I got a slight chuckle out of this because it reminded me of one of my favorite quotes from Slate Star Codex (in this case the blog post was talking about Voat):
> The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.
Well if you ask me, Reddit is now mostly a small community of chosen people posting lead content, whilst everyone else watches and works for free in hope of earning a few imaginary points and reaching the now unobtainable (without paying in some form or fashion for it) front page anyway...
It's real easy to fake a user community with proper automation and a hand full admins nowadays in order to run a "revenue machine" social media community.
-Just a personal opinion, not fact (nor stated as such) though.
> if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches.
And the other side is important to mention as well: you end up with mainstream communities that are echo-chambers where no-one has ever encountered anything remotely like a witch.
I'm not familiar with these alternatives, or if it's true they descend into abhorrent extremism. But the problem with mainstream social media platforms prohibiting content is that it fuels the extremism it's trying to combat. I understand it's their right as private companies yada yada yada. But there's an increasingly narrow space within which to have meaningful conversations. And things are getting bad.
Moderates from both sides are being shunned for not following dogma. It's nice to see intellectuals begin to carve their own spaces in podcasts and substack. We need people willing to engage in thoughtful, nuanced and charitable conversation.
> But the problem with mainstream social media platforms prohibiting content is that it fuels the extremism it's trying to combat.
I've held this belief before but now I'm not so sure. Is this actually quantifiable? For example, I'd be interested to know if there are people or groups that have grown in size/reach after (and more specifically, because of) being banned from major platforms.
In fact, you just said that you're not familiar with these alternatives -- doesn't that hint that the banned groups might be now reaching a smaller audience? If they weren't banned, you might have seen them on the more mainstream sites.
Nice demonstration of the Paradox of Tolerance [1]:
"Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them."
This is the naive weakness exploited by every strain of authoritarianism, the idea that if we only object to every form of constraint of expression, we will always be free. Sadly, that is exactly what leads democracies to fall into authoritarian states.
Played out here in a free-speech site falling into an abyss of hatred that no non-idiot would want to support, so it failed for lack of support.
How does that paradox square with the transition of intolerant societies into tolerant ones? Where intolerant attitudes were not only tolerated, but the norm?
If this was really a paradox, such a transition should be impossible. But since such transitions took place, the same forces that enabled them can also prevent a society from becoming intolerant.
Of course in practice this paradox is only ever invoked by those that get to define what counts as "intolerance", or those that agree with the current definition.
It’s too bad that nobody can find a middle ground between the increasing amount of heavy handed censorship on Reddit and literally all Nazis.
I thought /r/gendercritical and /r/nonewnormal both fit into the bucket of “I can see why this is controversial, but it’s more dissent from mainstream opinion than clearly ban worthy.” Again I’m not espousing views in those subreddits I just didn’t view them as ban worthy.
All sorts of “misinformation” is totally fine as long as it goes with the group think such as the Rolling Stone story on Oklahoma covid units being overrun that turned out to be false.
Reddit has unpaid moderators who wield way too much power and blackmail the company into getting their way. Now Reddit has raised money so we can expect even more purges to become as advertiser friendly as possible.
Some sort of app that would connect federated backends would be ideal, Lemmy was on the right path but yet another dead on arrival project due to ideology.
I know we seem to be on a path for increasing centralization but I predict the pendulum swings the opposite way as the user experience on centralized sites keep deteriorating due to pressure to monetize and people get fed up of a few power mods on these sites dictating permissible opinions.
I was a frequent lurker at /r/nonewnormal and I agree with your analysis - dissent from the mainstream opinion that lockdowns and mandates are good, but more of an opinionated criticism than anything banworthy. The moderators put a great deal of work to keep it civil and non-partisan, and their efforts were completely destroyed when they were kicked off Reddit.
Some /r/nonewnormal participants went to Ruqqus, some went to communities.win, but the racist and anti-semitic posters on those sites kept trying to subvert the existing positive culture and it wasn't fun browsing there.
Anyone who can solve the the "less echo chamber than Reddit but less racist than Ruqqus" hosting dilemma stands to gain a large audience.
These free-speech reddit clones always seem to descend to far-right Nazism. Maybe you have to ban all political discussion to survive as a reddit clone on the modern internet.
It's weird how these "free speech" social media sites always seem to have just as much moderation (if not more) than mainstream platforms, just with a big exception carved out for far-right fascist topics.
There are many left and far-left forums out there too, though yeah they aren't billed as "free speech" clones. Lemmy [1] is an explicitly leftist friendly type of forum and Tildes [2] while not explicitly leftist is in practice very leftist. There are as many communities out there as there are strands to human thought I imagine.
The shutdowns will happen so long as 1) there's not enough market share for the competing product (presumably from the network effects) and 2) there's market suppression from the current players. In other words: as long as there is a competing first-landing player and that player is actively working against any newcomers will there be a change? Probably not. To put this into a historical context: Standard Oil was notoriously gobbling up or destroying small players as a very successful attempt to own the market. This is no different.
dang|4 years ago
Ruqqus, an open source Reddit clone, is shutting down their main instance - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28799199 - Oct 2021 (107 comments)
hn_throwaway_99|4 years ago
> The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservativ...
winternett|4 years ago
It's real easy to fake a user community with proper automation and a hand full admins nowadays in order to run a "revenue machine" social media community.
-Just a personal opinion, not fact (nor stated as such) though.
jseliger|4 years ago
ekianjo|4 years ago
And the other side is important to mention as well: you end up with mainstream communities that are echo-chambers where no-one has ever encountered anything remotely like a witch.
jorgesborges|4 years ago
Moderates from both sides are being shunned for not following dogma. It's nice to see intellectuals begin to carve their own spaces in podcasts and substack. We need people willing to engage in thoughtful, nuanced and charitable conversation.
mahogany|4 years ago
I've held this belief before but now I'm not so sure. Is this actually quantifiable? For example, I'd be interested to know if there are people or groups that have grown in size/reach after (and more specifically, because of) being banned from major platforms.
In fact, you just said that you're not familiar with these alternatives -- doesn't that hint that the banned groups might be now reaching a smaller audience? If they weren't banned, you might have seen them on the more mainstream sites.
toss1|4 years ago
"Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them."
This is the naive weakness exploited by every strain of authoritarianism, the idea that if we only object to every form of constraint of expression, we will always be free. Sadly, that is exactly what leads democracies to fall into authoritarian states.
Played out here in a free-speech site falling into an abyss of hatred that no non-idiot would want to support, so it failed for lack of support.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
bad_username|4 years ago
What in fact leads to that, is states declaring certain views they oppose as "intolerant", and starting being intolerant to these views.
chuckee|4 years ago
If this was really a paradox, such a transition should be impossible. But since such transitions took place, the same forces that enabled them can also prevent a society from becoming intolerant.
Of course in practice this paradox is only ever invoked by those that get to define what counts as "intolerance", or those that agree with the current definition.
ditonal|4 years ago
I thought /r/gendercritical and /r/nonewnormal both fit into the bucket of “I can see why this is controversial, but it’s more dissent from mainstream opinion than clearly ban worthy.” Again I’m not espousing views in those subreddits I just didn’t view them as ban worthy.
All sorts of “misinformation” is totally fine as long as it goes with the group think such as the Rolling Stone story on Oklahoma covid units being overrun that turned out to be false.
Reddit has unpaid moderators who wield way too much power and blackmail the company into getting their way. Now Reddit has raised money so we can expect even more purges to become as advertiser friendly as possible.
Some sort of app that would connect federated backends would be ideal, Lemmy was on the right path but yet another dead on arrival project due to ideology.
I know we seem to be on a path for increasing centralization but I predict the pendulum swings the opposite way as the user experience on centralized sites keep deteriorating due to pressure to monetize and people get fed up of a few power mods on these sites dictating permissible opinions.
bmarquez|4 years ago
Some /r/nonewnormal participants went to Ruqqus, some went to communities.win, but the racist and anti-semitic posters on those sites kept trying to subvert the existing positive culture and it wasn't fun browsing there.
Anyone who can solve the the "less echo chamber than Reddit but less racist than Ruqqus" hosting dilemma stands to gain a large audience.
kumarvvr|4 years ago
And I browse tech and other news sites a lot.
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
Computeiful|4 years ago
Legion|4 years ago
exogeny|4 years ago
Talking about finance? Well, who do you think controls the world's money? And on and on.
Note to dang/admin: I'm sure it is clear that I am being illustrative of a hateful argument, but I am happy to redact.
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
Karrot_Kream|4 years ago
[1]: https://lemmy.ml/
[2]: https://tildes.net/
exogeny|4 years ago
And yet it's going to happen again, and again, and again. Voat, Parler, whatever.
dang|4 years ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
SkyPuncher|4 years ago
brodouevencode|4 years ago
The shutdowns will happen so long as 1) there's not enough market share for the competing product (presumably from the network effects) and 2) there's market suppression from the current players. In other words: as long as there is a competing first-landing player and that player is actively working against any newcomers will there be a change? Probably not. To put this into a historical context: Standard Oil was notoriously gobbling up or destroying small players as a very successful attempt to own the market. This is no different.
rvz|4 years ago
The forever mission to stop them is still incomplete. It is only going to get harder as they keep on being resilient and censorship resistant.
Done by none other than the ones who love chasing so-called 'nazis' for a living.
hunterb123|4 years ago
Conservatives want a place on the internet.
progforlyfe|4 years ago
[deleted]