Following up on its new harassment policy, Reddit banned a tiny sliver of its most noxious forums this week, resulting in bad people vomiting all over their website.

There isn't really a debate going on over this—it's more like a huge tantrum being thrown against Reddit management, most especially the new CEO Ellen Pao. Obviously, a dozen new boards offering up the same noxious views as the deleted boards have popped up in their place.

The company's move was obviously a trial balloon. It's resulted in a lot of questioning of other hives of scum and villainy throughout Reddit, and why these particular pustules are being drained but not others.

As a guy who has survived cystic acne, let me tell you, sometimes the doctor sends you home to heal between treatments. But that doesn't mean he doesn't want to lance all the boils. He's pacing himself. Yes, Coontown, you're probably slated for destruction.

The few boards banned were apparently selected through a tortuous process where execs tried to find boards actually being used to harass specific people in person, rather than to express generally noxious views. "We're not censoring views," they say. But Redditors are afraid they'll censor views.

They should censor views.

Bring Down the Ban Hammer

Hopefully, this is one of the last gasps of the "Internet is not society" crew. The Internet is society. You don't get to be a different person in some imaginary world by making up a pseudonym on Reddit. You don't get to be a bad person without judgment or payback. Yes, I'm judging. This is my column on my site. I get to judge. But I also think I have the vast majority of decent, kind people behind me.

If you want to defend public discussion of "fat people hating," I'd love to see you defend it in person. Maybe at work, in front of your boss, or by shouting out your views in a supermarket parking lot. Let's see where that gets you.

The vast majority of decent, kind people—I want to think this, at least—believe that "fat people hating" and tossing around racial and sexual slurs is gross and demeaning, and there should be less of it in our world, not more.

There is a need for a First Amendment to defend awful people politically, because political winds change and the state has unique coercive power, but there's no compulsion for private individuals or companies to give those people a forum, or for that matter not to shun them. The founders of this country didn't assume that it would become a place with no social control; in fact, social control is the libertarian alternative to political control.

Reddit has long been home to sniggering bunches of bad people being self-satisfied in their badness. You don't even have to start delving into the Gamergate or feminism debates here. I hope we can all agree that we do not want the people who have expressed the opinions in "Coontown" to have positions of influence in our society, or even in our social circles.

Just this week, for example, I was alerted to an extremely creepy subreddit which involves guys ogling women on the street and making sniggering comments ostensibly about their clothes. Should it be criminal to be gross like those guys? Probably not. Should we give those people a forum? Hell no. Bring that ban hammer down. This is the Internet. If they want a forum, they can start their own. Elsewhere.

You Can't Clean House If You Can't Agree On What's Dirty

So let's say Reddit starts cleaning house.

Now we get to two critical questions: Can an online community survive, and thrive, without bad people? And can the moderators stop at just banning bad people?

I'm hoping the answer to the first one is yes; I fear that the answer to the second one is no.

American society is at war against itself. We're shattered and fragmented. We have no trust in our neighbors. We can't let our children walk to school because we're so constantly afraid of people around us. We arm ourselves in public against imaginary threats. We run debtors' prisons. There is little compassion and understanding between our political camps.

The hysteria happening on Reddit is because we cannot agree on what "bad people" means, even to the most basic extent. We cannot even agree that groups which describe themselves as hate groups are bad people. If we can't agree on that, then anything may be banned at any time, and we all live in fear rather than safety.

In a society where where we hate and fear the people around us, there may only be two extreme alternatives: the rule of the loudest and most offensive (because the worst are always the most full of passionate intensity), and a dead quiet borne from terror.

The Internet is society. Reddit may fail because our society is failing. That's a bigger problem than Reddit.

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