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aristarchus writes:

Interesting review of a subreddit, wait, no, it's actually fairly good, from a philosophical point of view, over at The Ringer: How "Am I the Asshole?" Created a Medium Place on the Internet. Perhaps all we Soylentils could ask together?

With everything else going on in the world (please see: a pandemic, massive unemployment, the upcoming U.S. election, Karens, police brutality, protests, riots, climate change, and balancing working from home with sending your kids to school), the Reddit forum known as Am I the Asshole? has started to feel like a safe space. It's a place where accountability actually exists, even if only in the form of branding someone right or wrong in one absurd situation. It's also a place for growth: Sometimes posters return to talk about how their lives changed—almost always for the better—because of the advice they got from thousands of anonymous strangers.

[...] The format of the posts has largely remained the same since the beginning. Someone asks a question about an interpersonal conflict, and readers weigh in about whether the poster was in the right or in the wrong and why. But the moderation team has come up with ways to make the subreddit better (or sometimes just more fun).

One of those ways is by adding rules. A subreddit is allowed to have up to 15 rules; since the team added a "No COVID posts" edict earlier this year, AITA now has 14. The most important of those rules is "Be Civil"—without it, AITA might feel like the rest of the internet instead of being a respite from it. The moderators explain that being civil means to "attack ideas, not people" and to "treat others with respect while helping them grow through outside perspectives." It's not often that social media and personal growth go together in the same sentence.

[...] That said, it's not all moral improvement and helpful advice on AITA. Vicious comments have to be removed regularly, and users get suspended or banned every day for breaking rules. Posters often report that they get harassed in private messages, enduring everything from name-calling to death threats. (AITA "doesn't own Reddit," Beaulac says, so while it's something he and the moderators worry about, they also don't have control over anything that goes on outside the forum.) The moderators added an automated message everyone sees before posting, which includes a warning that AITA is a very public forum with millions of readers, that the story could get reported on by the media, and that—despite their efforts—some people don't follow the "Be Civil" rule. Posters get doxxed regularly; the subreddit is just too big for people to be guaranteed that what happens in AITA stays in AITA. The best the moderators feel they can do is warn posters what to expect when telling their stories.

The entire, thought-provoking article runs over 5,000 words and is well worth reading.

[Ed Note - A hat tip to c0lo who also submitted the linked article via IRC.]

Original Submission