Ruqqus, an open source Reddit clone, is shutting down their main instance - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28799199 - Oct 2021 (107 comments)
> 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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Other people who got cancelled or pushed out - like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald - now stand to get really very rich indeed off their new audiences. Writing, it turns out, can be profitable. Just not the sort of writing you find in most media outlets. This also applies to Scott Alexander, quoted above, though he wasn't directly cancelled, "just" doxxed by the New York Times.
Does this fuel extremism? Well it certainly fuels distrust of large institutions and mainstream media narratives, although what "mainstream" means is increasingly unclear. Joe Rogan pointed out the other day that given CNN's tiny audience sizes, it's really Rogan that's mainstream and CNN that's the fringe now. Groups like CNN, MSNBC, even the BBC seem increasingly extremist to me. The rationality and moderation you might hope for from older journalistic institutions is now to be found elsewhere, like the places they like to insinuate are full of extremists.
"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.
What in fact leads to that, is states declaring certain views they oppose as "intolerant", and starting being intolerant to these views.
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.
Most often, they do NOT actually manage to transform their intolerant society from within, but leave to find tolerance elsewhere. This is the most basic history of the worlds largest superpower - it's European inhabitants fled the various forms of intolerance at home, and then declared and fought for their independence when the rulers tried to extend their intolerance into the new lands.
This can also feedback to provide assistance to those still in the original lands. Also, the intolerance occasionally gets so bad that it will cause revolts and uprisings, which is typically how new tolerance is created.
The tolerant countries also can feedback and support such fights. One of the more notable ones was when Intolerance rose to a severe form in Germany in the 1920s, and we fought WWII to overcome it. Tens of millions died to fight intolerance, showing that fighting intolerance is a rather strong drive in humans.
I can think of few examples where tolerance gradually grew.
What happens is that a tolerant society is created first with great vigilance, and then after a few generations of getting comfortable with it, vigilance declines, and vacuous arguments like this pop up, attempting to separate freedom from responsibility for maintaining it, and an opening is created for the few to exercise their intolerance on the many.
So, nonsense, just because intolerant societies can be overthrown by the majority that just want to be left alone and 'live and let live' —and this usually requires massive effort and usually bloodshed —, that has zero bearing on whether intolerance can grow and drive out tolerance in a tolerant society.
In fact, the situation is the opposite.
If tolerance was the metastable state, then intolerance would never be able to grow in tolerant societies, yet it almost always does grow — and that paradox is how it does so.
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.
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.
Do you believe that is possible? Ruqqus would lead me to believe that it's not. The moderation needed to make it less racist is anathema and unpalatable to the audience that would need to support it in the first place. And that's not even mentioning the lack of a viable business model if it's not brand-safe.
And I browse tech and other news sites a lot.
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.
If I had a nickle for every not dead comment on HN saying "everything is political" (though it seems to be in a lull these past couple months) I could get a pizza delivered a couple times a week.
[1]: https://lemmy.ml/
[2]: https://tildes.net/
I'm reasonably sure that in far left forums, though you can (for example) find quite a bit of antisemitism and similar toxic opinions, you won't get a lot of "Stalin was Right" memes, or admiration for the Khmer Rouge.
There is a qualitative and quantitative difference between the extremes of the right and left in US political discourse as well as the amount of cover the mainstream is willing to extend.
And yet it's going to happen again, and again, and again. Voat, Parler, whatever.
Digg died and the population moved to reddit. MySpace is deader than most zombies.
So maybe the question is how does one beat the network effects that are so prevalent?
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.
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.
I don't think "remaining up" is the totality of their goals. I think what the writer of the post is getting at is that pursuing this direction leads to no outcomes better than a marginally sustained existence.
Conservatives want a place on the internet.
