Reply to Jeff, would you consider doing an AMA?

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[quote=jsteele][quote=Anonymous]Has your view on what you might consider a misogynist, racist, mean, defamatory, or just plain nasty post that should be deleted shifted over the years?
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Yes, dramatically. When we first started I pretty much thought anyone should be able to post just about anything. I was of the opinion that words were just words and if you didn’t like them, you could ignore them. I was very much in “the cure for speech you don’t like is speech you like” camp. But then I started to understand the impact of abuse minorities and women constantly face, especially online.

It also took me a while to learn something that I don’t think is really understood about a site like this. Those that tend to use racist and misogynistic language and so on comprise a fairly large group of users — far larger than I think we like to acknowledge. Moreover, they can be among the most active users. There is a certain fear of blocking them or removing their posts because doing so can cost you a big chunk of your users. But, what I’ve found is that the negative impact of such posters far outweighs any benefit they might bring with their traffic. Moreover, their activity chases away many other users who don’t want to deal with them. So, wholesale blocking actually grows traffic to the site rather than decreasing it. It is almost counter-intuitive.

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