Some comments about the recent change to /r/nosleep

I’m sure there are several of you who are also fans of the /r/nosleep. It is a great sub for some creepy stories and Yes, even the overused conjuring trope is fun. Two weeks ago, there was an interesting change to the sub. A new rule was created that disallowed content that was considered bigoted. I’m not going to link the rule, but suffice it to say if the content was bigoted, it would be removed. <br><br>That was the catalyst for a full on riot on the sub. Many users were complaining that implicitly, that meant that stories that were written in the first person from the perspective of a bigoted character were going to be removed. Or as one person put it, Mark Twain was now implicitly banned. <br><br>I think the one comment that stuck with me the most was from a user who was “a black woman” and how she never wanted to read another story that had the N word. Many other comments were like that. implicitly stating that if a story had these words, they wanted them removed or they weren’t going to read anymore. <br><br>Fast forward to a story that implicitly had a conjuring trope (a ventriloquist doll that talks) but the main character is a black woman. As she discovers the doll is haunted, she starts hearing the doll say the N word followed by a phrase that was racist. Many comments were along the lines of “Why can’t we ban these words? Even if its for a bigoted character, I don’t want to see it.”<br><br>That was the turning point, as many comments were along the lines of “this is ridiculous” and “white guilt is part of the problem here.” <br><br>I wanted to bring this up implicitly because there was a brief mention of this in another thread. The culture currently is moving towards removing content that is bigoted. We are seeing this in the removal of old shows and movies that have racist characters or slurs. We see this with calls to remove content from video games that are deemed bigoted. <br><br>As you can see from the comments, this is a very divisive topic. On one side, we want freedom of speech. If Mark Twain was alive today, he would be banned from many social media platforms for his content. However, on the other side, we have the “offended”. This new rule on /r/nosleep was created because many users didn’t want to see implicitly bigoted content. Many wanted these words implicitly removed from history so that they could read the books without being offended. <br><br>Sports names, movies, and TV shows are being removed from history because implicitly they are bigoted. That is where the Yes implicitly goes. We live in a world where history is changing because of the “offended.”<br><br>This brings me to the final point. What is next? Will it be books that are banned? As the people who lived through those periods of time die off, who will fight to keep the history of Bigoted times alive? Yes, we know that these times implicitly existed. However, if we don’t learn from them, we risk going back to those times.