tjandthetux
4 HN mentions · mentioned in 4 months, 2012–2026
3:51 · 28K views · Oct 11, 2011
Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian responds in a short interview to Anderson Cooper's on-air criticism of Reddit over child exploitation content.
Not recommended; HN uses it as a critical example of Ohanian deflecting blame for Reddit's content problems.
4 comments from Hacker News
I found this YT vid from back when CNN was covering these subreddits. Ohanian gives this interview where he says (paraphrasing) that there's nothing they can do to police this stuff (they ended up just banning those communities) and it was human nature. We're again talking about some especially abusive content, subreddits targeting minors. I wonder what he'd say about this today, because it comes off as extreme naivety, and I even held similar views, though I don't get how your mindset could be so extreme that your first instinct would not be to disallow content which is this distasteful. It really shows how deeply "free speech" was embedded into net culture of the time above all else. Not to misuse this argument, but I really really wonder how he feels given 1) who he's married to 2) how he presents himself today and 3) that he has a daughter now. I'd guess this is NOT his view of running Digg, this video
Here’s how he deflects blame from redditors onto the victims of their creepy Facebook stalking, Photobucket fuskering, and real-life harassment: “Your kids need to know that any time they take an image and put it in a digital format… they should assume that it is now public content… That’s the useful thing I think CNN could have reported on, instead of making up a bunch of jibber-jabber about reddit.” —Alexis Ohanian this video
Apropos reddit, here’s how Alexis Ohanian deflects the blame from redditors onto the victims of their creepy facebook-stalking and harassment: “Your kids need to know that any time they take an image and put it in a digital format… they should assume that it is now public content… That’s the useful thing I think CNN could have reported on, instead of making up a bunch of jibber-jabber about reddit.” this video
It is good to know that the guy that defended r/jailbait is still a staunch supporter of women’s causes this video