If you can't stay here, where do you go? The sustainability of refuges for digital exiles

This semester, our research team has waded into some of the murkier waters of the internet in search of the conditions under which online hostility flourishes. We're still developing our tools and getting a sense of the work that is being done in this area.

Among the most pertinent, and recent, studies was a study by Eshwar Chandrasekharan and colleagues about the effects of banning toxic, hate-filled subreddits. I've always been curious as to whether banning (i.e., eliminating) entire communities (in this case, subreddits on Reddit) had the intended effect of curbing hate speech, or whether users merely expressed their hostility in another community. The study suggests that banning communities is an effective way to curb hate speech on Reddit: 'migrants' or 'exiles' of the banned communities either stopped posting on Reddit altogether, or posted in other subreddits but not in a hateful manner. The authors are quick to point out that these exiles might have just taken their hostility to another website. Given the fact that Reddit users cannot be tracked beyond Reddit, it's hard to determine whether or not that happened, but there is some evidence to suggest that websites like voat.co acted as a kind of refuge or safe harbor for Reddit's exiles: many of the same usernames that were used in Reddit's banned communities surfaced on voat.co. To quote the authors of the study, banning a community might just have made hate speech "someone else's problem."

I'm intrigued by this possibility. It fits with a hunch of mine; what you might call the homeostatic hatred hypothesis, or the law of conservation of hatred: there is a stable amount of hatred in the world. It cannot be created or destroyed, but merely transformed, relocated, or redirected.

Refuges like Voat.co are like cess pools or septic tanks: they isolate elements that are considered toxic by most members of the general community. In the context of waste disposal, cess pools and septic tanks are great, but I wonder if the same is true in social contexts. On the one hand, they might prevent contagion: fewer non-hateful people are exposed to hateful ideas and behavior and thus are less likely to become hateful. On the other hand, by creating highly concentrated hateful communities, you may reduce the possibility that hateful folks would be kept in check by anyone else. You're creating a self-reinforcing echo chamber, a community that supports its members' hateful ideologies, behavior, and speech.

Whether or not these online refuges are good or bad may be moot if they are not sustainable. In searching for more information about Voat, I was surprised to find that Voat isn't doing so well. Reports of its demise seem to be premature (it is up and running as of this moment), but it seems clear that it faces challenges. The foremost of these challenges is revenue.

I get the sense that people often underestimate how much time and money is involved in creating and hosting a large (or even moderately sized) online community, or community-of-communities. Someone needs to pay for the labor and server space. Advertisers and funders, in general, don't seem to be wild about being associated with these types of online communities. If there were a greater number of people who were willing to inhabit these refuges, people who had a lot of money and could buy a lot of things, then it might be worth it to advertise there and to host these communities. If the users had a lot of disposable income, they could use a crowdfunded model. But it doesn't seem to be the case that there are enough users with enough money to keep a large community running for very long.

Such sites could end up as bare-bones communities with fewer bells and whistles that are easier and cheaper to maintain, but they seem to encounter other problems. I get the sense that people also underestimate the difficulty of creating a community that produces frequently updated, novel, interesting content. Content quickly becomes repetitive, or boring, or filled with spam, or subject to malicious attacks. This is a real problem when the value of the site is content that is generated by users: bored users leave, creating a smaller pool of potential content suppliers. The smaller the conversation gets, the less alluring it is. These refuges will continue to be bare-bones while other online communities, video games, TV shows, VR experiences, and other ways to spend your free time add more and more bells and whistles. Why bother spending time in a small, repetitive conversation when there are more alluring ways to spend your free time?

Of course, defining 'hostility' and 'hate speech' is tricky, and the obvious objections to studies like this is that 'hate speech' is being defined in the wrong way. You get criticism from both sides: either you're defining it too narrowly and not including robust, sustainable communities like commenters on far right wing or left wing blogs, or you're defining it too broadly, categorizing legitimate criticism of others as hateful and hostile. It's clear to me that you can't please everyone when you're doing research like this. In fact, it's pretty clear that you can please very, very few people. I suppose my interests have less to do with whether or not we classify one speech or the other as 'hateful' or 'hostile,' and more to do with user migratory patterns, in particular those expressing widely unpopular beliefs (or expressing beliefs in a widely unacceptable way). It seems that people have their minds made up when it comes to the question of whether techniques such as banning communities are restricting speech or making the internet/society a safer, more tolerant space. But both sides are assuming that the technique actually works.

While some would lament the existence of refuges and others are likely willing to sacrifice a great deal to see that they persist, it's worth asking 'what forces constrain them? Why aren't they bigger? How long can they persist?'

Reddit, Gawker, and The Freedom to Say Horrible Things

As a Redditor and someone who is interested in how online communities work, it’s been fascinating/sad to see what happened at Reddit over the past couple of weeks.

The initial decision by the company to fire a beloved employee touched off an angry user rebellion which eventually led to the harassment of CEO Ellen Pao by a smaller group of users and the CEO’s eventual resignation. The whole series of incidents revealed to me that Reddit consists of two factions that can be defined by how upset they were at Pao. These factions always existed, but recent events make the differences more visible.

It’s important to note that the size of these two factions are not as easy to measure as it initially seems. The highly vocal, negative anti-Pao sentiment (and, more generally, strong emotions about anything) is conspicuous while the size of the other, less vocal group must be inferred by the fact that the vast majority of content on the site has nothing to do with Pao or the recent controversy. The first group is much more highly invested in the site than the second group – it likely consists of a greater proportion of moderators, heavy users of the site, and people who bother to up/downvote Pao-related posts. But the second group is likely larger. The first group consists of “strange bedfellows”: those with legitimate gripes about the seemingly arbitrary and poorly communicated decisions of their leader and those who are simply predisposed to expressing hatred. 

The small group of people with ill will is influencing the fate of the site, but it isn't being done directly through the upvoting/downvoting of content or through posts or comments on the site. Instead, sites like Gawker and traditional news coverage focus on the small, vocal group with ill will and drive public perception of the entire site, which influences who participates or invests in the website. 

The misperception of Reddit promulgated by news stories is so beguiling in part because people judge online communities in much the same way that they judge offline communities. But Reddit isn’t a community in the ways that offline groupings of people like universities, neighborhoods or even countries are communities. It isn’t structured to be one shared experience or reflect a single, shared set of values. Proof of this: my experience of using Reddit changed very little during this upheaval (it was still mostly pictures of delicious hamburgers, science AMAs, and gifs of hilarious failed attempts at handshakes). By creating self-organizing sub-communities or "sub-reddits", the structure of Reddit (and perhaps the structure of other decentralized social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube) facilitate distinct, individualized experiences. However, thanks to stories like the one in Gawker, this reality may ultimately matter less than public perception. 

And so I couldn't help but relish the irony when Gawker, immediately after mocking Reddit for having a crisis over what to do with hurtful, hateful content, had a crisis of its own when editor Tommy Craggs resigned after the Founder and CEO pulled a hurtful, hateful piece of content without consulting him. 

The cynical take on what happened at Reddit and Gawker is that these websites are getting popular and trying to make the next step toward profitability, making themselves appealing to advertisers by sanding off their rough edges and eliminating some types of content that the websites used to tolerate. In doing so, they are compromising the values of free speech and/or independent journalism. Gawker CEO Nick Denton states in an email to one of his employees that "These are the stories we used to do. But times have changed." Does this refer to the commercialization of Gawker and similar websites, or does it refer to the maturation of some of its leaders, a maturation which helped them realize that there are values other than free speech and getting web traffic, values like a consideration of the harm that words can do to others even when they are protected by law, and that sometimes these values come into conflict. Perhaps the phrase "times have changed" refers to both changes. Perhaps two forces - the commercial and the compassionate - are actually pushing in the same direction for once, against hurtful content, leaving libertarians on the other side, opposing both commerce and compassion (I don't like those odds).

In both the Reddit case and the Gawker case, the way in which the decisions to alter content were made (in a kind of sloppy, ad hoc way) left the company open to criticism. Personally, I side with the upper management of Reddit in their cleansing their site of hateful speech. With Gawker, it's trickier. I suppose I feel that they set themselves up by posting news stories that had so little value to begin with and were so obviously hurtful of others. Denton found himself, as he notes, in an impossible position: he had to either run a story that was "pure poison" to the reputation of the Gawker brand or know that some of his talent would resign in protest after he pulled the article.

But I think the major takeaway from this may be that the conflict at Gawker, like the conflict at Reddit, was kind of inevitable. You have hurtful content, and when you're small and the mainstream media doesn't draw attention to this content, you can get away with this. But once you get big and the eyes are on you, you either become associated with hurtful content or you change the brand's identity by restricting content, firing those who won't comply, and alienating part of your core users. Though I don't have that much sympathy for Denton, I find his remark about balancing the "calculus of cruelty and benefit" to be an encouraging sign for a purveyor of prurience (one that sounds oddly similar to Institutional Review Boards' policy regarding balancing risk and benefit in scientific studies).

To be sure, you can still say horrible, hurtful things on the Internet. Which raises the question: Where do Tommy Craggs and the libertarians leaving Reddit go? Do they all go to someplace like Vice Media? What does Vice do when all this happens to them? Is hate like energy: incapable of being created or destroyed, only redirected?

Why we hate TV now more than ever

If, indeed, more people feel more hate towards television than ever before (example of said hatred, which is usually directed at reality-based programs), here is a possible explanation that relies on technological and economic factors rather than some general decline of morals, behavior, or taste:

1. Since the rise of reality-based programming (due, in part, to the writers' strike of the late 90's), there is a pipe-line for cheap programming and lots of channels and timeslots to fill.
2. More tastes, desires, and values can be catered to cheaply on TV than ever before. Those varied tastes, desires, and values always existed, but before the rise of cheap-2-produce TV, only certain "elite" tastes could be catered to.
3. There is a new kind of diversity in terms of the desires that are being catered to through TV programming. Because of how deeply synergistic TV is (w/ cross-channel promos, program lead-ins), you can't just get your little bit of tailored content. You have to be exposed to other content not intended for you, unlike the internet where you can go to your favorite sites and generally avoid the variety of sites that cater to other preferences and lifestyles and whatnot. Its not the diversity of values expressed on TV that drives people to hate it: its the fact that you're almost forced to be exposed to those other values.
   

It is, of course, also possible that TV encourages or legitimizes disparate value systems and, thus, ratchets up people's pre-existing knee-jerk distaste for behavior that they can't understand. Reality TV gives people an excuse to hate people who behave differently than they do. What could the other explanation of people's strong hatred of certain programs be? I doubt that its b/c these programs are poorly crafted. I think that when people see something they don't like on TV, they don't just think about the fuckhead that created it, but also think about the audience for the program. They believe in the premise that TV can promote, cultivate, or instill values in an audience, and they fear the erosion of their own values in the face of those of The Hills or Jerry Springer or whatever. But those are real people on those shows. Its not like you're just hating fictional characters if you hate those shows. You're hating (at least semi-)real people. Do people who hate reality based TV shows hate them b/c of the characters' behavior (which is quite different than behavior exhibited in previous fictional TV programs) or is there an added layer to that hatred based on the fact that those are real people that they're hating?

This whole theory of mine may be wrong in that its based on a few people I happen to know and a few blogs I read. Maybe only certain people hate TV more now or feel that hate more strongly (the people who were being catered to during the network era).

Its also possible that some of the people who watch the shows other people hate like the show but hate the people in the show. For instance, you could like The Hills and hate Spencer. In fact, many reality-based shows understand the ways viewers love to hate people by positioning the subjects in each show as simultaneously sympathetic and laughable subjects of derision. In effect, the viewers identify with an invisible narrator who is relaying other people's stupid behavior for their amusement. Is She Really Going Out With Him on MTV is a good example. The men are laughable, but are the women? To some, yes. And the men are, in some sense, successful, in that they're rich, good-looking, and they're getting laid, so a viewer could look up to the them, feel attracted to them, or identify with them. But you can also hate them while liking to watch the show.

When someone says, "I cannot believe people watch Flavor of Love, I hate that show," they may imagine that the show is on the air because other people like or identify with the characters and behavior on the show. That is, after all, why they as viewers watch TV. But maybe other people, particularly younger people, watch shows in order to hate others, and are able to make the distinction between show (which they love) and characters (which they hate). Or maybe its some kind of mixture of love and hate that they get from watching it.

After googling "Most Hated TV," I did get the sense that people hate reality-based TV, as a whole genre or individual shows. They also hate comedies that they don't find funny, and popular shows that they don't understand the appeal of, maybe b/c they're hard to avoid (American Idol).