It’s not even June 12 for me, yet I suspect many subreddits went dark based on UTC.
I moved to Reddit during the Digg migration. Thus, I got the default subscriptions from back in the day. Over the years, I’ve unsubscribed to things I felt were crap, and I’ve added a number of subreddits.
Already, many have gone dark. My old.Reddit.com homepage already looks much different than normal, and I know that a few subreddits that do show have announced they’ll go dark. I assume they are US based and timing that locally.
I’ve spent more time in the Lemmy fediverse than on Reddit since joining, but I’ve spent time on both.
I’ll admit to cynical skepticism of the impact of the darkening. I still don’t think it will make a difference in Reddit policy, but I now believe it will have a larger impact on Reddit traffic than I imagined.
I still expect it to have no change in Reddit attitude or really in Reddit users.
So far I haven’t felt any overt political views other than be respectful of other people.
I used to be pretty extreme on the free speech side (a la Ellen Pao saga), but I think the biggest lesson I learned is that unfettered trolls just drive out solid content and create very toxic communities.
Free speech absolutists have nothing to do with free speech.
These just want to say what they want without having to bear the consequences.
The right to say what you want is a good thing. But in the end it doesn’t mean that the other side should be accepting of the speech you deem free.
If one is spouting vitrol/hate/intolerance towards a group of people under the banner “free speech” then don’t look up weird when the affected are not accepting of that speech you deem free.
For me the whole idea free speech is to express yourself how you want to (within what is reasonable, use your common sense) without the police and/or government knocking at your door.
At that point my boundary is at spewing or pushing for intolerance. I refuse to be be tolerant towards intolerance.
This is exactly it. They don’t want freedom of speech, they want freedom from the consequences of their speech. They don’t like that the people affected by their speech have a voice too, and that the hateful rhetoric they spew into the world is finally being pushed back on. To the privileged, equality feels like oppression.
It just means the government can’t go after you for it. No more or less.
Consequently, that also means any physical harm the public does to you is a crime and should be prosecuted.
Exactly, which is why it’s so funny seeing people rant about their right to freedom of speech being infringed upon by private companies that don’t want advertisers to abandon them because of hate speech on their platform. They assume it’s because of some agenda being pushed, when the only concern they have is the effect on their bottom line.
The most aggressive free speech advocates I know are also some of the most horrible human beings I’ve ever met. They believe horrible shit. They want free speech because they know what they say is horrible, and want to be able to continue to say it with no real consequences other than being socially ostracized.