Right. By now you’ve heard about Reddit’s new content moderation policy, which (in short) is basically that it will continue to ban illegal stuff, and then work hard to make “unpleasant” stuff harder to find. There is an awful lot of devil in very few details, mainly around the rather vague “I know it when I see it” standards being applied. So far, I’ve seen two kinds of general reactions, neither of which really make that much sense to me. You have the free speech absolutists who (incorrectly) think that a right to free speech should mean a right to bother others with their free speech. They’re upset about any kind of moderation at all (though, apparently at least some are relieved that racist content won’t be hidden entirely). On the flip side, there’s lots and lots and lots of moralizing about how Reddit should just outright ban “bad” content.

I think both points of view are a little simplistic. It’s easy to say that you “know” bad content when you see it, but then you end up in crazy lawsuits like the one we just discussed up in Canada, where deciding what’s good and what’s bad seems to be very, very subjective.