[HN Gopher] Lemmy, an open-source federated Reddit alternative, ...
___________________________________________________________________
Lemmy, an open-source federated Reddit alternative, gets funding
for development
Author : jasonbourne1901
Score : 288 points
Date : 2020-06-27 19:36 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dev.lemmy.ml)
(TXT) w3m dump (dev.lemmy.ml)
| rolleiflex wrote:
| We have something similar to this, Aether. https://getaether.net.
| (code at github.com/nehbit/aether)
|
| Always glad to see more eyeballs on the space, so I wish then the
| best. Here are a few differences I can see at the first glance:
|
| - Aether is decentralised (as in torrent) this appears to be
| federated. That means Aether truly has no servers and every user
| is a peer, while federated means there are smaller 'Reddits' as
| servers that talk to each other.
|
| - By proxy that means we can't really have a web app
| unfortunately (working on it by the way of running a daemon on a
| raspberry pi) and they can - we need a native app running on your
| machine and seeding context to the network.
|
| - By another proxy, this means Aether avoids the issue of having
| a 'middle management' in the form of the ownership of your home
| server that federated networks have. You are the home server, so
| no one can control what you see. We call this user sovereignty
|
| - In Aether we have elections which elect mods based on popular
| vote and you control who is a mod, precisely because the 'social
| compiler' runs on your machine and allows you to compile it
| however you want. Two people with two different mod lists for the
| same community can see drastically different communities
|
| - We have a mod audit log and have had it for a while -
| everyone's mod actions are visible to everyone (this I think they
| also have)
|
| - Lastly, we have made the decision to not monetise Aether itself
| and create a team communication app called Aether Pro, and
| monetise that. This creates a 'Chinese wall' between where we
| make our money and the P2P network, which means it's a shield
| against drifting towards trying to make money from a social
| network. The code bases are separate but similar, so that also
| means work done on the Pro helps Aether as well. We have gotten
| some funding for the Pro, and we consider the P2P version a
| 'marketing / goodwill expense' in the context of that funding.
| That aligns us towards making sure Aether is long-term viable,
| well maintained and monetisation-free.
|
| In contrast I think they've gotten money to work directly on
| this, which has both good and more hazardous sides. In summary,
| we opted for a long term structure that has less moral hazard (in
| my opinion, of course), in favour of a more stable app without a
| need for monetisation that has fewer, more stable releases.
|
| For context, here's how a recent thread looks on my Aether
| client: https://i.imgur.com/45tXQEO.png
| DevKoala wrote:
| Excellent. I am trying this. Thank you.
| rolleiflex wrote:
| Please do! We have a small, friendly community. Always glad
| to see new faces. Let me know if you have any issues.
| rglullis wrote:
| > By another proxy, this means Aether avoids the issue of
| having a 'middle management' (...) so no one can control what
| you see.
|
| This _right here_ is the main thing that will never let any
| fully-decentralized system become mainstream. Two problems:
|
| - Most people _do_ want "middle-management". They don't want
| to deal with security risks, technical issues, understanding
| how the protocol works just to be able to share memes and score
| points with their social peers. All they want is to open their
| browser, see what their friends/peers are posting and be done
| with it.
|
| - This trade-off between federated systems/giving up control
| _does not exist_. A federated system can degenerate into a
| fully-distributed graph. Those that want to keep full control
| over their system can easily do with a federated system: _they
| just run their own instances_.
|
| Decentralized systems for social networks fail the Zawinski
| test and do not provide one single use-case that can not be
| done with a federated alternative. I fail to see any benefit of
| pushing it except for buzzword investors.
| LockAndLol wrote:
| > Aether is a relatively large app with an Electron and Go
| toolchain, at 100,000+ lines of code. Getting it to compile
| requires setting up a correct build runtime with the latest
| versions of Go, Node (for Electron) and C dependencies and
| development environments. Expect the initial set-up to take a
| few hours. Be patient!
|
| Is Electron a hard dependency or is there a core lib that can
| be wrapped by the GUI framework of choice? And several hours of
| initial setup is pretty scary . Maybe providing a dev docker,
| snap or flatpak could get devs up and running much faster than
| that.
|
| Other than that, I love the idea of a decentralized forum. If
| there are specs I'll have a look at them to see how the
| intricacies of operating something like is were solved.
| rolleiflex wrote:
| Actually, we have recently improved on this, it's probably
| now less than half an hour of setup, at least on Linux. The
| new guide is on the Github repo: https://gist.github.com/nehb
| it/4a8c3d81d543e85c9df974f521732...
|
| We use Electron exclusively for GUI. The real app is a Go
| binary with a GRPC API. It's all fully isolated, so if you
| don't want to touch any Electron, you don't have to. Use the
| API to build a CLI app, for example.
|
| To be more specific, we have two Go binaries that we ship,
| one is the aether-backend that talks to the network, the
| other is the aether-frontend that compiles the content coming
| from the network into a social graph. Both are properly
| isolated and talk to each other _only_ over declared GRPC
| APIs. I've tried very hard to keep it hackable that way.
| ScottFree wrote:
| I'm extremely disappointed your icon isn't a picture of Lemmy
| from Motorhead.
| Afforess wrote:
| How is lemmy going to avoid the fate of the last reddit
| alternative (voat)? Voat attracted the communities banned from
| reddit, e.g the worst of the worst: jailbait, creepshots,
| beatingwomen, etc. The users most interested in an alternative to
| reddit are on average, the exact wrong type of user to help with
| the growth of a healthy community. I don't see any information on
| how being "federated" solves the hard problem of toxic
| communities, especially given that is the userbase it will
| attract.
| [deleted]
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Nothing wrong with communities like that as long as you keep
| them segregated like reddit does with each of its subreddits.
|
| If those start creeping into your politics, memes, and video
| game subreddits, then yeah you've got a rough problem.
| ryder9 wrote:
| > nothing wrong with pedophilia or nazis
| marcinzm wrote:
| >Nothing wrong with communities like that as long as you keep
| them segregated like reddit does with each of its subreddits.
|
| Which wasn't enough as I understand since those communities
| would en-mass attack other communities that they disagreed
| with.
| companyhen wrote:
| I'm a fan of https://tildes.net/ - created by an ex-reddit
| employee (creator of AutoModerator)
| FreeTrade wrote:
| member.cash is an interesting Reddit alternative. Not federated,
| but all the content is on a blockchain, so comments/users can't
| be censored, but users can filter them.
| ryeights wrote:
| What happens when illegal content is posted? Is it stuck on the
| blockchain forever?
| hkt wrote:
| Sure is!
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| I have to say, at the very least, the UI is a breath of fresh air
| compared to new Reddit. New Reddit is just...I can't quite put my
| finger on it, but it just feels awful to look at.
| glenstein wrote:
| Absolutely. It's not a bad interface, and for better or for
| worse I think this is critically important to get right, and
| was a huge part of Mastodon's success. I think so many other
| well-intentioned projects fail because of inscrutable
| interfaces, so it is good to see the UI taken seriously.
| ehsankia wrote:
| While I agree that new reddit is awful, I still much prefer old
| reddit to this. Also what's up with this new trend of having
| the main content width-restricted, but not the header [0]? The
| new GitHub UI that went live this week has the exact same
| problem on wide screens. What kind of UX designer ever approved
| such a mess and why do so many sites do this?
|
| The main UI itself, again very width restricted, but also has
| strange paddings [1] which limit severely the area for the
| title (which is the most important UI element). Doesn't really
| make sense to me.
|
| [0] https://i.imgur.com/gZEWEdJ.png
|
| [1] https://i.imgur.com/nayP548.png
| buzzert wrote:
| Agreed. At least old Reddit didn't require JS to load
| anything a didn't show spinners every time you clicked on
| something.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| > Also what's up with this new trend of having the main
| content width-restricted, but not the header [0]?
|
| For extremely wide screens it obviously looks awkward, but
| the idea seems sound in principle.
|
| IIRC, the reason you'd want to restrict width of content is
| that it's hard for your eyes to track back all the way left,
| to the start of the content, when you need to go down a line.
| But the header is just a single line, so it doesn't have this
| problem.
| markdown wrote:
| So many noob mistakes in the UI and I haven't even started using
| the site proper.
|
| I see a link "Create Community", this takes me to a form where I
| get to create a community. I spend time naming and describing
| this community, and then click the Submit button. At this point
| it decides to tell me that I need to use lowercase for the
| community name.
|
| So I fix that and hit Submit again. At this point I'm told I have
| to create an account first. WTF, why didn't you tell me earlier?
| If I leave this page to create an account, will you preserve what
| I've filled into this form for when I get back? Why didn't you
| just add the necessary username/password fields to this form at
| the same time you showed me the error?
|
| Anyway, so I click on the link that says Login/Signup and get a
| popup that says "Are you sure you want to leave?" Now I have to
| click again to remove this popup. Another wasted click and +1 to
| the "annoyed" meter. See above for how this could have been
| avoided by just adding the login/signup forms to the form I just
| filled out to reduce friction.
|
| Anyway, so I create an account. And it turns out the site forgot
| everything I'd done before that. Why ask me questions (make me
| fill out a "Create community" form) if you're going to
| immediately forget all my answers?
|
| Absolutely no respect for the users time. Why would you do that
| when your very existence depends on attracting more users?
| FailMore wrote:
| Nice review of the UX...
|
| If you want to take a look at something different you can try
| my side project https://taaalk.co. It's a platform for
| interviews.
|
| (Sorry for the shameless plug, I just worked hard on my UX and
| would be interested to have it judged!)
| arcturus17 wrote:
| The problems in UX/UI in what I've tried span from fundamental
| interaction design down to code.
|
| I guess it's a young project, so lots can be improved. I think
| the problems you mention are bad but they sound fixable.
|
| I'd think about contributing or at least start by running my
| own instance and tweaking the interface to my liking. I'll also
| need to check if Inferno is worth learning.
| cateye wrote:
| There is huge need for such an application.
|
| Hope that it becomes moderately successful. If it becomes too
| successful, it will become victim of it's success like Reddit.
| notkaiho wrote:
| It will absolutely need popular support to attain some sort of
| critical mass, and not just among the cast-offs from other
| platforms, such as Gab, Parler etc.
| pugworthy wrote:
| What do you see as the need?
| [deleted]
| benbristow wrote:
| Looks nice. Really fast webapp too.
|
| Congrats team! Looking forward to tracking this project's
| development.
| vinay427 wrote:
| You're not kidding. This webapp is so fast (after the initial
| load) that I genuinely wouldn't be surprised if the Reddit
| mobile website intentionally adds sleeps/delays as some have
| jokingly suspected in the past. On this site, I can actually
| scroll through posts or collapse comment threads without
| wondering if my touch input and/or browser are frozen.
| arcturus17 wrote:
| Not my experience... Touching "Communities" on my iPhone
| takes a while to load.
|
| Edit: to add, while touching the buttons for the different
| sections, it seems sometimes my touches are not registering,
| requiring me to try again.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| A brand new site doesn't have many features yet. The more
| features you add the slower it'll get.
| bserge wrote:
| New Reddit doesn't need sleep/delays, it's already slow as
| molasses heh.
|
| If not for old.reddit.com, my time on Reddit would've gone
| way down :/
| revnode wrote:
| I wish that was the only problem with the new Reddit ... it
| frequently crashes my browser. No other website does this.
| emersion wrote:
| This sounds like a browser bug tbh.
| takeda wrote:
| My understanding was that s/he was referring to the new UI.
| Actually Reddit makes it hard to be on the old interface, I
| have to use browser extension to completely avoid the new
| UI.
| taurath wrote:
| A federated reddit system needs ways to lock down user accounts.
| That it's basically 4chan in terms of anonymity gives too much of
| an open door to extremists and trolls. I don't see any difference
| between this and voat except the assumption of goodwill rather
| than being centered around right wing extremism.
| posguy wrote:
| The fediverse has proven quite resilient to trolls, bots and
| numerous other challenges as users and instance operators can
| block other users and instances, (or mute/content warn media)
| among numerous other moderation tools to prevent bad actors
| from destroying the signal to noise ratio of each instance.
| omnimus wrote:
| There is also https://tildes.net/ that is also open-source.
| LockAndLol wrote:
| Is it federated though?
| stormdennis wrote:
| I'd like a "reddit" that wasn't a confusing mess to navigate on a
| browser on my phone and wasn't always trying to get me to use the
| app. It could do worse than take lessons from the design of HN. A
| separate HN clone for each subreddit.
| proc0 wrote:
| Love the name, love Motorhead. Here's a Lemmy quote: "Apparently
| people don't like the truth, but I do like it; I like it because
| it upsets a lot of people. "
| golemiprague wrote:
| I don't know how it is in the US but outside it seems like
| messaging apps replace the functionality of reddit/twitter for
| the less lefty inclined people, Telegram is a good example.
| Unlike Gab/Voat messaging apps already got a huge user base so
| statistically they don't become a cesspool of the most extreme
| views, right or left, but they are not moderated so all voices
| can find a place to be heard.
| embit wrote:
| Once upon a time, open source federated reddit was called Usenet.
| imrelaxed wrote:
| Seems to be crashing on my end.
| sq_ wrote:
| Same here. Must be getting the HN hug of death.
| gpm wrote:
| > dessalines (mod, admin, creator) 23 minutes ago > > We have
| > 2200 connections to the server right now, its a DDOS. Rust
| seems to be handling it fine, but the nginx is having issues.
|
| https://dev.lemmy.ml/post/35712
|
| Sounds about right - I'm amused that whoever saw this thought
| it was a ddos though.
|
| dessalines - if you're reading this - I expect looking at
| referrers would be a good way to (manually) diagnose real
| attacks vs people becoming interested in your site.
| readnews1 wrote:
| "Reddit alternative" "open source federated"
|
| What is the difference between this and usenet
| takeda wrote:
| I agree with you that Reddit basically overlaps this area, but
| I don't think access to Usenet is easy these days (ignoring
| paid services that are optimized for downloading files).
|
| Although if anyone knows good servers (ISPs no longer seem to
| offer them) or even better a way to connect own server to
| Usenet, I'm interested.
| generatorguy wrote:
| You might be on to something! repackage an nntp server with a
| web front end in a docker container and away you go
| readnews1 wrote:
| @zzo38computer (can you tag people on this website????)
| [deleted]
| as1mov wrote:
| One thing that stands out to me is lemmy has public modlogs[1],
| this is a great feature in my opinion. Something that should be
| more common.
|
| Quite a few people on reddit are frustrated by how opaque
| moderation is, but looking at the meta community of power users
| that seems to mod the bigger subs, I doubt the devs will ever
| copy this feature.
|
| [1]: https://dev.lemmy.ml/modlog
| Traster wrote:
| The entire moderation aspect of reddit is a disaster that only
| goes un-examined because there's so many other glaring issues
| with reddit. You can piss off a random guy with no affiliation
| or responsibility towards reddit and get banned from basically
| 90+% of reddit's content.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| I moderate a couple of subreddits and agree moderation is a
| disaster. For popular subs, moderators are basically swamped in
| a never-ending avalanche of shit. Even if you want to be a good
| mod, doing so for the long haul is an insane time commitment.
|
| The fact that being banned from one sub doesn't usually get you
| banned from another sub is totally understandable, but combined
| with how easy it is to make a new account, in practice it's
| just never-ending whack-a-mole with shithead posters.
| erulabs wrote:
| Congratulations! Just discovering Lemmy! Federated software is
| excellent - I'll have to write a home-hosting tutorial for this!
| badrabbit wrote:
| Sorry, don't like the name. Also, when you say a reddit
| alternative, to me it gives the impression that the redditor
| culture will remain so why would I sacrifice the content rich
| reddit for a new platform? Federation doesn't mean much to me as
| a user that justs wants [social]entertainment and news (and
| commentary on them).
|
| There's only one thing that can change my mind a little: if you
| guarantee email is not and will never be required to sign up or
| use a feature. Edit: if you think this is irrelevant, consider
| how both reddit (until recently) and HN didn't require email for
| signup, also the majority lurker population and importance of
| lurker-> user conversion. If email is your hill to die on, it
| will also be mine and I hope a majority of lurkers' hill to die
| on against you.
|
| As a techie I support federated and decentralized systems but as
| a user, how the platorm is architected is irrelevant, my
| experience is all I care about. Also,how will it monetize? Ads?
| If so I will stay with reddit. Non-crypto payment? Yeah, crappy
| reddit is better.
| rglullis wrote:
| Is paying in crypto that much of a feature for you? Honestly
| curious about it.
|
| I have been working on hosted Mastodon/XMPP/Matrix and I would
| definitely consider adding Lemmy to my list of supported
| services. If I can get authentication via LDAP for it, even
| better and quicker.
|
| The one thing stopping me from a bigger announcement is that I
| am yet to finish my crypto payment integration. If you are
| indeed interesting in something like this, can I reach out to
| you once it's ready?
| badrabbit wrote:
| I pay 3x the price for protonmail just so I can buy crypto at
| an inflated price with cash and pay for my email. Yes it is
| critical for me. I and many others are willing to pay up for
| a service that respects our privacy and asks for consent
| before selling us out.
| rglullis wrote:
| Thank you! You just helped me validate all of the work I've
| been doing for the past 7-8 months.
|
| Can I contact you in a few days outside of here? If so,
| how? Keybase?
| mahathu wrote:
| >There's only one thing that can change my mind a little: if
| you guarantee email is not and will never be required to sign
| up or use a feature.
|
| I'm not trying to play the devils advocate here, just genuinely
| curious: Why do you (or anyone else) have such a strong opinion
| on not using emails for signing up? Usually, when a service
| requires me to enter an email, I have no issue with using a
| service like 10minutemail and never checking that email account
| again.
| badrabbit wrote:
| I have spoken about this many times on HN. It comes down to
| this: email is being used in many nefarious ways and it is an
| ancient protocol with many insecurities. Anonymous email
| works for a bit but then every service worth using starts
| banning the providers. Both reddit and HN prospered as a
| result of not requiring email, that should tell you a lot
| about how horrible it is. It's on the same level as social
| security numbers being used as a secure secret that
| identifies a person. Email was not meant to be abusef this
| way, and I have seen first hand how it can be used against
| people so I have chosen it as my figurative "hill to die on".
|
| Now, if I can give a limited use address that cant be tied to
| me as an individual,expires after a period of time and
| messages are E2EE encrypted with no metadata leakage I don't
| mind that.
|
| I have spent almost an entire day trying to sign up to one
| service withour having to give up my phone number,real
| IP,creditcard or real email address to anyone as a challenge.
| I have tried countless anonymous email providers and sms code
| receiving services. I failed. Email abd phone number
| collection is a modern tech evil for me.
| judge2020 wrote:
| The problem is always 'how do i allow this user to reset
| their password', or more 'how do i verifiably contact the
| user'/'how do i verify someone emailing support is who they
| say they are' - without email, it's completely on the user
| to know and remember their password, something a lot of
| people can't do (and most don't use a p/w manager). HN does
| fine here since it's a 'tech' community where the majority
| likely does use a password manager, and Reddit gets away
| with it since their UI is so quiet about the email being
| optional - almost everyone thinks it's a required field
| since other websites require it and it looks just like the
| u/p field.
| badrabbit wrote:
| If you choose to opt out of email then you also choose to
| opt out of email support and being able to reset
| passwords via email. Two factor auth solutions let you
| store a one time recovery code for example that you write
| down or store somewhere safe, that's one option if you
| care to support it but I wouldn't mind losing the email
| only features you mentioned either.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| > If you choose to opt out of email then you also choose
| to opt out of email support and being able to reset
| passwords via email.
|
| And the users will get mad and blame the service
| provider. That said users are dumb/wrong or whatever is
| irrelevant, what matters to the business is that they're
| pissing off users and getting a bad reputation. Thus,
| requiring emails from the user is entirely rational and
| in fact is a good business practice.
| notkaiho wrote:
| Exactly, it's not like you can't create a genuinely anonymous
| email address for a one-off purpose.
| badrabbit wrote:
| Yes it's actully like that. Those services get blocked but
| why do I have to use a third party when you can just make
| emails optional. If many users dont feel comfortable giving
| up their email, just make it optinal. You cant expect my
| support when you don't care about forcing me to jump
| through hoops because you don't care about my privacy
| preferences.
| notkaiho wrote:
| I'd genuinely be curious as to some statistics about how
| many users do feel strongly about using an email /
| generating an email. I get that you feel that way, but to
| what extent is it a common feeling?
| MintelIE wrote:
| People don't trust companies who want an email address. You
| get extra spam, the company or their successors and partners
| sell the email address, poorly secured computers and cloud
| nonsense almost ensure it'll be stolen, and nowadays if you
| have an incorrect opinion you could easily be doxxed, even by
| people inside of these big tech companies and startups.
|
| You may not care about these issues, and you might have the
| correct opinions for now which don't irritate the tech
| overlords. But lots of people have learned the hard way that
| providing an email address is, at the very best, going to
| result in spam. At the worst? You could be physically
| assaulted, lose your job to an outrage mob...
| tetris11 wrote:
| Its am easy way to filter bots though, and its similarly
| easy for actual users to use disposable emails
| SiNiquity wrote:
| Requiring an email isn't a (good) way to filter bots
| though.
| badrabbit wrote:
| Bots cant use anonymous email? Seriously?
| detaro wrote:
| What makes it easy to distinguish disposable emails
| belonging to bots from those belonging to humans?
| MattGaiser wrote:
| And which of these problems is not solved by 10minutemail?
| fxtentacle wrote:
| They'll ban it once they notice.
| badrabbit wrote:
| Thank you! Everyone wants to lecture about anonymous
| emails, I think they havn't tried to use them for
| anything serious.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| I have used them for everything from Stack Exchange to
| Quora. Only yopmail seems to be banned consistently.
| badrabbit wrote:
| All of them
| MattGaiser wrote:
| It makes the spam irrelevant as you never see it, it
| makes it being sold irrelevant as again, you never see
| it. It can be stolen and nobody can tie it back to you.
| badrabbit wrote:
| This isn't 2003. Bots are litetally backed my humans that
| sit all day creating bit accounts. There is an industry
| behind bypassing simple things like this. Why cant bots
| register a million domains are receive a million account
| registration emails?
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > There's only one thing that can change my mind a little: if
| you guarantee email is not and will never be required to sign
| up or use a feature.
|
| Why is this so important? You can just use any temp email
| service to sign up and never deal with it again.
| badrabbit wrote:
| You cannot after a while. You have to rely on that service
| not being blocked for registration and i would also need the
| anonymous email service to not require email,cc payments or
| phone number. Either way, they dont need email to provide a
| service and the karma/voting system stops bots. If I can
| easily register anonymous email and signup,so can bots so
| whats the point? To make me jump over many hoops and hope i
| make a mistake? Just to prove a point ? Make privacy a
| difficult task so normal people wont bother and leak enough
| info to be used against them? No thanks, you don't have my
| support.
| Kinrany wrote:
| There's a different type of interaction: a community that needs
| a place for its members.
|
| As an organizer, you don't want to host it yourself, but you'd
| also prefer not to depend on a single provider. Federation
| makes that possible.
| [deleted]
| mfkp wrote:
| Not a good sign when the website doesn't load:
| https://i.imgur.com/Us1mwrD.jpg
| bo1024 wrote:
| I had several problems trying to get the page to load. After
| allowing it to use lots of javascript-related resources, it
| eventually loaded but took a while to display the actual text,
| on a fast internet connection. Unfortunate.
| superkuh wrote:
| > JavaScript is required for this page.
|
| Yeah, I'm out. That was a problem with the federated reddit-alike
| notabug.io too. It was just one giant javascript application, not
| html. And doing "pre-rendering" of the javascript on the host
| machine made the VPS costs too much to be tenable for people to
| federate.
| LockAndLol wrote:
| Prerendering of the JavaScript? What do mean by that? Don't you
| mean prerendering HTML?
| superkuh wrote:
| I do. I just worded it badly. I meant "pre-rendering of the
| javascript" to mean executing JS on the server and then
| sending the resulting actual html/css.
| shawndumas wrote:
| The "forgot password" link does not work. (On mobile so I did not
| dig in and see if there were any errors in the console.)
| nickdothutton wrote:
| I'm hopeful something good will come of this. I wrote this about
| LinkedIn but most of it could easily apply to a Reddit
| alternative, I love HN but would love to see a broader platform
| that didnt become cancerous. https://blog.eutopian.io/building-a-
| better-linkedin/
| ativzzz wrote:
| > didnt become cancerous
|
| Ultimately any platform big enough becomes cancerous unless it
| has sponsors who are willing to fund the platform without
| turning a profit, like HN is funded by ycombinator (though
| notice how over time there are more and more hiring
| advertisements for ycombinator companies).
|
| The bigger a platform becomes, the more expensive it becomes to
| maintain; the people who were volunteers at first have to
| either monetize to be able to continue supporting the platform,
| or they have to sell the company to someone who can support it.
|
| Once money is brought into the equation, a community starts to
| slowly deteriorate, as money slowly starts taking over all
| aspects of the platform, which is nothing more than human
| nature.
| artembugara wrote:
| The website is down only for me
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Neat, but the big test for a discussion platform like this is
| what happens when they get big enough to matter, to get the
| attention of journalists looking for a scoop.
|
| It's easy to slide by with haphazard (or no) moderation when
| you're small. Discussion extremists (trolls, bigots, and the
| like) are less attracted to smaller platforms; they'd prefer
| bigger ones, if any would take them.
|
| I'm curious what will happen with the central listing of
| communities if a particularly vile community gains popularity. If
| there's a community unapologetically dedicated to, say, neo-
| nazism, and they like to do things like praise Hitler or discuss
| ways they can kill racial minorities, do they still get listed?
| How will others feel about that?
| MattGaiser wrote:
| How is this going to avoid becoming like Voat?
|
| 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.
| bluedino wrote:
| 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.
| intothemild wrote:
| Looks like ownership will be transferred.. but we're talking
| about Lowtax here.. he's rather unpredictable
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| > 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'.
| zackees wrote:
| 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.
| phoe-krk wrote:
| 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.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| 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.
| input_sh wrote:
| "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
| user@example.com, 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.
| phoe-krk wrote:
| https://fediverse.party/
| young_unixer wrote:
| 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.
| philipkglass wrote:
| 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.
| austincheney wrote:
| I left Reddit. I got tired of the echo chamber nonsense and
| deleted my account.
| Thorentis wrote:
| 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.
| raldi wrote:
| The only redditlike sites that outcompete Reddit are ones with
| _more_ moderation (e.g., HN), not less.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| 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).
| ralusek wrote:
| 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.
| antepodius wrote:
| Because it isn't about protecting yourself from harm,
| it's about attacking people you hate.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| 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.
| antepodius wrote:
| 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.)
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| > 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.
| antepodius wrote:
| 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.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| 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.
| fastball wrote:
| 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.
| ralusek wrote:
| I don't think HN outcompetes Reddit...
|
| Also, Reddit has more moderation than Reddit. Subreddits
| exist for a reason.
| asjw wrote:
| Moderation hides content
|
| 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
|
| Worse is better always wins
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| 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.
| chinesempire wrote:
| That's the nature of discussion when there is someone who
| controls the discussion.
|
| 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.
|
| Decentralisation is exactly about that: it empowers you
| and not someone else to decide what you like to read or
| not.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| > 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.
| chinesempire wrote:
| It works because I decide.
|
| 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
| uber 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?
|
| Of course they don't...
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| > 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.
| chinesempire wrote:
| > This only works for small communitie
|
| That's simply not true
|
| Ad blocking works because I decide what to block, not
| because the websites posting the ads are moderating them
| in a good way
|
| Let me decide, is it really that scary?
|
| My email account is not on Gmail, I manage the spam, and
| it's ridiculously easy to get just the content I want and
| delete everything else
|
| It's hard to scale it for hundreds of accounts
| automatically, but it's not on a personal level
|
| Forums are about what I want to read, not about what it's
| good for me because a platform says so.
|
| "People have the power" Patty Smith used to say
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| > Ad blocking works because I decide what to block
|
| Ad blocking isn't a community, 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.
| chinesempire wrote:
| 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.
| rglullis wrote:
| 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.
| zacharycohn wrote:
| How is that different than Reddit, except with less ability
| to control cross-subreddit brigading?
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > Don't like a instances because it is run by a deplorable?
| Don't subscribe to it.
|
| How is that different from how Reddit/Voat currently are?
| rglullis wrote:
| 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.
| judge2020 wrote:
| 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.
| rglullis wrote:
| 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.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| 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.
| simias wrote:
| But I already see many "subreddits" (here called communities)
| on the main website: https://dev.lemmy.ml/communities
|
| 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.
| rglullis wrote:
| 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.
| hypersoar wrote:
| 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.
| badRNG wrote:
| 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."
| snapetom wrote:
| 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.
| detaro wrote:
| 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.
| kiba wrote:
| All good alternatives will have rule, thus moderation.
|
| Where does the line between "free speech" and moderation
| exists?
| xupybd wrote:
| 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.
| badRNG wrote:
| 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.
| detaro wrote:
| 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.
| Miner49er wrote:
| raddle.me is a reddit alternative created by lefists after
| being banned on Reddit. It hasn't been taken over by the
| far right.
| badRNG wrote:
| 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.
| Deimorz wrote:
| 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.arch
| ive.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.
| hadrien01 wrote:
| I believe the first migration to Voat wasn't for a
| subreddit ban, but when upvote/downvote counts on comments
| became hidden
| Deimorz wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| dbbljack wrote:
| ezpz dont federate with racists
| detaro wrote:
| Voat explicitly branded itself like that.
|
| In comparison, a large source of Fediverse users (Mastodon etc)
| are people that leave Twitter because they think it isn't
| moderated well enough.
| aqme28 wrote:
| Hilarious to make that comment on HackerNews. This site is
| undeniably a reddit competitor, but it doesn't feel like a
| cesspool to me.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| 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.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| There are a few Reddit-alikes that aren't cesspools. They have
| guidelines for contributions and a moderation policy for people
| who don't meet them.
| jchw wrote:
| 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!)
| holidaygoose wrote:
| 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.
| gregf wrote:
| I would say reddit is on the far left not the far right, you
| can't have any opinion that isn't towards the left on reddit
| with being attacked.
| lodovic wrote:
| No moderation: right wing posts flourish. Strong moderation:
| left wing posts flourish.
| antepodius wrote:
| 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!
| antepodius wrote:
| 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.)
| jka wrote:
| 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.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _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.
| ativzzz wrote:
| > 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.
| Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote:
| 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.
| glenstein wrote:
| >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.
| swebs wrote:
| 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.
| winstonewert wrote:
| 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.
| rsynnott wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| jboynyc wrote:
| You might be interested in what one of the foremost
| sociologists studying white supremacy online has to say about
| this: https://contexts.org/articles/the-algorithmic-rise-of-
| the-al...
| seneca wrote:
| 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.
| nebulosa wrote:
| > 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.
| marcinzm wrote:
| >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.
| badRNG wrote:
| 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.
| agensaequivocum wrote:
| > 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.
| rsynnott wrote:
| 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.
| agensaequivocum wrote:
| > 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.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| 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.
| badRNG wrote:
| 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.
| agensaequivocum wrote:
| > advocacy for the genocide of black people, Jews, trans
| people
|
| 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.
|
| > vitriol on the left against billionaires and cops, but
| these are positions of power, not identity groups one is
| born into.
|
| Doesn't make it okay.
| earthscienceman wrote:
| 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?
|
| I'll let James Baldwin do the talking:
|
| https://youtu.be/c3n-cI4wXCM?t=34
| agensaequivocum wrote:
| > 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.
| agensaequivocum wrote:
| > I love how you explicitly avoided the use of the word
| gender
|
| Maybe because sex is a more accurate term.
|
| > don't actually address that you're uncomfortable that
| some people don't fit into the social boxes of male and
| female.
|
| So? What's your point? Male and female on not simple
| social boxes. There are real biological and physical
| differences between them.
| nebulosa wrote:
| > 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.
| agensaequivocum wrote:
| > 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.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| 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.
| agensaequivocum wrote:
| > It's an argument around taking away the rights of a
| certain group of people
|
| It's not a right to be in the military. You also don't
| have a right to my services. So if I don't want to make a
| cake because I don't agree with a homosexual lifestyle or
| maybe because I have issue with the Catholic faith that
| it well within my right.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| 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.
| badRNG wrote:
| > 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.
| agensaequivocum wrote:
| > 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.
| seph-reed wrote:
| Smart people use their brain to avoid conflict and end up
| kind of weak in that context. They don't stand their ground.
| Typically the lean left.
|
| Far-right definitely stand their ground, and can easily go
| unfazed by logical arguments.
|
| Dicks fuck pussies. We need assholes to shit on the dicks.
| [deleted]
| nebulosa wrote:
| 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.
| austincheney wrote:
| > become far-right oriented?
|
| 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.
| BosunoB wrote:
| 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.
| wnevets wrote:
| or keep getting kicked off of the other platforms.
|
| or duplicate accounts to give the illusion of larger numbers.
|
| For example there are a lot of Reddit accounts created with
| in the 3 months or so very active on the same post pushing
| the same agenda.
| throwvid19 wrote:
| 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.
|
| And even some lefties!
| paulv wrote:
| > 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.
| throwvid19 wrote:
| Well put.
|
| The Left typically wants to silence/ignore while the
| Right typically wants to fight/berate about it.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| 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.
| paulv wrote:
| Berating people to the point that they leave the
| discussion is the same thing as silencing.
|
| Also, "berating" is a kind word. We're talking about "I
| have the right to exist" vs "we should systematically
| exterminate/enslave people like you"
| heavyset_go wrote:
| 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.
| Acrobatic_Road wrote:
| Oh, but they definitely do exist. On 08chan, 0chan, and
| millchan they do not have post moderators. Anything goes
| including illegal content.
| fiblye wrote:
| 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.
| osmarks wrote:
| I'd expect that it's because if you have some new forum
| without (as many) restrictions, you get both:
|
| - people who disagree with the restrictions of other places
| on principle and want a freer alternative
|
| - people who can't say what they want to anywhere else,
| because it's generally disliked
|
| and most people probably do not want to read stuff from the
| second group.
| rsynnott wrote:
| 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.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| 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".
| throwvid19 wrote:
| Not as bigoted?
|
| Large swaths of the Left don't hate:
|
| - men?
|
| - whites?
|
| - straight people?
|
| - conservatives?
|
| - police?
|
| - people who live in rural parts of the country?
|
| There may be a ton of rationalizations for those rather
| bigoted perspectives, but it doesn't make them any less
| bigoted.
|
| Heck, the white supremacists have a whole bunch of
| rationalizations of their own. Does that make theirs okay?
|
| [Edited: formatting]
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| 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.
| earthscienceman wrote:
| 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.
| TheGrim-888 wrote:
| I live in Seattle and the city is now entirely covered in
| grafiti suggesting that we should kill police, white
| people, Trump, etc. They march in the streets every night
| in Capitol Hill as a show of force, surrounding cars and
| forcing them out to join the march. The left is on video
| spending days/weeks literally burning cars/buildings,
| rioting, looting stories, which everyone already stopped
| caring about. They're 1984 style trying to rewrite
| history by destroying statues, deplatforming and
| censoring any dissenting opinions. The left has clashed
| with the police and forcefully taken a chunk of my city,
| an American city, and claimed it as an autonomous zone
| that America and law and order no longer applies to. It's
| apparently hate speech for Trump to suggest that we
| should enforce rule of law and stop the left's violence,
| but everything the left is doing is perfectly fine, and
| gets support from mass media and every major tech
| company.
|
| Now imagine the opposite scenario. Imagine if a bunch of
| Republicans started literally burning cities to the
| ground, or taking over a section of an American city, or
| spray painting that all blacks should die. Imagine if a
| bunch of Republicans started erasing every Democrat hero
| from the history books. If a bunch of Republicans decided
| that law and order no longer mattered. People would be
| screaming that Nazis had taken over and the military
| needed to be sent in, and how the country was lost. But
| the left does it? A-OK.
| earthscienceman wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3n-cI4wXCM&feature=youtu
| .be...
| augustt wrote:
| Hmm, yes, imagine if a bunch Republicans took over a
| government building, armed to the teeth. I can't fathom
| it.
| earthscienceman wrote:
| Wait now. Let's be honest with ourselves here. There's a
| big difference between these situations. The police
| didn't throw tear gas at the republicans.
| earthscienceman wrote:
| 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".
| ianleeclark wrote:
| 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.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| 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.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Everyone else has no strong reason to leave the existing
| platform.
| agensaequivocum wrote:
| There are quite a few people on the left in the gun
| community who do.
| shahsyed wrote:
| That's a pretty general statement, one that I would avoid
| without proof or evidence.
| colordrops wrote:
| 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.
| as1mov wrote:
| 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.
| Jimjamb98 wrote:
| 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).
| CM30 wrote:
| 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.
| moomin wrote:
| 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.)
| needAnAltHN wrote:
| Moderation is extremely difficult. I can't say HN is done
| well because there is a heavy subjective hand.
|
| The only thing good are the vast majority of users here
| have good intention. If only HN had multiple boards with
| various mods.
| jedberg wrote:
| 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.
| kortilla wrote:
| 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).
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > I would love to switch to a better alternative
|
| I would love to switch to Reddit from 2008.
| pelasaco wrote:
| I would love to switch to the World from 2008...
| harel wrote:
| I'll take the 90s please... we all wanna go back to some
| period of time where the memories evoke the strongest
| feeling...
| natdempk wrote:
| What are you thoughts on tildes? In my experience the
| community there is reasonable and definitely not filled with
| nazis.
| dorkinspace wrote:
| 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.
| foolfoolz wrote:
| there's extremists on every platform
| as1mov wrote:
| 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).
| strombofulous wrote:
| 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
| [deleted]
| pjc50 wrote:
| 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.
| sampo wrote:
| > /r/the_donald
|
| They shut it down. 0 new posts for past 3 months.
| evan_ wrote:
| Reddit didn't shut them down, the mods of r/t_d set it to
| only approved posters and nobody is approved.
| encom wrote:
| Yes, they moved to https://thedonald.win/
| as1mov wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| hcal wrote:
| 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.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| There is poo on every surface. The key question is the
| amount of poo relative to the other stuff.
| edw wrote:
| 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?
| gpm wrote:
| 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.
| rhizome wrote:
| > _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?
| beervirus wrote:
| I learn stuff on HN every time I visit. Reddit is
| (somewhat) entertaining, but I don't usually learn
| anything important there.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| I do it as I would otherwise be playing video games. If I
| have a big project going on, I'll ignore Reddit and
| Hacker News for weeks.
|
| I also learn a lot of new stuff.
| glenstein wrote:
| 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.
| kelnos wrote:
| 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.
| rhizome wrote:
| 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.
| djsumdog wrote:
| Voat attempted several design choices to make it solve certain
| complaints about Reddit, and most of those choices ended up
| being terrible ideas:
|
| https://battlepenguin.com/tech/voat-what-went-wrong/
|
| I think the right answer is federation. Having a lot of
| instances moderated by different people gives people a lot more
| freedom of choice.
| glenstein wrote:
| >How is this going to avoid becoming 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.
| bennysonething wrote:
| The Reddit redesign made Reddit ridiculously unusable. Also like
| the web in general the more users it got the horrible it became.
| The stardard of content fell through the floor. The stanard of
| comments did the same. It went from be a pretty free market
| liberal types to angry left wing reactionaries over the course of
| a few years. It felt like the users got younger and younger until
| one day I saw a pic bunch of high school students egged on by
| their teachers holding a "socialism now" banner, this was front
| page.
| antepodius wrote:
| I think the lesson might just to move on from sites whenever
| they get too big and cancerous.
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