Reddit already has competitors. It is just that they are cesspools as the only people who have a strong reason to leave reddit are those reddit has banned.
It's a weird issue honestly. I've been on reddit for almost a decade, and I don't like what it has become. I would love to switch to a better alternative, but the problem is any alternative that pops up seems to be filled with extremists as soon as it starts. This doesn't imply that anyone who wants to leave reddit is a neo-nazi, a lot of us are stuck with reddit because everything else is filled with shit.
The best way to stop an alternative becoming filled with extremists is to start it off as a community for a specific audience, then expand to a more general one later on.
Twitch and Discord did well there for instance. Started out as gaming focused, then became more mainstream.
By doing this, you bring in non extremists early on, and tilt the audience pecentages in such a way that most regulars aren't such extremists.
The problem is most 'alternative' platforms market themselves as 'Reddit/Facebook/Twitter/YouTube except with free speech and no rules' rather than 'an art/gaming/music/sports themed alternative to Reddit/Facebook/Twitter/YouTube with free speech'.
Former means you draw in the outcasts and extremists, latter means you draw in another audience that can then be made more mainstream by opening up support for more and more fields of interest.
This is a seriously good observation. To add to it: moderation is _the_ hard problem of discussion forums. A nine year old can write a discussion board in python, any five decent developers can write one that scales reasonably. Or, you know, copy an open source codebase. Way harder is getting any actual users, but even that’s nothing compared to community maintenance.
Saying you have no moderation is attractive to one crowd in particular (there are other people who theoretically favour it, but practically they’ll use a moderated forum anyway). So you get a quick numbers boost but you’ve now fundamentally limited your audience to people prepared to share head-space with that crowd.
Reddit, Facebook and Twitter got in early and got to spend a lot of time learning on the job. Unless you start small, you’re not going to get that luxury now.
(Please don’t take this as an endorsement of any particular moderation policy, in theory or practice. Most of them are kind of awful at times. But the problem is hard.)
I see what you're saying, but I have to say as someone who was there, this was not the problem with Reddit. Early Reddit (as in first year) was extremely tech/programming/"netizen" focused, and it was really a lot like HN has been for years.
But when you start to gain popularity, the way you treat "free speech" becomes an issue. Discord is not a great example in that niche communities are not scraped for web search (that I know of).
But if you're just copying reddit, why would someone want to go to "a reddit for art" if reddit already has a section for art? You have to offer something substantially better, otherwise it's easier to just stay where the traffic is.
The interface on Reddit is garbage, a huge chunk of the existing users are garbage, people brigade into subreddits, the admins have the final word over you; and, finally, Reddit has no features for specific communities (e.g. image tools for art).
I was just the right age to enjoy the 90s to full effect. So much happened (to me) musically and culturally in that decade, that it has to be the best.
It's such a large site now with so many different communities and types of users. My opinion is it has transitioned from a forum to a social media platform. I think it caters to people who like the content side of social media, but do not wish to see people they know in real life (which can evoke jealousy and other negative emotions).
the developers of Lemmy are very clear about their stance regarding nazis at least, and that's more than I can say for Reddit https://dev.lemmy.ml/post/34286
Their developer code of conduct also looks good in that regard
Seeing how the flagship instance is run by people who are socially conscious I don't see this being a problem. Pretty much same thing happened with Mastodon Social, and with millions of users the community is still great. It's far friendlier and more civilized than Twitter.
What do you mean by "it," in "what it has become?" Also, what value(s) you're looking for in "better alternative," because none of anything in your comment is specific besides "neo-nazi." I'm aware of the site's problems with them of course, but they don't encroach on my daily usage, so I'm curious what might be pushing you away if it's something other than a constant barrage of neonazis in every subreddit you subscribe.
I really liked the idea originally. Unfortunately it turned into a pretty hard left leaning echo chamber. This was partially driven by mods from extreme left subreddits being very active on the site.
Here’s another question: Would any of our lives be any worse — or would they be better? — if we simply chose to walk away and not be a part of any of these platforms, HN included? How much of our lives is made up of karma whoring, level grinding, and falling into the <https://xkcd.com/386/> trap?
I dislike this framing because I think the important thing here -- the need to resist false equivalences between different platfroms -- gets papered over, when it's a really practical and important question with real implications. I don't think 'all platforms are bad' represents forward motion in a conversation about what platforms are able to do differently to make them better than others.
> Would any of our lives be any worse — or would they be better? — if we simply chose to walk away and not be a part of any of these platforms
Monks walk away from pretty much everything, and have been doing so for a long time now. They continue living. Does the result of that qualify as either better or worse than what you have now?
I made 40 dollars last weekend by falling into the https://xkcd.com/386 "trap". Thursday before last weekend someone released a starlink coverage map that was wrong, specifically it made arbitrary circles on a globe and pretended they were coverage. In order to fix this mistake I made https://droid.cafe/starlink.
A reddit user was kind enough to spontaneously donate 40 dollar (in btc) to me despite the fact that I didn't solicit donations. It's also been a pretty productive endeavor for learning about front end development, listening to feedback and giving users what they're asking for, learning to use cloudflare/gcp, and now learning to optimize glsl shaders to enable a fancier renderer while still getting reasonable performance on cheap hardware.
I feel like I often learn a lot about one random topic or another when I research so I can accurately correct someone who is being wrong on the internet. The above is an interesting example because there was a concrete deliverable at the end of the process, but I don't feel the fact that I learned from the process is particularly unique.
I think you could credibly ask that question for nearly anything outside of human basic needs. But the answer is simple: people are entertained and enriched by different things.
I certainly spend some amount of time on HN replying to things I shouldn't bother with, but the majority of my time on HN is filled with learning new things and hearing interesting perspectives on those things. I consider it a net positive in my life, and over the years I've gotten better at avoiding the negative parts.
I think the problem is that because reddit banned a lot of extremist communities there is pent up demand within those groups for a new host platform. If you start a new reddit competitor, users with those extemist views are looking for a home and will be the first to find and adopt it.
A large well formed community can survive a portion of its users with negative comments and posts, but I doubt you can build a community on the back of those users. Instead that negative group poisons the the platform for a more mainstream crowd. People won't join a plateform if the first thing they are exposed to supports extremist views.
Agreed, but at least reddit is unique in that it seems to get accused of being accused of both kinds of extremism, Tumble/Twitter/HN seem to think it's a right wing shithole, while the 4chan/Imageboard ilk thinks it's a leftie propaganda machine.
That's not the case with the alternatives, most tend to go really hard on one side of the extremism scale (right: voat, left: raddle).
I can't imagine thinking reddit is right-wing in any way whatsoever. Just looking at the front page (/r/all) I counted five explicitly left-leaning posts (on subreddits like /r/whitepeopletwitter), three that alluded to left-leaning subjects in a positive way (such as a post on /r/atheism), and 0 posts that even came close to kind of sounding like it might have been right-leaning. And this doesn't even consider the comments which is where the real hivemind exists.
Yes it hosts /r/the_donald or whatever but reddit as a whole is very left-leaning.
Edit: Hey ya'll instead of downvoting me how about providing some evidence of widespread right-leaning thoughts that aren't isolated to individual subreddits and shamed throughout the rest of reddit? Spoiler: You can't
I've observed the same thing honestly, most default + biggest subs are pretty left leaning. Though reddit does tend to host some right wing subs for which you have you go out of your way to find. There's also some old hate subs they removed few years back, people tend to get the perception of reddit from that time.
This needs a larger comment, but the "intellectual right" has largely self-destructed, leaving the focus entirely on white supremacy, homophobia, anti-contraception, anti-abortion, global warming denial, and weird conspiracy theories in general.
It's pointless trying to be a "respectable" right wing intellectual because you have to spend all your time running around justifying the completely incoherent things that Trump is talking about.
Chicago school economics? You can have a discussion with that, and leave it civil. That doesn't work with the_donald.
This is just you choosing which part of right-wing ideas you like.
I could make the exact same argument with the left.
"Yeah, saving trees and whales sounds fine, but they should stop it with all the LGBTQ, BLM, socialist stuff"
You can't have a civil discussion with those people either. In fact it's getting increasingly difficult to have civil discussions with anyone (HN is an exception because everyone is on their best behaviour, but to a large extent this results in self-censorship; you can see that the least politically correct comments are made with throw-away accounts).
Can we try to figure out sociologically, why by default unmoderated social forums become far-right oriented?
Is it because:
- People on the far-right are magnitudes more vocal and active online than those on the left? That they spend a magnitude more time posting and voting on the internet?
- Or when people are anonymous, they reveal their "true selves" more which exhibits more far-right (selfish, tribal, conservative) values.
- Or we are underestimating how many people are on the far right, because they are constantly censored so in our minds we think they are the minority but maybe they're about half of the online population?
I'm just trying to figure out why it takes herculean effort to shift things enough to the left to be publicly palatable. And if so, then then it seems like any social forum is going to require heavy censorship/moderation to even be tolerable to the general public.
Most social sites lean left, and far-left dialog is generally tolerated in those places, while anything right of center is demonized in a gradient of intensity the further right you go.
Your own scenarios exhibit this, for example:
- You ask if the far-right are magnitudes more vocal, ignoring the comparison to the extremely vocal far-left which is heard regularly on mainstream social media
- You conflate "conservative" with "selfish", presumably ignoring the selfishness of the extremes at both sides.
Frankly, I think the left (and by extension, most social media sites) are WAY more comfortable with censorship, banning, hiding, etc., especially of ideas that don't align with the left. (Typically characterized as "evil".)
The far-right, on the other hand, I think is a lot more tolerant of at least the notion that "other" speech exists. They'll insult you, make fun, etc., but the compulsion to censor others is far less frequent.
So when you have a whole segment of the political spectrum treated as evil and silenced, they tend to gravitate to fora that enable speech, even if unpleasant speech. The far-right might be most noticable on those platforms, but if you look carefully, you'll see a whole gradient of right-ness.
> The far-right, on the other hand, I think is a lot more tolerant of at least the notion that "other" speech exists. They'll insult you, make fun, etc., but the compulsion to censor others is far less frequent.
The right thinks explicit "censorship", which happens via the community or site owner, is bad.
Implicit "censorship", however, which happens when the targets of racism/sexism/homophobia/transphobia[0] leave the site, is just fine.
[0] or their allies or people who don't want to be surrounded by assholes.
Do you know what happens when people don't want to deal with harassment due to a certain position they hold? It's called self-censorship, and the far right censors people all the same by harassing, berating, demeaning people etc until they leave or censor themselves. That's a common tactic of sites like Voat.
Weird, r/anarchocapitalism will ban anyone who is on the left, and r/conservative will ban conservatives who speak out against Trump. Even r/TheMotte will ban people for things like tone. I've yet to find these mythical spaces where conservatives tolerate speech they in particular don't like.
The chans are the exception, and not the rule. Most normal human beings don't use any of the chans, but there are tens of tens of millions of subscribers to the online conservative spaces on Reddit and Facebook, and they're all ban happy.
Another popular story today was about parler, a twitter clone which allows mostly all legal speech besides obscenity. It may be a conservative safe space, but its not ban happy.
People don't want to be exposed to content that dehumanizes them, argues for their extermination, or targets harassment against them. There are large swaths of the population who are targeted by the far right in this way. These targeted groups simply wont deliberately return to a site that consistently provides them that experience, there's simply no reason for them to.
These large segments of the population will demand moderation from platforms they use to protect them from targeted harassment. It's these sorts of platforms that have the potential to truly become massive.
Platforms that are strongly moderated from day one (e.g. don't allow targeted harassment of minorities) don't need a "herculean effort to shift things enough to the left to be publicly palatable." A good example is the Reddit alternative raddle.me or even hacker news.
> people don't want to be exposed to content that dehumanizes them, argues for their extermination
The left does this on Reddit/Twitter constantly towards right wing people and no one bats an eye. It's like maybe those in power are extremely biased towards the left.
I don't think that there's an equivalency between the advocacy for the genocide of black people, Jews, trans people, etc and opposing someone for their political beliefs.
Perhaps there'd be more legitimacy in a comparison to the vitriol on the left against billionaires and cops, but these are positions of power, not identity groups one is born into. All revolutionaries of all political persuasions will oppose those in positions of power currently.
> Yes there are a very small minority of people who do call for this
I agree with you. We are talking about how targeted groups will demand moderation to avoid persistent targeted harassment from a comparatively small number of people.
Conservatives are also often targets of hate. There are black, Jewish, gay, and trans conservatives who are also targeted not for the content of their politics, but due to attributes they were born with and cannot change. I can always set aside my politics, but one cannot set aside their race, gender identity or ethnic group.
Since the discussion is the sociological cause, the fact that the group doing the harassing is small, it will nearly always be banned by the larger majority that is targeted.
> Conservatives are also often targets of hate. There are black, Jewish, gay, and trans conservatives who are also targeted not for the content of their politics, but due to attributes they were born with and cannot change. I can always set aside my politics, but one cannot set aside their race, gender identity or ethnic group.
I agree. One thing to note though is it's one thing to remove bad law such as outlawing homosexuality as such and it's another to try to force everyone to promote you're life style. Harassment is bad. One problem is that there is no agreed to standard of harassment. So a lot of the left don't like that as a Catholic I will not promote or think that a homosexual lifestyle is something positive. This is not harassment nor is them disliking Catholics and saying mean things about our people and positions.
I think the best comparison for gay marriage is interracial marriage. If you are okay with interracial marriage legally, but personally oppose it, people will have a negative reaction to that sentiment. Likewise, people will have a negative reaction to your personal opposition to gay marriage in a similar way to the way they'd be disgusted by one's opposition to interracial marriage, no one is entitled to having their views accepted.
I think how people react to your positions is a very different discussion than the sociological and political questions we've discussed so far though.
Im glad someone is standing up to protect those poor billionaires and racist cops. Because maybe they get hurt when they read someone online saying they actively hurt the world by existing! And as we all know, being a billionaire with hurt feeling is just as worse as being murdered by racist cops, or dying because a billionaire didn't want to pay taxes so he lobbied to lower taxes, causing public services to disappear!
> This is a misdirection. Yes there are a very small minority of people who do call for this but it is what I'm talk about is simple opposition to others political beliefs. If I say that there are only two sexes and you cannot change your sex, I would be banned from many of the most popular subreddits. This is not advocating for the genocide of trans people. It's a scientific and political position.
A comparison can be made to other positions which may be a tad extreme here, but I think it's arguably appropriate. If someone advocated for climate change denialism on any public forum, they'd be laughed out of the metaphorical room. However, even if attempts are made to persuade said people with logical arguments, often they will continue to hold such beliefs to the same strength or even stronger than before.
Is it appropriate to silence people for holding specific views? No. But ultimately some compromise has to be made. A decent solution may be the use of a debate section, but I'm sure better ones exist.
> If someone advocated for climate change denialism on any public forum, they'd be laughed out of the metaphorical room
The problem is that no one online has any sense of nuance. Any questioning of the absolute worst prediction, or disagreement about public policy regarding it are looked down on as climate change denialism.
They seem to be specifically calling out the far right, not just conservatives. Far right is synonymous with for example, calls for an ethnostate that would exclude certain people.
Firstly, no, that position isn't 'scientific'. The scientific portion of the equation comes from the separation of gender and sex along with the psychological and sociological expectations of how someone conforms to a given gender role. I see this often that people take a disingenuous stance and then claim it's 'scientific' when its anything but.
Secondly, that argument has a lot of baggage associated with it. Transgender people get banned from the military because they 'cannot change their sex' or 'transgender people lose their jobs because they don't conform'. It's an argument around taking away the rights of a certain group of people and it shouldn't be surprising that people don't want to associate with that.
Look, I agree. I shouldn't be forced to do something for someone who makes me uncomfortable, even if it's something that they can't change, and which doesn't materially impact me in any way.
But at the same time, do you not see how this reinforces existing disparities in opportunity and social acceptance? If you have a better solution than mandating that businesses don't discriminate, I'm all ears. However, if you simply allow businesses to freely discriminate, then the world will only become more unfair over time.
I mean, now we've established why you would end up getting banned from many subreddits. You're essentially arguing to treat one group of citizens as second-class citizens because you don't like them. A lot of things aren't 'rights' until they're codified in law, but that doesn't mean people don't deserve to be treated equally with others.
I would never agree to take away rights from a Catholic, but it's disappointing to see a Catholic argue to take away rights from someone else using their faith as a bludgeon. Especially when I know many Catholics whom treat gay people the same as everyone else.
What exactly do you mean by "scientific position"? The term seems, to me, an absurdity.
> Doesn't make it okay.
Putting aside any actual wrongdoing, attacking those with privilege is infinitely better than attacking those without: the former have the resources to defend themselves; the latter do not.
> In the same way your stance on climate change is a scientific position regardless if your stance is correct or not.
Can you please just give the definition of "scientific position" that you are using?
Do you mean an assertion regarding reality? Because I think everyone agrees on the reality. The question of what the words "sex" and "gender" constitute is not a question of reality: it is a question of social and legal constructs.
> It's still an evil to unjustly attack someone even if to different degrees.
I love how you explicitly avoided the use of the word gender and don't actually address that you're uncomfortable that some people don't fit into the social boxes of male and female.
As for vitriol against billionaires and cops, taking a stand against people abusing power is as American as the Boston tea party. If you're advocating for people to shut up and take the abuse you sound pretty authoritarian to me. Is it that hard to look at the situation and say "give me liberty or give me death" applies to poor people and black people too?
> If you're advocating for people to shut up and take the abuse you sound pretty authoritarian to me.
No I never said that nor do I think it. There are definite problems with some cops and there are many instances of gross abuse. I have no problem with billionaires.
Approximately no-one on reddit or twitter is saying that straight people shouldn't be allowed marry. Plenty of people on both are saying that I shouldn't be, though. To take just one example.
"People should be marginalised, and made second class citizens, and marginalised people should be kept marginalised" is a pretty common theme on the far right. It is rare on the far left; not that it's non-existent, but there just aren't that many sincere Stalinists or similar left.
What dehumanising content are you seeing from the left? I mean, if it's just "the other side are bad people" stuff, well, everyone does that. The "these classes of people should be socially and politically suppressed" stuff is overwhelmingly from one side, though.
> People should be marginalised, and made second class citizens, and marginalised people should be kept marginalised" is a pretty common theme on the far right.
What? Not that there is no one with this view but it is an extreme minority. Same with people calling for the killing of all cops on the left, very small minority.
No it's not. For example, being against gay marriage is still a fairly mainstream social conservative position; opposition in total is around 35% across the US[1]. You don't hear much about it anymore because it's viewed as politically infeasible even within those circles, but if they could do it they absolutely would.
Just look at the recent supreme court ruling that made it illegal to fire people based on you being gay or transgendered. Tons of conservatives shot back on that one. I don't know how you can look at a viewpoint like, "yes, employers should be allowed to fire you for merely being gay" and think that that doesn't mean they want to keep marginalised people marginalised.
You should reflect on your privilege if you think it's only a small minority holding views that people that aren't straight white males are worth less.
An extreme minority explicitly hold the view publicly, but what's not an extreme minority are people who take the long road around saying it and people who have kneejerk reactions to any proposed changes to the status quo.
Mike Pence is one example and he's the VP. Calling it an 'extreme minority' when there are multiple examples of high-level politicians holding views like that seems disingenuous.
As far as I can tell, there are no politicians or indeed anyone with significant power calling for the killing of all cops.
Unless Nancy Pelosi or someone starts retweeting videos demanding the liquidation of the kulak class, you'll forgive me if I don't take your claims of 'extreme minority on both sides' all that seriously.
Normal people won't tolerate being on the same forum with huge assholes. Especially assholes who are bigoted, rather than just generally angry/jerk-ish. The far right happens to contain a lot of this kind of person.
The far left has people who are also very angry, but they're generally not as bigoted. The demographic they're most angry at is rich people, which is punching up instead of down at least.
And most of the rhetoric there simply isn't as vile. It's stuff like, "take rich people's assets so we can redistribute it equally". I may not agree with seizing wealthy people's stuff, but that's nowhere near as offensive as "kick out all the gay/non-white people".
One of the funniest parts of this is that a common critique by liberals in the US against the modern left is that the left is largely too CIS, white, and male.
Police sure, and you could argue for conservatives maybe. The others, no.
The far right thinks black people are flatly inferior, and tolerate or encourage violence and oppression against them because of this.
The far left's attitude toward white people is "it's bad that white people are dominant in society because of historical/structural racism", even in cases like affirmative action the clear goal is eventual equality, not that they want white people to end up structurally oppressed instead.
If you can't see the difference in how toxic each of these attitudes are, I'm afraid I can't help you.
But I'd love to see you explain how the left is apparently bigoted against straight people.
As a straight white dude from the rural United States who regularly hangs out in extremely far-left circles in very far-left places... you're out of your mind.
I've never once heard a 'leftist' advocate for the murder of men, whites, straight people, conservatives, or rural dwellers (although, to be fair, occasionally the police). However, growing up and still when I visit home, I regularly hear how black people, queer people, and just liberals in general, aren't worthy of being left alive. These sides are not equivalent, no matter how desperately you want them to be.
Also, my induction into these liberal circles went so far as "you want people to be treated equally? cool.". I didn't have to hand in my cis-white-man card and tattoo an anarchy symbol. In fact, we regularly talk about all sorts of controversial subjects. My friends often enjoy hearing what it was like to grow up in the world of pocket knives and bar fights. I take my communist friends out to shoot guns. Ask me how many of my rural friends have ever asked to experience life among the queers?
You're comparing a rose bush with thorns to a semi-automatic rifle in terms of aggression towards the other party.
And. To the point of 1984-style revisionist history, old man. Statues are symbols we use to celebrate heros and victors. It's plain-as-day simple to look at a statue of a treasonous black-hating slave owner and say "maybe a statue of these pricks isn't the best way to memorialize history". It's not re-writing history to say "the union won and let's not celebrate slave owners". It's re-writing history to say "these slave owners are heros, lets memorialize them in statues".
There's a lot of problems with your comment but I'll stick with the most egregious/shocking point.
Are you really suggesting that confederate leaders are republican heros? And if-so... are you acknowledging that republicans admire and would like to celebrate treasonous bigots that went to war against the United States so that they could own slaves?
Sounds to me like you're admitting that the platform of the republican party is literally that of racists. So, in that way, I understand why these groups would respond to being oppressed by racists with violence.
Depends on how relevant you consider a social "scientist" having build a career on creating a bogeyman on mixing up nationalism, extreme right and white supremacy. A former columnist at "Huffington Post", she is now writing a book on "Undoing White Womanhood". Calls herself a "change agent" on her own webiste.
Sounds rather like "anti-White" activist to me, like an intellectual Robin DiAngelo.
It's because mainstream moderated sites don't censor far-left views, so those people have no incentives to move to unmoderated sites. For example, /r/MoreTankieChapo isn't even quarantined.
Option 4: poorly moderated forums tend to fill with people banned by most other forums, such as Nazis. And various other undesirables, too; I gather voat had a big influx when Reddit banned its paedophile subreddits, and another one when FPH et all were killed.
So if 1% of the population are far-right extremists, but most normal platforms ban or restrict them, any new platform with poor regulation will tend to fill with them.
I do think that the very extreme (and thus bannable) far right _are_ probably more common than ditto on the far left; you just don't get that many Stalinists, anywhere. But the normal left (and normal right) aren't generally nasty enough to get banned everywhere, so most of the internet's displaced population of commenters is far right.
I think there is an aspect of option 1, too, though. In Ireland a while back we had a referendum on allowing same-sex marriage, which passed by 62%, and another one, on legalising abortion (until then only legal in very limited circumstances), a few years later, which passed by 66%. Now, if you'd gone based on web polls and opinions being expressed in the comments on mainstream sites, you'd have assumed that both would fail by a landslide; it was really kind of incredible. Comments on news sites etc were grossly unrepresentative of the actual public mood; the right really does seem to be a lot noisier.
Ok, I've not lived in Ireland for 15 years but I find it hard to believe that it has a 'right' that falls into the same definition as that of the US. You can't say that being anti-abortion means you're right-wing and therefore must also hate black people. It is actually possible for people to have a foot in either camp, to varying degrees, on multiple issues.
Twitter recently deleted 170k bot accounts that pushed a Chinese controlled narrative related to covid. It's not hard to imagine that other actors are doing the same on reddit in order to stir shit up, and that impressionable real users are falling for it.
My guess would be that attention-seeking and disruptive behaviours are part of the explanation.
In a forum with ten reasonable conversation threads and one highly controversial one, attention is likely to move towards the controversial topic.
The phrase "don't feed the trolls" is well-intentioned but it's difficult to scale the message when so many people are online and can witness and partake in minor and major conversations alike.
It also doesn't help that engagement (regardless of reason for engagement and any human stress created as a result; they're harder for software and metrics to capture) tends to be seen as something to optimize for, both within companies themselves and also by their investors.
Controversial conversations are sometimes necessary. People who repeatedly raise controversial topics to gain notoriety or attention are generally not - although their behaviour may be a sign that they need help in other ways.
> The phrase "don't feed the trolls" is well-intentioned but it's difficult to scale the message when so many people are online
I think this is similar to the economics of spam: the cost of spamming is so low that even if a small fraction of a percent respond and convert, it's still profitable to spam.
People who troll are just looking to rile people up. All they need is one or two people to respond (out of hundreds or thousands or more). Even someone who knows better will occasionally be triggered enough to respond to a troll.
> The phrase "don't feed the trolls" is well-intentioned but it's difficult to scale the message when so many people are online and can witness and partake in minor and major conversations alike.
I wonder if it's possible to have a community where the moderation is more focused on educating people to identify trolling and discourage posters from engaging with emotionally charged/inciting posters. Instead of warning the troller, encourage people to just downvote and move on instead of engaging.
I consider a troll as someone who is seeking to create a strong negative (anger, hate, frustration, etc) emotion in a reader intentionally or unintentionally. I dont know if this is too subjective and impossible to enforce.
Hacker news has excellent moderation, and high standards for comments. Relax them a bit to allow for memes and harmless troll threads like Rick rolls while strictly moderating against those participating in bad faith. Mind you, moderation needn't be by paid or even volunteer moderators. There are various solutions axiall available and the most successful are always multifaceted in their approaches.
Maybe I'm naive, but it seems pretty obvious that it's because technology is mostly full of leftists, so they tolerate their own extremists and ban their opponents. Deplatforming has been a tactic of the left for a while now.
> Maybe I'm naive, but it seems pretty obvious that it's because technology is mostly full of leftists, so they tolerate their own extremists and ban their opponents. Deplatforming has been a tactic of the left for a while now.
I wouldn't say that technology is full of actual "leftists", more a group ranging from overly-myopic liberals who struggle to do what would actually benefit minority communities in a more positive sense to the libertarian types who only end up restricting what people say because it ends up affecting their advertising revenue. Simply by virtue of being in a position of financial power, it's very difficult to hold truly leftist views.
>Deplatforming has been a tactic of the left for a while now.
Deplatforming has been the go to method of the right for at least a century (see mccarthyism) and longer if you include lynching/death as essentially equivalent (ie: you can't speak if you're dead). The left has simply finally got enough critical mass to do it themselves.
>Can we try to figure out sociologically, why by default unmoderated social forums become far-right oriented?
This did not used to be the case. It's a relatively extremely recent phenomenon, that I would say only really coalesced around 2014-2015.
It used to be that the wild west of the internet was, to the extent that it reinforced anything at all, a boon to liberal and left wing politics and organizing. And a lot of the cultural aspects weren't co-opted the way they currently are. Gamer culture was surely unconsciously sexist, misogynist, but not to the extent that it is now where it's a full-on reactionary identity. Internet atheists didn't used to be misogynist right-wing trolls, but they are now.
Trolling was just trolling, it wasn't organized into mobs or propaganda in the sophisticated way it is now. Anonymity and revealing one's 'true self' didn't channel it into a cultural current of toxicity that is now established and ready to welcome those impulse and stoke them and use them to nudge a person into a right wing trolling infrastructure.
I think it's been weaponized by state actors and by bad actors who figured out how to use the tools, to turn everything into a nuclear wasteland. I don't believe it inherently disposes anyone toward any particular set of politics necessarily, and it didn't used to be the case that it got channeled in this way.
The current state of slashdot is good place to investigate. These days the comments are filled with people switching to anonymous mode to inject some sort of political statement even if it has no relevance to the story. Sometimes it's just people posting giant ascii swastikas.
I'd assume another reason is that given that a small number of far-right threads/communities exist, you're going to have people leaving simply because people who are against, or at least frustrated with, your existence isn't a great place to be around.
The problem is not so subjectively limited as to be a right-wing problem. Communities, unless extremely well policed, tend to become gravities of like mindedness when there is a visible vote system. This seems to occur because vote counts, whether positive or negative, are viewed as a form of credibility and because people are generally hostile to disruption and originality.
When you step back from a subjective slant the phenomenon of group think has been well studied.
When reddit first launched, the media and mainstream leaned a bit more right. Reddit had people with pretty heavily left leaning views and also borderline anarchist libertarians flocking to it. Gay marriage and legal weed were actually not incredibly mainstream ideas back then and people who supported these things were often pushed out of many places, but virtually everyone posting on reddit supported it and topics like it popped up daily, mixed among programming news. There was also batshit sovereign citizen stuff and videos of people walking out of court because the court flags had gold fringes and that meant it wasn’t legit, and quite a few people on reddit praised stuff like this.
Now the virtually everybody out there already supports gay marriage and legal weed, and those are a baseline for everything left of center and basically mainstream thought now. Everybody right of that gets pushed out of communities, so whenever some new community pops up, you get a whole spectrum of right of center as well as sovereign citizen types again looking to settle down and establish a community like left of center people did with places like reddit all those years ago. One bad thing for these new communities is that the internet is far more accessible now, and the more extreme members see their chance to finally talk, and those with extreme opinions like talking a lot.
I think it is because far-right is far less palatable than far-left.
Consider two possible statements:
1. Hitler wasn't that bad.
2. Stalin wasn't that bad.
I think, for most people, the first provokes a much more extreme reaction. Both were objectively terrible human beings, but defending Hitler is seen as far more extreme than defending Stalin.
This has two effects:
Firstly, far-right people are continually kicked out of communities. Far-left people are not. So any new unmoderated community is going to attract these "refugees"
Secondly, nobody notices or cares when a community goes far-left. But its far more noticeable when a community goes far-right.
I think both of those examples would provoke a pretty extreme response in most people, but sincere Stalinists just aren't very common, at all. You see a _bit_ of "Stalinism was actually good" stuff on the internet (weirdly, occasionally from the right; some more confused Russian nationalists have a bit of a Stalin fetish), but you'll see a lot more holocaust denial.
Maybe the figure-head isn't en vogue anymore. The methods are always popular.
Leftists(Socialists, Communists, Anarchists) often publically revel in the idea of when "the revolution comes" to put anyone dissenting up against the wall or sending them to a Gulag camp of some sort. I don't find that exactly reassuring. Seeing how "protesters" in the US and Europe act like chinese Red Guards during the cultural revolution, this day doesn't seem far off.
I'm reading the "Three-Body Problem" right now and the first chapter eerily reminded me of the current situation where not being enough of an "ally" to the racial BLM movement is a thought-crime punishable by having your life destroyed.
It's the paradox of tolerance. If you tolerate the intolerant (e.g. right-wing assholes) they will push out other groups through their intolerant behavior. The only solution is to rabidly ban hate speech and similar behavior.
It's because everyone puts up this herculean effort.
There's a large population of people out there with views that annoy left-wing people, who don't really have a place on most internet platforms, because all internet platforms are left wing, because the dominant culture of silicon valley is much more left wing than the mean of, say, US citizens. (And everyone who wants to keep their job pretends to be more left wing than they are, too.)
Anyway, this means there's this mob of people without a place to talk, and they want such a place. So if a place ever opens up that doesn't strictly persecute right-wingers- well, it's like being a town during the inquisition that doesn't persecute witches. Obviously, all the witches are going to flock to you!
It's because everyone puts up this herculean effort.
There's a large population of people out there with views that annoy left-wing people, who don't really have a place on most internet platforms, because all internet platforms are left wing, because the dominant culture of silicon valley is much more left wing than the mean of your average person. (And everyone who wants to keep their jobs pretends to be more left wing than they are, too.)
Anyway, this means there's this mob of people without a place to talk, and they want such a place. So if a place ever opens up that doesn't strictly persecute right-wingers- well, it's like being a town during the inquisition that doesn't persecute witches. Obviously, all the witches are going to flock to you!
(Witch metaphor courtesy of Slatestarcodex, may it rest in peace.)
It’s true that “thing but not” sites tend to have issues with getting the unwanted population of the original “thing” website. And of course, some of that “unwanted” population is actually not necessarily bad, but a lot of it certainly is. I think the main way you can combat this is by disincentivizing users to bring their unwanted behaviors to the new site while incentivizing existing users to check it out. Obviously network effects dominate, but that hasn’t stopped there from being small niches where Mastodon instances and Matrix chats are good and healthy. OTOH, the point of sites like Voat and Gab were to support users who were not welcome on Reddit and Twitter, and therefore it quickly became a problem. But I don’t like the notion that you can’t directly compete with established sites - I feel like back in the day this is Exactly what happened with news aggregators. Digg and Reddit were once fairly similar sites; although Digg always had a nicer interface, they served an extremely similar purpose at the end of the day, and yet it was possible for them to compete. I think it’s harder now, but probably still doable if you can be novel enough, or if the big site becomes too annoying (Reddit seems to really be trying at this, to be honest; just try using their website on a mobile browser!)
Most of the arguments about social media content policies center around American politics, but Reddit has been banning other potential lightning rods for controversy. They banned DarkNetMarkets, Deepfakes, and SanctionedSuicide in 2018. They banned WatchPeopleDie last year [1].
It's not hard to see why Reddit would ban any of these, but at some point there may be a critical mass of too-controversial-for-Reddit content that isn't just interesting to the Voat crowd. Is that point now? I'll have to wait and see how Lemmy turns out.
The other theoretical advantage of a federated service is that smaller instances are less expensive to run than one big centralized service. There are a lot of people who could afford to run a service on a $10/month VPS as a hobby but who couldn't afford to run anything at actual Reddit scale without corresponding revenue. That's important considering that Reddit leavers are more likely to be posting not-safe-for-brand content even if it's not specifically hateful content.
[1] Not a sub I ever visited, but by most accounts surprisingly non-toxic as a community, considering the subject matter.
It's federated, each instance would be a subreddit. Don't like a instances because it is run by a deplorable? Don't subscribe to it. Is a deplorable posting deplorable things on the instances you are subscribed to and trying to piss on your pool? Downvote/mute/ban them.
Also you have a big "create community" button at the top. Surely that doesn't spin a completely new instance of the application every time? And if not, how can we tell which instance a community belongs to?
Honestly I don't really understand the need for something like that to be federated. In the olden days you had a bunch of forums/BBS/IRC network/Whatever that served various niches but didn't communicate with each other.
For instance, what would we gain if we decided to turn HN into a Lemmy federated service?
If anything it seems like in the long run it would be a disservice, as very large communities with lower standards would end up spilling and wrecking niches where the community is more tightly knit and post higher quality content.
This fediverse thing makes some sense for IM and similar applications where you want to be able to connect easily with anybody. For forums however, it feels rather pointless to me.
Well, currently Lemmy does not even have a working federated implementation. Maybe it's too early to guess?
> For instance, what would we gain if we decided to turn HN into a Lemmy federated service?
It doesn't have to be a "Lemmy" Service. But let's pretend that dang decides to implement ActivityPub for HN. What would we get? Some guesses:
- Less people trying to game/break HN. There is great value in gaming HN now because of its centralization. If HN is just one in a place with a bigger number of actors, I would guess the incentive to game it would be reduced.
- Easier to have cross-pollination of ideas. There is an overlap between some subreddits, HN, lobste.rs, etc. Now, we can accept these services are big enough that there is always some cross-posting. What about the other topics that are HN-worthy (gratifies one's intellectual curiosity) but are under-represented elsewhere?
- More room for dissenting/non-status quo views. With ActivityPub, your client could easily allow you to subscribe to an account. So let's say that I want to see whatever more controversial people post - e.g, idlewords. With HN, I need to either stalk him or hope that the echo chamber has decided on his favor on a given day.
Granted, I think is highly unlikely that dang or YC would have any interest in doing something like that. They would be giving away control of the conversation and the risks are unknown for very little benefit. But is it really our job to be concerned about this? I'd rather have more people and more actors sharing this control than having to trust entities that become too big to fail.
If i'm a redditor that looks at r/dankmemes and r/gifs all day, or a creator for those subreddits, I don't see why I would leave reddit for a competitor. Without these people coming from reddit, it'll have the same problem as voat where nobody is looking for - or even willing to try - alternatives unless they were rejected.
You know it's not an either/or proposition, right? You can still use reddit even if you also have an account at the competitor.
But anyway: if you are someone that only cares about looking at whatever BigCorp allows you to look, then sure, keep using reddit.
If you'd like to have some form of control over the content you value, create and would like to promote, then your best bet is to fight for alternatives to the current big centralized systems.
The difference would be for the deplorable, who now has no "mah free speech" and "reddit is censoring me!!11!!" excuses to fall on and justify its deplorability.
More seriously though, the important thing about ActivityPub is that it removes central points of control. No matter how much you agree/disagree with the governance of Reddit/Facebook/Twitter et caterva, they are just too big for the good of society. Federated systems is one chance to take this power from them and bring to people - if not directly (say, because you don't want the pain of hosting/managing all that crap) at least you can delegate this power to someone closer to you - or at very least to a bigger number of smaller providers who will them have no monopoly and will have to keep your interests first.
how is this different from reddit governance where subreddits are already responsible for self-moderation? I don't think a lot of users care whether the instances are technically separated, in the case of Mastodon this is probably what stops people from using it because it's not intuitive to understand.
Voat was created intentionally and specifically for the (mostly far-right) trolls too unsavory for Reddit. So, if Lemmy is not that, it'll have a head start.
No it wasn't. Voat was originally "Whoaverse", a reddit clone that the developer created as a school project. He literally copy-pasted the HTML/CSS from Reddit and then started gradually rebuilding some of the backend in C#. You can see the original version in the internet archive: http://web.archive.org/web/20140427060403/http://whoaverse.c...
He tried to get people to use it for a while, but since it was just a less-functional and empty Reddit, nobody was very interested. Eventually some of the users/subreddits banned from Reddit started using it since they had been kicked off real Reddit, and the developer ended up welcoming them while justifying it as "free speech". I think he mostly just seemed happy that some people actually wanted to use his site.
It's all been downhill from there, and the original creator even abandoned the site a few years ago and handed it over to someone else.
As the person that hid those upvote/downvote counts, I definitely remember that uproar well.
A relatively small group "migrated" for a few days, but didn't stay. Here's Whoaverse one month after the up/down counts were removed from Reddit (notice that they added visible vote counts, which they didn't have before): http://web.archive.org/web/20140718134533/http://whoaverse.c...
Other than the stickied site announcement, almost all of the posts only have a handful of votes and only a few have any comments.
The banned users were the first group that actually stuck around on Whoaverse/Voat, because they didn't have the option of just going back to Reddit.
This seems to be the outcome of all of these Reddit clones, even the ones made with the best of intentions.
Take for instance Ruqqus, another site created as a free speech reddit alternative. It consistently has horrifying content on the front page regularly; viciously racist content, anti-Semitic memes, unironic pro-Nazism/pro-genocide discussion posts, and generally terrible content. This is likely because it is exactly this content that is being "censored" from Reddit, not these harmless free speech advocates who are silenced by a big company.
Can anyone actually tell me what valuable discussion is being censored on Twitter, Reddit, etc? Banning this type of content is mandatory if you want a platform that is safe and available for trans people, Jews, gay people, women, etc.
People shouldn't have to tolerate people @ing them with slurs, be exposed to "reasoned" arguments for their extermination, or memes dehumanizing them for the sake of "free speech."
Why do you assume that all alternatives have to be "free speech = allowing abuse" alternatives?
E.g. a large subset of Fediverse (Mastodon etc) communities are communities that avoid Twitter because they don't feel Twitter is doing enough to be safe for them. And instances have a varying policies about how they handle instances with different moderation standards.
The problem is access to platforms. We haven't found a good way to do this. People should be free to opt in or out of the content they want. What offends one will not offend another. For example a thread on hunting will offend some who love the animals they hunt. There is no universal right or wrong there. On should have access to an online community the other should have the ability to disagree or avoid that community. The problem is when an organisation like Twitter picks a side that free speech becomes an issue. Only because of the monopolistic nature of the platform. But that's what makes the platform good, everyone is there.
When free speech on the internet is discussed, it is within the context of freedom from excessive moderation on a platform. To call a Fediverse a "platform" doesn't seem quite analogous, these communities are more like their own platforms that are far more intensely moderated than even Twitter or Reddit.
Free speech advocates who aren't convinced by the "just go to another platform" argument in a discussion about Reddit or Twitter censorship likely won't think the argument is worth accepting simply by redefining what a platform is.
And what stops a network of lemmy instances from being that more intensely moderated Reddit alternatives? That's my point: just because other reddit alternatives have branded themselves as "free speech" doesn't mean all of them have to. And federated platforms might make that easier than one-offs.
Ruqqus is nowhere near as bad as voat is. Moreover, in threads, they are well aware of what happened to voat. They know they have to walk a line between free and open speech and not devolving into a haven for nazis and racists. However, the best way to help them is for more sane users to participate in that community.
I'd argue that raddle is far more intensely moderated than Twitter or Reddit, probably more so than most subreddits.
I may not have done a good job of illustrating it in the previous post, but the example was mainly focused on platforms that bill themselves as an anti-censorship alternative to Reddit. Censorship and free speech on social media are incredibly complex topics, and the development of an endless stream of tiny, far right echo chambers doesn't seem to capture the spirit of this "town square" that free speech advocates are looking for.
Moderation should be similar to a database view. I would love a browser extension and backend store like Lemmy that posts to both the site I’m on but also Lemmy (each site would be a distinct “namespace”). What is a forum but a collection of post identifiers with a corresponding tree of comments.
If a mod removes, hides, or takes other mod action on a comment or post, the browser extension and federated storage system still allows me to see and interact with that content and it’s writer (“showdead” globally). You could subscribe to “mod actions” (which is just curation) by mod, which would govern your experience of the content.
I appreciate the mod work here, for example, but I also want to be able to bypass that “filter opinion” so I can still interact with folks and content out of band if I so choose (one person’s “flame war” is another person’s vigorous debate).
Yes. Even just the existence of different subreddits with different moderation policies is already close to a perfect solution.
I don't understand why people are so hellbent on getting subreddits that exceed their tolerances removed from the platform. There are orders of magnitude more subreddits that I ignore altogether than the ones that I choose to subscribe to.
Speaking only of the US legal framework, hate speech is still free speech. Ignore speech you prefer not to consume instead of supporting the curtailment of rights.
No, I mean it's about removing people you hate's ability to speak to each other (and to you) in a completely legal manner, by getting reddit to destroy the place where they congregate and hounding them out of the digital cities.
The answer, of course, is that these people should build their own cities. But first, of course, they'll just have to build their own websites, servers, datacentres, ISPs, and nations.
(And militaries, to stop USGOV from killing them all, presuming they dare challenge the banks by building alternatives to traditional payment processors.)
> The answer, of course, is that these people should build their own cities. But first, of course, they'll just have to build their own websites, servers, datacentres, ISPs, and nations.
Yeah! I’m proposing building systems on top of Reddit and Hacker News (just two examples, any forum really that serves its data as http) to backfill their content and discussion data (comments), and prevent global censorship by mod actions. If you can’t censor The Pirate Bay and SciHub, you’d expect such a system to be equally durable. It’s all JSON blobs, identifies, and endpoints.
These sites are temporary (remember Digg?), so you want to build discussion systems that are durable, prevent censorship, and will outlive their underlying websites they sit on top of. These are not unreasonable amounts of data we’re dealing with, it’s mostly compressible text. I can store 100TB in Backblaze for $500/month, and front it from VMs around the world.
Good luck! We do need something more robust than individual company-owned websites. My optimistic side hopes that when we get good enough protocols for this sort of thing entrenched, things will stay good.
I’m hopeful. The Distributed Web movement appears to have legs and momentum. Time will tell if it delivers the aspirational value supporters believe in.
I would say it's not "more moderation" but rather "better moderation". An unbelievable amount of human effort is spent moderating reddit. It is very, very far from unmoderated. The issue is that the moderation going on is not intended to help along things like constructive conversation. Moderation on Reddit by and large exists to make subreddits as insular and myopic as possible.
That's the biggest limit of moderated forums, they only reflect the opinion of the most active groups who can steer the discussion helped by moderators who benefit from rewarding the largest groups instead of the best comments
If moderation was visible and moderators were forced to leave a note about why the moderation took place it would be a real discussion platform
HN is not
Slashdot is a lot better than many others in this regards, but it's not popular anymore and you can't make money on it, while a lot of people leave by posting shit on Reddit
That's just the nature of discussion basically anywhere. Every person and group have lines that you're not allowed to cross, and when people cross them you just get unproductive blow-ups, and someone or some sub-group will leave.
If you tried to herd state socialists/tankies and anarcho-capitalists/voluntarists into the same discussion space, they're so violently opposed they'd just be constantly screaming epithets at each other. That's not a useful thing.
Not to mention even when you have ideologically-aligned folks, some people are just anti-social dickwads who will constantly pick fights or argue in bad faith. I don't understand some people's seeming obsession with defending this kind of person, Some people just suck and everyone else is better off if they're not around. A private space is under no obligation to tolerate a poster who adamantly refuses to get along.
> If I'm having a discussion with people in real life I decide what I accept or not, there's no third party that decides for me what is right.
Yes, and that works fine because there's no platform there, just a 1 on 1 or small group conversation. You can still easily replicate this, unmoderated, with email or various messaging apps.
Once you can talk to potentially hundreds or thousands of people at once, once there's a platform, that model breaks down. Bad actors who would be uninterested in trolling single individuals are very interested in trolling hundreds at a time. And nobody wants to "walk away" from an otherwise good community because of handful of very loud people are spouting hate there.
Any platform that's both popular and unmoderated will eventually be dominated by extreme content, and will push out normal people, who will go somewhere that's popular and moderated.
There's no intrinsical limitation on the number of participants
Don't you like what a user says?
You can ignore them
Don't you like what some instance does, you can block it.
Any platform that is popular has an editorial board and doesn't want you to say things they don't like.
Simple as that.
Newspaper had no comments sections because it's silly to comment the news, they already decide what to publish and what not.
They already chose who to talk to, there's no point in discussing when you can only comment what someone else wants you to talk about.
Have you seen today on HN a post about exactly 40 years ago, when an Italian civil plane, the Itavia Flight 870, was shot down by a fight between NATO and Libyan fighter jets and 81 innocent people died?
You won't, because it's gonna be flagged as politics.
But you're going to read about every cat fight between über rich silicon valley founders because that's not politics for them, it's what they wanna talk about.
Trolling is a problem for the platform, not for the users.
I don't mind trolls, if I can decide who they are and silence them.
If they do it for me, it's censorship.
Censorship is not bad per se, but it's not done in my name, it's only in the platform's interests.
Do platforms ever ask users what do they think about banning someone?
> I don't mind trolls, if I can decide who they are and silence them.
This only works for small communities. You can't feasibly block the literally thousands of trolls and petty assholes that are posting on Reddit every day without that task consuming all your time. Multiply that by every single user having to do it personally and it gets even sillier.
There's a reason basically every popular platform is moderated on some level, and it's not because of some grand meta-moderator conspiracy.
Moderation is near-universally used because it works. Non-moderating doesn't work for conversations that eclipse some size. Disliking how moderators behave doesn't change that.
> Ad blocking works because I decide what to block
Ad blocking isn't a community or discussion forum, and most people just use whatever blacklists some 'authority' comes up with.
I guess the equivalent for a forum would be where you could not only block users (which is already common), but also share/combine blocklists. That's an interesting idea.
I think you'd run into the WoW sharding problem where it creates a sort of dissonance where you're nominally in the same space but also not in the same space at the same time. Still, would be cool to at least experiment with.
It's a user's side tool to remove unwanted content based on community generated rules
It's content moderation nonetheless
The error IMO is to think that the current implementation, which is also very young and immature, it's the best possible
It isn't
HN is not really a community, it's a platform run by a commercial entity, with (legit) interests
Imagine if HN was just a node of a larger federated network
They could decide what to post on their node(s) and which comments to remove
I could run my instance and subscribe to their feed or their same source feeds and make different choices
People could share blocklists, whitelists, favourites, ratings and everything else and decide what to use and what not
HN would still be popular, but other nodes could benefit from having more freedom or making different choices
Now HN (and every other UGC out there) is an all or nothing experience
Facebook is facing an ad boycott because they can't moderate the platform the way corporations want, it means advertisers are the ones who ultimately decide which content is valuable and which is not, sometimes it can coincide with what users want, but more often than not it doesn't.
But if we produce the content (like this conversation we're having) we should have control over it, and be able to reproduce it on a instance we control and continue it ad libitum even when HN decides our karma doesn't allow more than a few comments a day or one of us is shadow banned for reasons completely unrelated to what we are discussing right now or because it looks like spam to them or any other reason they think it needs moderation.
It's their right if the content is free for someone else to pick up and they are not responsible for what happens on other nodes.
It should be part of giving back to the community, you generate content for us, we moderate it like a DJ selects music for the listeners, but you can make your own playlists if you want to, because we don't make the music, we just mix it.
Nobody said HN should not moderate their public instance, they have people to respond to, it simply shouldn't be the only instance
If I had a feed of every comment and every link posted, I could read them and make my own rules
This post is being downvoted but it's a well known feature of HN that heated discussion are immediately flagged and they disappear very quickly
If a platform wants people to engage but don't want people to be passionate about their beliefs, it is not a discussion platform, it's a walled garden for a certain type of opinions.
Does it make discussions better? probably, if you already agree with the rules or can (or want) to follow them.
What if you can't?
What if a topic is divisive because on HN people refuse to acknowledge that the general view on HN is simply wrong?
Nobody will ever know.
Imagine a person going to a vegan restaurant asking for a steak. How long will it take to get kicked out?
That's a feature, if you are vegan, but it's not desirable for every restaurant, especially if they want (or like) to serve a broad range of customers.
Of course HN can say that this is exactly what they want, but what about the discussion about "is what they want right?"
I'm talking about HN because one of the post mentioned it like a good example of a free and open platform, but a platform that bans users for talking about politics is not really a good example of good moderation.
Moderation should happen on the receiving side, when it happens on the publisher's side it's called editing.
Any news outlets has editorial boards, there's nothing wrong about it, but it should be clear that the opinions expressed on an editorialised platform are not free.
Decentralisation has, among the many downsides, the advantage of being controlled by the party who receive the content, not the one who generates it.
The reason Voat is so bad is because it's the only alternative so the extremists are all shunted there. If a federated group of many forums was available with different moderation policies, then there would be breathing room for non-extremists.
See how the Fediverse works - it has largely avoided becoming like Voat. Most alt-right instances, such as Gab, are hugely defederated by instance admins and therefore isolated from most of the network.
You speak in a language too cryptic for regular consumption ;)
Which "Fediverse"? As I understand the concept, it applies to social networks in general. But it appears that you are referring to one specific network which contains the Gab server in it.
"Fediverse" = federated universe. Basically a bunch of smaller social networks speaking together through common protocols. Think: being able to follow a YouTube channel straight from your Twitter account — no need to create a YouTube account.
The most popular of such networks is Mastodon (https://joinmastodon.org/), which everyone can run on their own server (often referred to as an "instance"). By default, you create an account on one server and just speak to everyone like if you were on the same server. If one of such servers turns out to be a cesspool full of bigots (like Gab is), an admin can simply say "my server will no longer communicate with that server". When a bunch of servers do that, Gab is pretty much isolated, even though it's using an open protocol.
To put it in layman's terms: if a lot of spam comes from [email protected], Gmail can just dismiss the emails coming from all addresses that end in @example.com.
Server owners are usually transparent and keep lists of servers they're not speaking to on GitHub or somewhere.
Which has the same problem of the community being an echo chamber, the only difference being that it's a left wing echo chamber instead of a right wing echo chamber like voat.
It has a number of things going for it. First, it's on activitypub, and will have the same kind of granular federating controls as mastodon, at least at the instance level.
And as another commenter mentioned about initial culture, the politics/cultural tilt of the devs are unapologetically anti-righ wing troll, which is a great start, and a lot of the stuff people post about is linux/open source/libre/fediverse stuff, which is a focused interest that doesn't fall back to the lowest common denominator of trolling.
I think it's off to a good start, it's starting with a good culture that's explicitly conscious of the trolling problem, and it shares a lot of the spirit and mission of the other fediverse projects which are driven by conscious concern in mitigating these issues.
There a situation going on at SomethingAwful where if ownership isn’t transferred, a vocal group of users is going to leave. Some of them have suggested BreadnRoses.net, which advertises supporting an open community and being inviting to all.
However, it’s too far to the left and focused on solidarity to take all of SA’s threads and even forums.
You have such a mix over there, everything from tech to politics, guns, drugs... a lot like reddit.
> Some of them have suggested BreadnRoses.net, which advertises supporting an open community and being inviting to all.
It does?
> B+R is a community-owned space that seeks to foster solidarity between people from all backgrounds that share a common character. We reject policies of social dominance, Neo-liberalism, patriarchy, the gender binary, white supremacy, and other social ills espoused by capitalism. We support worker/union/trans rights, empowering those without a voice, and each other.
> Do not advocate for obvious bad shit like landlords/cops/capitalism/etc. This is a leftist space.
Sounds like they're quite explicit about what things they're non-open/inviting about.
Their attitude sounds like D&D/C-SPAM turned up to 11. Even as a Bernie-loving social democrat, I'd have to say 'pass'.
As someone that has probed this community on different basic morality subjects for years and gotten downvoted to the lowest possible score (-4), I can reliably say that there's a portion of the user base that hold beliefs and perspectives that are not making the world a better place and sometimes make this feel like a cesspool.
Sometimes the lack of exposure to real-world problems creates people that are completely disconnected from reality.
True, but just don't fall into the trap of thinking Reddit is a centrist, unbiased platform that only bans those that upset the equilibrium. Reddit is partisan, applies bans selectively, and permits astroturfing when it agrees with the cause.
Reddit is infiltrated with corporate sock puppet accounts. A documentary has been made about it. Any reddit that supports Trump and becomes popular get's dismantled. A good example is the the_donald, who's moderators were kicked out and the community had to leave.
Like as in "used by right-wing people who got kicked out of Reddit"? Probably by heavy moderation, the Lemmy developers are left to far-left as far as I can see form a glance.
Like as in "used to create an echo chamber for ideologically aligned people to talk to each other"? That may well be the goal.
Reddit already has competitors. It is just that they are cesspools as the only people who have a strong reason to leave reddit are those reddit has banned.