Well, pretty much to be expected. Saw that lots of subs that got banned attempted to move to Ruqqus, but they never gain any traction. Reddit as a platform is just far too convenient - lots of people won't visit an entirely new website for just one sub in their feed.
The downfall of ruqqus began when they (ruqqus) banned mgtow, who had migrated from reddit after a ban there, and a bunch of other guilds, and failed to provide a good reason for that or evidence of broken rules. This contrasted sharply with the free speech forum promise that ruqqus had been promoting before. Then the ruqqus admins said that they "pivoted" to be more an open source project and less a free speech community. And then of course everyone just left and ruqqus became a wasteland.
I'm very familiar with Lemmy, I had contributed to it a bit in it's early development.
I like it, but in particular I think some UX design that apply to reddit and any other centralized link aggregator don't make sense in a federated system, multi communities on one server are fine but the way they're implemented in Lemmy is too Reddit like to be fully useful in a federated network.
While these "free speech" Reddit alternatives end up taking a far-right tone, what's funny is how all discussions they host have to be approached from that angle.
So you can't just talk about your favorite TV show. You have to first make a nod to how it features a Jewish conspiracy to push black-white interracial relationships. Only then can you go on to discuss the actual episode.
The comment that got flagged for trying to reverse this missed its point, but I thought it had one.
My reply-too-late:
While that is a little hyperbolic, there's definitely a "kid gloves" approach you have to take in a lot of online discussions.
E.g. there was an article on burnout that popped up on HN[0] recently where the author made sure to apologize for being a "privileged white chick" early on. You can't just talk about your problem with burnout and how you handled it, you have to virtue signal about issues that might not even be related first.
I've seen discussions on Twitter get swamped with "what are you doing in our conversation?" replies that drew the line on racial boundaries, when the issues at hand weren't even exclusive to race.
This happens, but for the example of talking about a TV show, setting your perspective is interesting context. I don't know why it would be described as "kid gloves," though, any more than someone prefacing their comments on industry regulation with the company they work for.
What the OP is describing is more like that the real subject of the board is white male nativism, and in order to talk about any other subject on what is supposed to be a general venue you have to somehow connect it back to the group's tribal concerns. It could almost be a challenge: how would you do it with ice cream? Maybe lead in with a dig at Ben & Jerry's. How would you do it with a new iPhone release? I have no idea.
Acknowledging your privilege is not categorically virtue signalling. One can think there's not value is acknowledging privilege (or that it might not exist), but let's not pretend it's impossible (or unlikely) that another does.
Are you saying that it’s not categorically virtue signaling because someone can find value in that? Doesn’t sound logical to me. If the detail doesn’t contribute to the discussion but is meant to appease a specific group - that’s definitely closer to virtue signaling than to a genuine expression.
Again, I think the problem here is that you might not find that privilege acknowledgement contributes to the discussion, but there are plenty of people who acknowledge their privilege in the belief that it is contributing to the discussion.
I think it's very telling that folk think that writing "I'm saying this from a position of privilege" invariably is done with a proverbial gun to their head, hoping to evade a public flogging if they fail to do so.
People, myself included, genuinely see disclosing your position of privilege in the same way someone from Company X might say "Disclosure: I work at Company X" when commenting on a post about Company X. Now, it might seem that acknowledging ones privilege is shoe-horned into every conversation, but I challenge you to think about how privilege touches so much of our lives.
Anyways, all I'm saying is you don't have to "find value" in folks acknowledging privilege. You just need to be able to imagine a world in which they do.
I think you've misinterpreted them. The discussion is about the 'intention' of somebody mentioning privilidge, not the social merit of the act itself.
If one mentions it in a genuine way that is contextual to the discussion, then it is entirely appropriate. But if it is blithely and thoughtlessly tacked on to a preceding statement (which, let's face it, happens), then it gradually becomes a platitude and empties the acknowledgement of any charge or primacy when others are mentioning their privilige in a considered and good faith way.
Providing context like that seems alien to me. In the same way as specifying that I am a white cis straight male 98% Northern European and 2% Central European, etc, etc.
Almost everyone is privileged in some way. I, personally, don't need to know whether someone is privileged to evaluate and understand their opinion. But on the other hand I agree with you that some people do in fact want to see this context attached to every post.
Hard to read this comment and not see it as putting an equivalence between these two points. How are anti-Semitic conspiracies regarding miscegenation comparable to annoying virtue signaling by white people?
The comment doesn't regard sort of right-leaning conservatism, these websites cater to the far right, anti-Semitism, conspiracy theories, racism, etc. Not the ambiguous, "having an afro is cultural appropriation" sort of racism (or what far left/idpol people consider racism may be), literally people calling for ethnostates and even genocide of groups of people. That's the problem and part of why these sites die, because they get populated by extremists who get kicked off of the larger, corporate platforms.
That's the problem. Nothing to do with "sensitivity online" or whatever, unless sensitivity includes being bothered by fringe ideologies that most of the population don't accept.
Again, why are people equating weak virtue signaling about milquetoast democratic leanings with singaling about *Anti-semitic conspiracy* mongering? I think the issue isn't about signaling or "when in rome" sort of fitting in, it's that to signal you are part of a the community you have to appear super fringe.
I don't agree that Jews are trying to make black people marry white people. Is that what you're referring to? I'm certainly not for white people "checking their privilege" either because as I said it's annoying.
Perhaps in certain subreddits that's true, but on Reddit, it's easy to find both far right and far left echo chambers. And it's easy to find centrist communities. It's also easy to find communities where people don't talk about politics at all, and just discuss their favorite TV show or 3D printing filament without bringing anything else up.
That's not the case on these other "free-speech" reddit clones - they're exclusivly far-right extremist content.
It's a mistake to think echo chambers are a phenomenon which only take place on the political extremes. Reddit itself is an echo chamber of tepid liberal orthodoxy and American exceptionalism, moderated by a former member of the Atlantic Council. A fish doesn't recognize the water it swims in.
Redditors might call a place like Hexbear an echo chamber for instance, but it wasn't the members of Hexbear who chose to isolate themselves. Reddit made that decision by banning them.
While this is true, I feel like there really is a difference between modern online communities and the ones that existed in the older era, before the so-called web 2.0 era. You can't escape bias at all, that should be any person's educated perspective, but there is a difference in degree that is sharper both on reddit and facebook groups and the like.
Ironically, twitter (which does skew left wing at least in some places), while having its host of issues, has a much lower degree of echo chamber-ness because there are no groups, everyone is thrown in a pot together. It does have the cancel mobs and all that but an echo chamber it is not, which at least proves "echo chamber" isn't the default final state of any social media platform.
> it's easy to find both far right and far left echo chambers
Could you point to 3 "far right echo chamber" active-ish (more than 50,000 subscribers) non-banned subreddits?
For "far-left" I'd say: r/politics r/LateStageCapitalism and r/socialism
EDIT: I knew this post was going to get heat. I consider myself a "leftist" (and by US standards I would be maybe consider a communist) but my point was that there is active censorship of right/far-right discourse in Reddit. Even in my pro-socialist/anti-capitalist view I like reading and seeing the other side's point of view. Main reason being that I think we should be open to other views to see the things to improve in our ideas.
I would invite people to engage in the conversation instead of having a knee-jerk reaction.
Moderators for popular subreddit r/JusticeServed on Reddit — one of the most visited websites on the internet with an estimated 12 billion page views per month — said Monday that due to new site policies they are no longer allowed to permit posts, comments, or any other content that shows a person of color as the aggressor
First, that's from more than a year ago. Second, I looked into it because it sounded literally unbelievable, and indeed it appears to be some sort of trolling and/or conservative fever dream. That exact phrasing shows up in various other places, for example [^0], [^1], and there are threads here and there explaining the frequent trolling of u/automoderator [^2], [^3].
r/conspiracy is a sad story. I loved the subreddit from years ago, where crazy and even stupid conspiracies were discussed. Nowadays it's all related to "antivax" crap.
> my point was that there is active censorship of right/far-right discourse in Reddit.
Politically biased rule enforcement is a bit different than having a community that invariably has to frame every unrelated thing in terms of a certain political ideology.
While your overall points are good, you derail a more more original comment into the standard partisan censorship discussion that happens over and over on HN.
r/the_doland (banned)
r/CringeAnarchy (banned)
r/Greatawakening (banned)
The myriad of r/incel communities and their clones that Reddit plays whack-a-mole with
Pointing to a few exceptions does not change the fact there is a clear political bias to reddit Admin action.
This is to be expected given the geographic location of their Admin staff, however to deny this to to pretend that CNN, MSNBC and Fox News are all "unbiased news sources" which everyone knows this to be false as well
While yes, Reddit Admins do take action on behavior, the Admins ideology allows certain groups more "benefit of the doubt" more warnings, more kid gloves than other ideologies do.
Any honest observer can see that in the pattern of Admin action
>ah yes, making fun of people dying is okay as long as you obscure the names!
Yes. You've made up an imaginary enemy in your head and you are talking down to others based on the imaginary Reddit company in your head.
The reason those other communities were banned were for targeted harassment, doxing of real people, and brigading other subreddits. Reddit has never stated that they were any rules on the "morality" of the content. The communities that are still around have not broken those rules yet.
So then what is the defense for a similar subreddit that made fun of people that died after getting the vaccination. They followed the same "rules" you seem to claim here, they did not doxx anyone, they did not harass anyone, they did not brigade other subreddits, most of it was just side by side tweets of a person positing the vaccination announcement followed by a notification they died a few day later...
>the only speech moderation we should be worried about on any site is illegal speech
I never said that. I, for one, am not a free speech absolutist, and I think those that pretend they are, are children of the Facebook era of online discourse. I am iterating once again, that Reddit has clear rules and those rules have largely been executed without political bias. If your favorite subreddit got banned, they were very likely violating those rules.
I wasn't active in the community, but I believe r/fatpeoplehate was mostly unsolicited photographs ("creepshots") of overweight people and making fun of them.
It appears r/hermancainaward is 100% based on posts that the deceased willingly shared with the public. I think that's a meaningful difference.
> It appears r/hermancainaward is 100% based on posts that the deceased willingly shared with the public. I think that's a meaningful difference.
Just a minor correction there: The majority of posts from the death people in HCA are from Facebook. I think that normally, people posts would only be shared with their Friends (unless you specifically change it to be public).
In that respect, posters in HCA would be publishing posts that were originally not meant to be public.
As an example, I might write a post in Facebook about me and my wife going on vacation to X place for 1 week. While it is OK for me for my friends to know that, I may not want this information to be public for fear of my house getting robbed while I am gone.
Although I completely agree with the sentiment and main point of HCA (and I actually have enjoyed the schadenfreude of some of the awarded people there), I concede that it is definitely a subreddit that is of quite bad taste and brings the worst of the "pro-vaccine" side of the argument.
I think that r/HermanCainAward is actually quite sinister and designed to normalize and reinforce dehumanization of "the other side". The whole point of the subreddit is to showcase people who've had strong political convictions, then died as a result of them.
You're supposed to feel a sense of comeuppance that these people who don't believe in the vaccine or dismiss the severity Covid died as a result of their beliefs. There is no shortage of mockery involved, either. It is disguised as simple schadenfreude, but I sense the subscribers are actually reveling in the deaths of others.
There have been threads there where people say they would prefer that sub wouldn't exist at all, those preventable deaths and misery fading from existence. I don't know whether they do it for laughs or are just burnt out from people choosing to make a point of politicizing not wearing a mask, probably a mix of both. I don't know how to solve that problem either, some of the posts there contain straight up insults towards people who vaxx/wear masks, this feedback cycle of radicalization is self sustaining at this point.
My post was exactly what GP was doing here. He couldn't talk about the article posted without bringing in some neo nazi fantasy he had. I simply changed the words he spouted and it fit perfectly with what he is doing.
Reddit bans anything "far right" (whatever that means) that gets popular.
Extremist used to mean terrorist, now it's used for people you don't align with politically.
No one on [Patriots . win] is an extremist, but I'm sure you'd say they were.
Comments by the OP in that thread clarify the direction this is supposed to take, responding to "The swamp in one picture" with "One Drone Strike".
Textbook extremism. (edit to add: or, as hunterb123 asserts, an edge lord. Since I don't know the site or user but hunterb123 apparently does, I'll take them by their word.)
Ah, the edgelord defense, a Tried and True practice. One issue is that the entire thread is _only_ edgelords in that model. I couldn't find anybody on that page speaking out against the ideas espoused by the poster.
As for "comment that you'd find anywhere", I know a few places where I wouldn't find such comments. Not because oh-the-oppression, but because people don't engage with them in the same way as on that page. It's possible shape a culture and that site seems to have chosen one that is easily being mistaken for extremism, at the very least.
I don't know them, so if you assert that they're an edgelord and not an extremist, I can only imagine that you do know them.
Lacking any other information, and given a relative unimportance of that person to me, I'll take your word on that. Given the time you devote on the defense of that community, it's certainly more important to you than it is to me.
If you don't know them how did you assert they were an extremist in your original comment?
An extremist is likened to a terrorist, you need to have evidence other than some edgelord comment, otherwise they are just an edgelord.
Until proven otherwise you should assume they are the same as Reddit edgelords (actually most of them ARE or WERE Reddit edgelords!)
I'm not defending one community in particular, I'm defending everyone's right to be in the community they want without being dehumanized as some sort of monster racist.
Depends on the federation: Federal Republic of Germany? I'm paying taxes so I guess one could consider me an agent.
But more than that: I also worked and work for organisations aligned with them in various capacities (currently I'm TA'ing at a state-run university, so while that's multiple hops away I guess it's a start? My fellow citizens often mix up what part is federal and what's state anyway, so it might as well not matter in the context of this conversation.)
Was just a joke. You joked that I guessed right you were a fed, and I joked that you must have been right guessing about the person on Patriots since I guessed right.
The underlying joke is we're all just guessing and judging people based on a razor thin insight that is a brief comment on a forum.
Bullshit. It’s generally acknowledged by everyone whose IQ exceeds their shoe size, that wishing death upon politicians is extremism. Stop defending this kind of shit - it’s not defensible no matter how much you clutch your pearls and whine about your freedumb.
So if I find you one instance where someone wished death on Reddit that has +1 upvote (like this submission) you'll concede that Reddit is an extremist site right?
The "one instance" thing only applies to that "patriots" site because you asserted "No one on [Patriots . win] is an extremist". It also doesn't show that the site is an "extremist site", only that your claim is wrong.
You're moving goal posts: The original statement of yours has been "no one on patriots is an extremist", classifying site users. Now you're at "you'll concede that Reddit is an extremist site right?", classifying the site itself.
That seems fair game to bring up though, because this is a thread discussing the site as a whole, and not about a TV show. And the pattern of reddit clones hosting exclusively far-right ~~~extremist~~~ (edit: I'll replace this with "leaning") content while reddit itself is far more diverse is an interesting observation.
I dunno, go look through any popular subreddit and it's all about "extreme" leftist politics, even /r/funny, etc.
But sure, some fantasy about neo nazis discussing tv shows that I'm sure GP totally saw and didn't just make up is relevant.
I guess my point is, yes, it can happen but it happens on both sides. Mostly, people just want a nice place to hang out amongst their like minded peers, and no that doesn't mean discussing Jews 24/7 believe it or not. GP talks like someone who has never talked with someone on the other "side". We're all people, stop dehumanizing the other political spectrum because you don't understand them.
tldr: the most extreme people on the right probably discuss Soros/Jews as much as the most extreme people on the left discuss Trump/MAGA. That doesn't represent anyone else.
While "extremist" might have connatations of violence/terrorism, those connotations are not inherent in the meaning of the word. I would argue that it behooves us to push back against such a connotation because it really only serves to delegitimize people who don't have mainstream beliefs by implying that they intend violence without having to justify an actually disprovable statement.
Sure. I don't like the word, most of my argument is infact arguing against the use of the word "extremist". I only used it once in response and I used "extreme" elsewhere which is fine to use when denoting where they are in the spectrum of the political ideology.
You explicitly upgraded the terrorism connotation to being part of the meaning by using it to draw a distinction between the two words categorical referents.
Instead I think you should have directly questioned whether the connotation of violence was part of the point you were responding to.
They're akin to when you're a kid with friends and one of you starts cussing, the rest don't react negatively, and then you just f-bombing all the things. Some people don't want to be adults or approach life that way, they just want the veneer of adulthood.
Any platform that establishes itself as a result of a purge from a left-wing dominated platform like Reddit will start out as explicitly right-wing and will struggle to gain non-partisan membership. That new platform will get its reputation tainted for being a place for extremism - even if it permits both left-wing and right-wing views. The left-wing folks won't see a need to join the new platform because they already have the existing one to feel comfortable in. They are content to let the new platform be seen as a hotbed for right-wing radicalism, continue to smear its reputation, and then wait for it to whither and die.
On the flip side, any platform that starts out as non-partisan eventually gets dominated by left-wing / left-leaning folks. I personally have seen this happen countless times on subreddits individually, then reddit as a whole. I sense that this is because activists on the left tend to naturally gravitate towards becoming moderators and establishing new forum rules whenever they take over. Most of the new rules are unobjectionable but questionably appropriate. "No Racism / Homophobia / Transphobia" is a fine rule, but is it really necessary in a woodworking subreddit? The other kind of rules are more subtle and easy for moderators to abuse, like "be friendly", which can be applied against right leaning folks and ignored when left leaning folks get confrontational. Eventually the conservative/right folks get drowned out by agenda-posting and getting downvoted en-masse. They either self-censor, just accept the downvotes and keep posting, get banned, or try to leave for a new forum.
There is a more general law that has nothing to do political leaning that was coined by someone who's community generally disproves your point.
moot, creator of 4chan, has a talk or blog post (can't find it now) detailing this exact dynamic. There are plenty of times moot banned discussion of a certain topic (not even politically relevant), those users would get mad and start their own chan. That chan would eventually be a community of people who just post about how they hate 4chan and continue to be contrarian until they died. Community building is hard and you can't build a platform around being anti-the-other-platform. I think it's fashionable to call these "new platforms" right wing, but this is not a new trend and its something common you would see in the phpBB days of the forum, except instead of the new platform being "right wing", it was that the old platform was fascist because the moderator was an asshole. That said, 4chan is a platform you can clearly point that started out non-partisan. Before Trump 4chan was pro-occupy Wall Street. The community, on its own, became more right wing without overtly advertising itself as such. Over time however it's clear that /pol/ is a far right platform and there was no need for it to splinter off from everything. The lack of robust right wing communities online has more to do with community building rather than self-censorship. A rightwing community has to be exclusionary from the start, and it's hard to bootstrap a community that must ostracize a portion early members.
It's my view, that globally in the western world, that conservatism is actually just a very loud minority position. The loudest conservative folks tend to act the most anti-social and ultimately tend to get ostracized. This ostracism as a result of their anti-social behavior leads to some persecution complex that they are being pushed out when in reality they just hold a minority position. The "no racism" rules are required because when said person gets banned for calling someone a n*gger who was just posting an image of a birdhouse, they tend to be the most pedantic about rules. Most normal people just don't want to deal with that.
Is it possible to create a free speech reddit alternative that doesn't immediately turn into a right wing extremist site? My mind immediately turns to the Paradox of Tolerance, and I think the answer is no.
Probably not, because here's the thing: Reddit isn't all that restricted.
Reddit still has swear words, porn, angry arguments about politics and religion on any subject, people arguing that most any social norm should be done away with... now you'll have to find the right subreddit for that, but that's about the only problem.
You have to dig quite deep to bump into a subject that you won't find any outlet for. Even in the cases where a subreddit got banned, you can almost always go and express the same opinion in r/changemyview and not be kicked off the site.
This means that there's about 3 reasons to ever seek out an alternative:
1. You have an issue with the management. Eg, you object to how the company works and don't want to give them money/traffic.
2. You have a purely philosophical disagreement with how the site is run, even if it doesn't impact you personally. You're offended the code isn't Open Source, or that moderation exists, or that people aren't able to hate on fat people, even though your personal usage of the site is just posting cat pictures and not impacted.
3. Your interest is one of the banned subreddits and you're a persona non grata on Reddit.
Of the three, the third is by far the most likely, and they're going to swamp out any influence the first two might have easily.
You’re offering a comparable product except with no real existing user base and a higher friction to gain new users for your community.
There’s some marginal audience in people interested in the principle of the thing, but the bulk of your users are going to be users that can’t be serviced by the main players.
If your only offering is “X, but we won’t ban you” then you’re going to collect the dregs of the internet.
There’s a bit of a feedback loop here as well in that many of the existing services are banning users and communities because they’re negatively impacting advertisers and the rest of the community. So when your service is overrun with the undesirables in short order, the rest of the communities are going to be negatively incentivized to migrate and you’re going to find it impossible to find any real financial support or backing.
So no, I don’t think “X, but free speech” will ever turn into anything but a cesspool. You need an offering that will attract desirable users as fast or faster than the undesirables that have been kicked out of anywhere else can sign up and that’s going to take some sort of additional value.
You either approach it from the social perspective, or the utilitarian perspective. From the social perspective, the goal is building a community. To build a community, people need to be held accountable for antisocial behavior. The technology is secondary.
Most of the times leftist communities split off from mainstream platforms, it is because the platforms either enable rampant antisocial behavior, limit the community's autonomy in deciding how to deal with it, or its just plain censorship.
The libertarians see it as a utilitarian problem. Banning any content or behavior is beyond the pale, and they try to build out their technology to ensure this "marketplace of ideas" prevails. They consider themselves rugged individualists, so the goal of building a community is an afterthought.
I wonder if there are any actual free speech services out there: Would any of them tolerate being swamped (as in 90%+ of the content) with insults hurled at their owners and operators?
My guess would be that there's already a limit to their tolerance. And from there, it's really a matter of seeing what kind of content they _do_ tolerate.
A site full of extreme* right wing stuff: That site is an extreme right wing site. If it is indeed "free speech" (which isn't demonstrated yet), that's merely coincidental, but it's not its defining property.
* To adopt hunterb123's preferred phrasing, because for them extremism apparently only begins when people start to draft assassination plans, not just daydreaming about it. I don't care about that particular semantic game, so I'll be as compatible as possible on this thread.
I'm a fan of lemmy, but that's patently untrue. The main instance has a very strong anti-capitalist and anti-discrimination lean inherited from its devs.
Even lemmy as software was not in favour of free-speach for the period they had that famous(ish) forbidden words filter in the default build.
I think the key is to avoid going full free speech. What you want to create is a more permissive community that's still under someone's thumb to a degree. It's difficult to start a community under just a slight change in priniples like that, though, because the lion's share of the people in the old community are fine with the status quo.
...So in addition to being more permissive, it seems that you have to have a better product, generally.
From SSC:
> ..if you try to create a libertarian paradise, you will attract three deeply virtuous people with a strong committment to the principle of universal freedom, plus millions of scoundrels. Declare that you’re going to stop holding witch hunts, and your coalition is certain to include more than its share of witches.
Folks, please use your words. Some of us are just trying to make it through Friday without having to login and use show-dead to see both sides of a discussion.
I've sometimes thought that downvotes shouldn't count for much when given by someone who doesn't reply. Count them, just not with nearly as much weight as someone who is willing to explain their disagreement. We already have flagging for marking something is inappropriate.
Visually though, it's not comparable. A reply (often long) is visible but requires reading to garner the sentiment. A grayed out comment is immediately recognizable as being "bad" and "disliked," hence why it's more powerful, and why people do it. It also requires much less effort than typing out why you disagree.
