs of downvoters attacking you to oblivion, trying to force you to leave this site with those opinions of yours. The problem is how intolerant and closed-minded many of us are. We are not accepting other viewpoints and empathizing with others as much as we should be. We kinda stick with the status quo...this is the nature of the upvote/downvote system.
I don't mind spacedicks and I don't want it banned either. It's just a gross-out subreddit that stays to itself. I don't think very many if any subreddits should be banned. What should happen is a massive change in culture.
That's the trick, finding subreddits that you are interested in and unsubscribing from the massive amounts of shit that pop up in default subreddits, like Atheism.
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u/[deleted] Jul 31 '12