Antisocial Media: Must-Read Deep Dive into Community Management at Reddit

@noemi @alberto @matteo_uguzzoni @hugi @nadia and others, I want to make this, if not an exercise,
some part of the Academy because it shows that even when a site is gigantic like Reddit, people still have to make the same kinds of decisions as it is in a smaller system.

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Very interesting.

Money quote:

“My internal check, when I’m arguing for a restrictive policy on the site, is Do I sound like an Arab government? If so, maybe I should scale it back.” (attributed to Jessica Ashooh, Reddit’s head of policy).

Weirdest quote:

“What is ReallyWackyTicTacs?” another employee asked, looking down the list.

“Trust me, you don’t want to know,” Ashooh said. “That was the most unpleasant shit I’ve ever seen, and I’ve spent a lot of time looking into Syrian war crimes.”

Data quote:

Last November, a group of computer scientists at three universities published a study called “You Can’t Stay Here: The Efficacy of Reddit’s 2015 Ban Examined Through Hate Speech.” They parsed a data set of a hundred million Reddit posts. Did the ban “diminish hateful behavior” over all, or did it merely “relocate such behavior to different parts of the site”? They concluded that the ban had worked: “Users participating in the banned subreddits either left the site or (for those who remained) dramatically reduced their hate speech usage.”