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.
When I saw lemmy my first thought was that I wanted to host my own instance of this once federation works.
I'm already hosting mastodon and synapse instances for the community. I believe strongly in hosting small federated community instances. This hobby costs me about 80USD/mon.
I wasn't particular enough. I pay around 80USD/month for a 4G/2CPU/3node k8s cluster where I'm able to host Mastodon, Synapse, Riot-web and Elasticsearch. Included in the price is a persistent volume of 20G and object storage for media.
The media storage is dirt cheap but it grows with the instance and users. One major issue some instance admins have is a lot of users uploading a lot of data.
My instance is very small and also blocked registrations to EU.
I expect to have enough capacity left over in my existing cluster to also host lemmy.
You can host a mastodon instance on a small server that doesn't cost this much, and you can pool the money with a few friends to have your own community for a few €/month :).
I remember people doing it with TeamSpeak, Minecraft, Counter-strike, etc. server, its the same !
That sort of cost is not necessary unless you're hosting a larger community. I run synapse (for myself, but it's idling at quite a low load so it could easily support more people) on a $10 USD/month Linode. For personal use you could get by on a $5 Nanode, but I'm using my VPS for other things, too.
The great thing about federation is that you don't have to host an entire community; just a slice of it.
No not all instances, unless you write a script using their API.
The public timeline of all instances is by default public, without authentication. So technically you could scrape them.
Also I must advocate relaying. ActivityPub relays are very simple servers that receive all posts from any subscribed instance. Not just mastodon either, multiple AP services supported.
And then relays those posts to all subscribed instances.
Relaying does wonders for the public timeline of a small localized instance.
Their rules are a lot stricter than Reddit’s. I’m not sure how that in practice works with it being federated, but assuming their rules are enforceable and enforced it looks like they’re just not interested in that content.
They lump porn (presumably also artistic nudity) along with hate speech, racism and so on as banned discourse. You're not even allowed to have a sexual alias.
This is not necessarily a bad thing for users - I often wish for a place similar to hacker news but with a wider range of topics - however, it almost certainly means they will never reach Reddit levels of popularity.
I do think that Reddit fills an important niche - a place where any topic is open for discussion, including porn and other forbidden topics like drugs. It's just unfortunate that the company currently ruling this niche is so morally bereft that they can't tell the difference between open discussion and fueling hate speech.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to convey though?
We can't just say, "The boundaries of hate speech are unclear, so we'll do nothing and have uncensored speech." This experiment has been tried over and over again, with uniformly bad results.
Early Reddit isn't what what most would call a "bad result". Ditto for early 4chan and for a lot of smaller communities that have very little restrictions on content beyond civility and anti-spamming.
The problem is that having uncensored speech doesn't scale, because eventually you'll become big enough to attract media scrutiny, which inevitably cherry-picks the worst parts of the user base. This cause 1) advertisers to pull out and 2) starts attracting more of the wrong type of users.
My point was, that it is hard and the lines are blurry.
But actually I do believe in the concept of unrestricted speech.
But I really don't know when was the last time, that was tried. There were times, when certain topics were ok to speak freely about, like racism, yes, but at those times other topics were restricted, so what exactly are you talking about?
There's a difference between largely unrestricted speech legally (being free from gov censorship) and having an unmoderated online community. Moderation is a good thong when done correctly, it raises the quality of the conversion by keeping bad actors and off-topic/toxic comments /post out. There's value in both tightly moderated and loosely moderated communities/spaces.
The restrictions on speech in the US are confined to “imminent lawless action”, per Brandenburg v Ohio. I think the commenter to whom you are replying might be entirely fine with Reddit’s speech policy following that precedent.
And no, shouting “fire!” in a crowded theater is not illegal and is protected by the First Amendment.
In Saudia Arabia it is illegal to say, God does not exist.
(and in germany under special circumstances, too - meaning, if enough people would get angry at you saying that, it would be illegal for you to say so)
> I do think that Reddit fills an important niche - a place where any topic is open for discussion
This used to be the case years ago but Reddit is anything but open now. It's a giant echo chamber and if you harbor unpopular beliefs or opinions you are not welcome.
That sounds like it applies to contributing to the source, not to users of the software, or they really want to make sure that there are few "what programming language should I use" flame wars with rules like Respect that people have differences of opinion and that every design or implementation choice carries a trade-off and numerous costs. There is seldom a right answer.
True, but the things about bigotry and harassment seem more likely to apply to the site, unless big projects get weirdly abusive issues or PRs. And it is linked from rule 1 on the website, I’m guessing the website rules isn’t referring to rules for contributing. I think maybe it’s both. I certainly don’t get the impression they want to be a Voat style ‘Reddit for after you’re banned’, regardless.
As for CoC: I believe it's more of a signalling act than a reaction to past issues. Just like the KKK would add "no race mixing" to the rules, a left wing open source project needs to signal to their in group, and their main way of doing that is to say "no harassment based on [some criteria]".
Adding a code of conduct of that specific kind ("no being mean about weight" etc) not as a reaction to actual issues you've faced, but from the get go? Yeah, and it's a reliable signal as well. Inclusivity is one of the progressive core tenets.
Inclusivity is core to democracy, and to call that progressive in 2020... Its just doing your due diligence in the face of software dev now being done by an ever diverse population. Any association will have house rules, often with very similar stipulations, and now software projects are doing the same, such that the wheel doesn't have to be reinvented.
No, it's really not. Democracy can function just fine without everybody being included everywhere.
I don't have an issue with it if anyone finds inclusivity to be the most important issue, but it is a progressive policy, not "core to democracy". Please stop moralizing your personal political convictions. No, you're not a good person because of random political beliefs you happen to have, no, people who don't share those beliefs are not bad persons, and no, democracy does not rely on everyone sharing your beliefs.
Ancient Athens had a democracy. It also had slavery. And of course women are more like children than full adults, so they're weren't allowed to vote too.
Democracy does not require Universal Suffrage.
Also fun quote from Wikipedia: In its original 19th-century usage by reformers in Britain, universal suffrage was understood to mean only universal manhood suffrage
"No harassment based on certain criteria". The old FreeBSD code of conduct is a good example. Instead of having a blanket ban on harassment, it listed specific criteria that you couldn't harass someone about.
Some subreddits were banned because other disliked the content. Like watchpeopledie. While the sub was disgusting banning it was for me the last nail in the coffin of social networks which decide what is the best for me.
While I still use Reddit I'm looking for an alternative without the built-in censorship.
This is a really good point. Today most (if not all) social media platforms seem to be relying on a central or centralised moderation system. Meaning that the limits of the Overton window are defined by a small set of people rather than the community itself. Here, I purposefully state 'the community' rather than 'representatives of the community' as these are two very different things. Reddit for example is moderated by 'members of the community'.
If we're to take reddit as an example moderation happens by individuals rather than all members of the community. And as such it is open to abuse whether it happens or not.
I thought about this for a long time and decided to write up what I would consider to be an acceptable framework for any given social media platform which would:
1. Help define the Overton window in a more organic fashion
2. Allow the platform to function within different jurisdictions.
3. Remove the overhead of central administration and opinion checking.
> Meaning that the limits of the Overton window are defined by a small set of people rather than the community itself.
I wonder if that's even the case, or if the range of allowed opinions is rather set by advertisers and investors. If Reddit had a very large, very lucrative Pro-Life community that essentially "kept the lights on" by providing high ad revenue, I doubt that they wouldn't cater to that community's wishes. They lean strongly to the left, because their audience does, and they want their audience to be happy so they stay and watch ads on their site.
This is not true. It’s because they and their employees are ideological and believe in their own moral superiority. The media in general is not leaning strongly to the left as a business decision. They are run by people that are intolerant ideologues who morally can’t allow counter arguments and opinions to be heard or seen.
If you can't speak out or express thoughts against the rules, you are ceding your own ability to ever change the rules. Allowing a small subset of people to control the rules for the masses has never, will never, and could not ever work in a free society.
The small groups of Twitter and Reddit moderators are far too small to ever represent the diversity of human thought. You may think the rules prevent harm today, but what happens if and when they encourage harm tomorrow? What if the rules turned against you? Wouldn't you want to be able to speak out?
This just feels like a rehash of the "think about the children" argument. We should not base human communication on the idea that some grown adult somehow somewhere could have such an adverse reaction to your content that they suffer serious mental or physical harm. Especially when said communication is hidden behind NSFW spoilers and other appropriate trigger warnings. Nobody could have possibly stumbled upon r/watchpeopledie and thought it was anything other than what it said it was.
Not all rules are created equal. Reciprocity in outcome is an important differentiator and fundamental to a functioning democracy. To equate a rule like 'no guns allowed' with 'all people are granted to right to vote' would be silly and naive.
I think there is a dichotomy here, one is rules, the other is ethics, both are different discussions.
For instance, can an ethical case be made for watching people die? Is there any benefit to be gained from this beyond the first novelty factor.
(A rhetorical question, just to note that the ethical debate precedes rule making)
Ideally an ethical debate would precede rule making. But last I checked nobody who didn't already work at Reddit was involved in making those rules; there was no site-wide referendum, no discussion with users, no warning that these decisions were being made.
Every other social media giant operates the same way. To my knowledge no mainstream social network has ever polled its users for changes to its community policing model. Which is crazy, because in actual society we all have the right to vote, but online we are beholden to nameless moderators and provided no representation whatsoever. It's entirely up to chance whether your case gets seen by someone who would be sympathetic to you (assuming it even gets seen by a person instead of some glorified regex matcher posing as 'AI').
I know in tech we like to outsource lots of hard problems, but nobody should accept outsourcing their moral framework to Twitter, Inc. or Condé Nast.
> Which is crazy, because in actual society we all have the right to vote, but online we are beholden to nameless moderators and provided no representation whatsoever.
I think the decision of users to continue to spend their valuable free-time using these social media sites is their vote in this scenario.
And I don’t mean that to come across as a flippant dismissal, I really don’t.
When we consider those who like to say they simply want a place to explore unpopular ideas, people are correct to question why they keep coming back to these sites.
The wider internet has no shortage of places for these people to explore the craziest ideas imaginable, and if there isn’t a place for some idea, it takes minutes to spin a server up with already packaged freely available open-source platforms.
People are voting with their valuable free-time to go back to these platforms, it is personal preference in action.
>If you can't speak out or express thoughts against the rules, you are ceding your own ability to ever change the rules. Allowing a small subset of people to control the rules for the masses has never, will never, and could not ever work in a free society.
That's funny, I find the moderators stifle talking about the rules on Hackernews via secret shadowbans, post rate limiting, and other secret punishments...yet here you are.
Nobody "stifles talking about the rules". We answer questions every day.
When we ban an account, we don't use shadowbanning it unless it is relatively new and shows signs of spamming or trolling, or being related to past abuses [1]. When an account has an established history, we say that we're banning it and why [2].
We rate limit accounts when they post too many low-quality comments too quickly and/or get involved in flamewars [3]. We're happy to take the rate limit off (and often do) when people give us reason to believe that they'll use the site as intended in the future. Emailing hn@ycombinator.com is the best way to do that.
Creating accounts to get around these restrictions is obviously a repetition of the original abuse and will get your main account banned as well if you keep doing it, so please don't do that.
the fact that you don't inform users of shadowsbans an rate limiting without due process is pretty stifling. it's the reason i have this account, as I'm sure you know.
It's very clear that this is YOUR community. I don't think that's a bad thing, community wise. Just own it. It's OK. Being dictator-like isn't bad if you have clear goals and limited scope. It's just unfortunate that one of your goals is to squelch those who have unpopular opinions. And I'm not talking about neo-nazi white supremacy bullshit, it's clear you support that edge.
People who don't want to admit that we've banned (or rate limited) them for breaking the site guidelines always strike a noble posture as "those who have unpopular opinions" and accuse us of secretly siding with their enemies. The commenters you accuse us of supporting say exactly the same things and then some. They certainly don't think they're "supported".
The tell in comments like this is that they are linkless. Supplying the relevant links would reveal the rest of the story and let readers make up their own minds. That's why they're conspicuously missing.
> That's funny, I find the moderators stifle talking about the rules on Hackernews via secret shadowbans, post rate limiting, and other secret punishments...yet here you are.
I'm on HN because dang and the others in charge of moderating repeatedly make good faith efforts to explain their moderation philosophy and keep the rules updated and visible.
If Twitter and Reddit moderators were as public as dang were I would feel far more comfortable relying on them to make decisions for me.
I think most people would interpret "hurtful to others" as incitement to violence, but in practice what is being enforced is a much weaker, blurry and often political standard of hurting other peoples feelings.
Just because something is subjective doesn’t mean it doesn’t have merit.
Most things in the world outside of pure mathematics are subjective. If you’re looking to do nothing if it involves subjective decision making, nothing would ever get done.
All around us, all day every day, we look at a problem, we take the best info and expertise available to us, and we make a judgement call.
The fact that almost always some level of subjectivity exists doesn’t mean we do nothing.
It's probably not possible in the current universe of the web, at least not without significant attention spent solely on this issue. In general a larger social network has more value if it can help you find people who share each of your interests, e.g. there is a subreddit for all things. There will always be a group of people who are drawn to new tech, but it needs to somehow actually solve a real problem that the old website didn't for most people to try it more than once.
New platforms do solve the "oh no I've been deplatformed from Reddit" problem for... people who've been deplatformed from Reddit, so certainly it has real value for them. If Reddit swings the moderation hammer too hard, that could be certainly become a draw, but as it stands Reddit has actually banned very few communities, considering.
Getting people to use a new website in any significant numbers is really hard, and there aren't that many examples of communities that have managed it in the time the internet has been alive. It's impressive that any have managed to stay relevant for more than a couple years.
1. It needs to position itself as something other than not-reddit
2. There are a lot of issues Reddit really doesn't solve. Reddit encourages short, pithy, drive-by posts without much in the way of engagement at all. Compare old newsgroups, old forums, or even the average post here, compared to the average post (even in a niche sub) on reddit. Reddit:??Mysteryreplacement::Twitter:Blogs. I don't know what ??Mysteryreplacement will be, but there's certainly room for it.
To me those interested in an alt-reddit are interested because they want an alternative to the echo-chamber that is reddit. Those you mention could be found on any site & just have to be banned.
I believe this is more of a problem for centralized services - federation gives freedom to the user to choose the level of moderation/censorship they want - if you find certain communities distasteful, you can just join servers that block these communities.
I think it is important however to have a strong emphasis on the separation of the servers from the protocol though - no one seems to care that Nazis could use email to have their own mailing lists.
I like to compare the fediverse with the forums, TeamSpeak server, and nowaday discord server. It is not suppose to be a huge service with everybody on it a la Facebook, but rather a lot of small community that can interconnect to each other :) .
Everybody use to run a PhpBB or alternative for their own community. I remember being part of multiple of them in the early 2010. A lot of them got replaced by subreddit or facebook page, and this is what the fediverse can replace. Not the whole of reddit or Facebook, but if you want a place for you and your friends to organize your dnd party, run your minecraft server, talk about passion X or Y, the fediverse can do that :) .
When it is useful to even just one person, it is useful.
Open Source doesn't need 'masses' in order to 'be successful. A lot of people make the mistake of applying generic economics to Open Source and related communities.
A federated mastodon or Lemmy instance is successful the moment one or more people use and enjoy it, nothing more. It does not need to have huge audiences to advertise to. It does not need to have Big Data to mine and sell. It doesn't need to pay employees, offices and bonuses. All it needs is one person enjoying it. Or two people having a meaningful interaction, to be successful .
Nothing can prevent terrible people from using an open source project. Meanwhile, Reddit doesn't do much of anything about this problem either. For, example /r/metacanada exists, and white supremacists from there are also moderating /r/canada subbreddit, Reddit hasn't taken any action on that. At least the developers of Lemmy are very clear [1] about their stance regarding nazis, that's more than I can say for Reddit. It's also worth noting that Mastodon has millions of users now, and it clearly isn't attracting the worst people. In fact, I find it's a far healthier and friendlier community than Twitter.
The situation on /r/canada is heartbreaking. Over recent weeks, almost every attempt to post a news article involving civil rights or anything overtly related to Black, LGBTQ+ or Indigenous issues has been immediately zeroed down, and in many cases then removed by a mod (their favourite method is to just hit the "dupe" button on all posts about a given news item or opinion piece, claiming they're all dupes, and not leaving one up).
If you make the mistake of discussing this on any other Canadian related sub where the /r/canada mods frequent, they'll ban you for life and say that you were "brigading."
The Reddit admins don't meddle in who moderates what. They'll take action on subreddits against the ToS but if someone's a mod on both /r/EvilShitThatsProbablyIllegal and /r/Kittens it's not something they're going to do anything about — and rightly so, IMO.
Nazis tend to have a lot of dog-whistles, and it's hard to keep up with them, but I tend to assume that any site that includes direct slurs ('retard', etc) with a lot of more subtle symbols (pepe everywhere, 'globalists') and a lot of content ridiculing various minorites and 'leftists' is probably a Nazi hangout.
Taking such a strong proselytizing stance when it comes to Antifa is not exactly a good look in my eyes either as the entire situation reeks of thinking "Antifa" only means "Anti-fascist." I subscribe strongly to the horseshoe theory and Antifa is closer to those they purportedly fight against than most people are comfortable with admitting.
But hey, that's the beauty (and ugliness) of federation: I don't have to like it and I can just start my own server. On the flipside, it also means I need to be beholden to a considerable amount of social rules, some of them unwritten, if I want to federate with the majority of the servers out there. I know how it goes, I've seen it first-hand when it comes to ActivityPub instances. That's how you get cliques.
Antifa is a decentralized organization of people fighting against fascism. They don’t have a positive ideology, literally the only thing that unifies them is anti fascism. Communists, anarchists, and liberals may all call themselves antifa
Using that logic Republicans could call themselves antifa since almost everyone, Republicans included, is against fascism. It's when you define "fascism" as anything right of Trotsky that people start have issues with your ideology.
Fascism is not he only form of authoritarianism. Many people commit thuggery and intimidation against people who hold normal everyday views in the name of anti-fascist action. The name of a movement doesn't mean it can't be coopted for other purposes/drift from its original purpose. Just like the nature/culture of subreddits change over time.
If you think antifa is targeting “normal everyday views” I’m concerned about what sort of views you think those are. Do you think that neonazi and alt right organizations hold “everyday normal views”? That’s what antifa targets
If you think The Spanish Inquisition is targeting “normal everyday views” I’m concerned about what sort of views you think those are. Do you think that not acknowledging God as our one true saviour and creator and those jewish/muslim/eastern-orthodox/atheist organizations hold “everyday normal views”? That’s what the Spanish Inquisition targets?
To be fair, this seems like a generally true case of how subreddits work. Leftist subs brigade, Conservative subs brigade, star wars subs brigade, subs about watching other subs brigade still brigade. It's unsolvable so long as people that disagree are allowed to freely access each other's reddits (not that that's a bad thing).
This is what happens all across the web, regardless of software. Raiding. IRC raids, forum raids, etc. Sometimes it's for fun, sometimes it's more malicious. Most software has ways to mitigate it. Temporarily closing new registrations, invite only registrations, throttling, IP bans, etc. Just like DDoS attacks, there is no true solution to this since that's how the public web and internet works.
The problem is when those communities constitute more than half of your users, they generally do creep into all of the other subreddits.
See: 4chan. It wasn't always like it is now, but since /pol/ grew to be so big, now pretty much every board has a sizable or majority far-right contingent. It's even worse on Voat.
You’ve got to give people a space to consider both sides of every argument. Better to cordone off that space than have that discussion elsewhere.
If you tell someone NEVER GO INTO THE LAST DOOR ON THE THIRD STORY, they’ll endlessly wonder what’s inside. If you show them that it’s your amateur paintings, they’ll never care again.
We want to act like we are purely rational beings, and maybe some of us operate on that level consistently, but those of us that do not, even for a moment, are ripe to have their animal brains taken advantage of for evil.
The paradox of tolerance is an iffy justification. It's an anecdotal testament of someone who survived the Holocaust, IIRC. Not to minimize the Holocaust or any part of it. That said, as far as I've seen, there's no established historical pattern that fascism is a function of societal tolerance of intolerant ideologies.
I don’t need to have a discussion with a guy who beats his wife because he never got help for his PTSD to know it’s wrong. Giving it a platform treats it like a point of view and not a gross fucking crime.
I don’t need to talk to a Nazi to know that gassing Jews and gays is wrong.
People seem to think that there are some unexplored ideas here that merit further discussion. We have already established that this shit is not what we want. Those in doubt can read accounts of domestic violence victims or a couple of history books to educate themselves.
And here is where the SpeakWrite machine was given authority to rewrite history in order to satisfy "The Grinning Fox" as Malcom X puts it.
If you don't want to talk to those people, then don't. But to stand there and claim to speak for all of us and claim you are the authority on what topics are authorised for discussion is such an disgusting level of narcisistic meglomania that needs to be stamped out.
You're just a Totalitarian, and you should be put on a podium along side your historial commrades (and their outcomes) for all to hear and see.
This shit has happened before, and many millions were silenced into the siberian wastelands for it.
I have no idea what I just read but I’m pretty sure that even if it was a cohesive thought that it is incorrect. Look, if you want to spend your time building a platform helping extremist groups communicate and coordinate, go right ahead. I think that’s a bad idea, and yes I am fairly certain I am right. Also, as someone who lived in an actual totalitarian regime, I think I know when I see a bad faith usage of totalitarianism in an argument.
Bothsidism is a straw man argument designed to present arguments that compare practical effects of different ideologies in bad faith and give rhetoric to people who have no business making the argument in the first place.
Dismissing an argument based on rhetorical sophistry is keeping your head in the sand while trying to get others to do the same. It’s reckless.
You might not need to talk to that guy to know beating his wife was wrong. But talking to him may make you realize he’s in a lot of pain, and that he’s been hurt by a system larger than both of you. That doesn’t absolve him of guilt but I think pragmatically it gives us a better shot at preventing such things in the far future.
You don’t have to browse Nazi forums to know that gassing Jews is wrong. But you may start to discover the reasons why these (mostly) young men are so angry, which I posit allows one to do more to prevent the spread of such ideologies.
> talking to him may make you realize he’s in a lot of pain, and that he’s been hurt by a system larger than ...
I'd look at fat-people-hate and beat-women subreddits more like bank robberers planning their next attack on a bank, discussing weapons, and having a good time looking at viedos of robberies from the past.
Then you can visit them and tell them "But it's wrong to rob banks, it's not your money and think of the poor people working in the bank, they'll get PTSD".
Or you say "Let's discuss the big underlying systematic problem that is larger than all of us, and makes you rob banks, and how to solve it"
Then you get banned from that subreddit, and the bank robberers continue enjoying robbing banks.
> Then you get banned from that subreddit, and the bank robberers continue enjoying robbing banks.
Bank robbers don't rob banks because they enjoy robbing banks. Bullys don't bully because "omg wow have you tried bullying it so great".
I'm all with you that bullying sucks, but if you want bullying to stop, you better damn well understand the motivation. If you reach for "they are just evil people", you're not thinking hard enough.
There is a difference in talking to someone to understand a problem and providing a communications platform for them to connect to other bullies in order to form a community that validates the practice. How in the world is that so difficult to see?
Say you build walkie talkies, and a member of the KKK shows up and says he needs 100 of them because they are rioting in a black neighborhood tonight and need a way to coordinate their plans. Do you say “sure in fact take some for free!” just so you can listen in to understand exactly how they are terrorizing their black neighbors, or do you tell them to fuck off because you don’t want to provide tools to a hate group?
> But you may start to discover the reasons why these (mostly) young men are so angry, which I posit allows one to do more to prevent the spread of such ideologies.
The hypothesis that forums dedicated to the spread of neo-Nazism can be effectively used in such a way actually help the world do more to prevent the spread of such ideologies is largely unproven.
Unlike the fact that the dissemination and social reinforcement of Nazi propaganda is an efficient way to help people in a lot of pain 'realize' that the 'real' cause of their problem is Jews.
What you say has a kernel of truth to it, but I think you are thinking of the wrong tool for the job. There was a well studied psychological phenomenon (sorry I can’t recall the name of the researchers at the moment) where if you put people of similar ideology in a room together and let them converse for a period of time, they will come out of that room holding more extreme views than they went in with, down to holding views that are more extreme than the view of their most extreme member going in. This happen every day on Reddit. Take /r/conservative. Theoretically, a great place to get a conservative point of view and discuss how it might clash with something opposite it. In practice, it has become a safe bubble. If you express a strong liberal viewpoint or identify as a liberal, you will get banned. Ask how I know. And at that point why would anyone outside that bubble go visit it, and why would anyone who is there leave? It creates the exact opposite effect of what you are describing.
Also, again, I am happy to fund research on why men beat women (or any person of any gender beats any other gender, though let’s face it, most times domestic violence is by men against women), but I don’t need 1000 angry men trying to justify to me and each other why it’s ok.
And that’s my point: the web allows us to give voice to those who haven’t been heard before. If a former Nazi wants to explain why he did what he did and why he walked away from it, we should give them voice and listen. If a current incel wants to detail his struggles and ask for help, we should lend an ear. But what help can be given to a man who beats his wife by 1000 men who do the same and think it’s totally justified? What possible good comes of helping them reinforce their beliefs while providing tools to exclude all external points of view?
Lastly, yes it is true that some points of view are just wrong. There are in fact bad ideas. Eugenics is a bad idea. Racism is a bad idea. Misogyny is a bad idea. We can let the academics study it and the therapists try to fix it, but we absolutely do not need to entertain it, pretend like there is some valid point of view there, or give it a platform just so someone can turn around, point out that the existence of the platform means there are two sides to the argument and demand more equal representation. If you really want to help, try going on those fringe subreddits and offer to pay for therapy for those young men. If they take you up on that offer, yes you’ve done a good thing. But in my experience you get a nicely worded message from a mod saying that you and your ideas aren’t welcome here.
Edit: also, I don’t give a fuck if you are in pain because crushing system, etc. If you beat your wife, you deserve a beating. If you think it’s sometimes justified you deserve two. Don’t make your problems someone else’s pain. It doesn’t make you justified. It just objectively makes you an asshole.
Edit 2: Daryl Davis is a black man who has been befriending members of the KKK and successfully convinced over 200 of them to leave. That does not justify the existence of the KKK, just shows how difficult it is to do this kind of work: https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convinc...
> Lastly, yes it is true that some points of view are just wrong. There are in fact bad ideas. Eugenics is a bad idea. Racism is a bad idea. Misogyny is a bad idea.
As someone who has been looking for good anti-racialist arguments for a long time (along with explanations for why eugenics is wrong and why we think there aren't substantial sex differences that make the sexes on average more suited to different things) the fact these kinds or things are censured and censored everywhere is immensely frustrating.
The only things I can find are sites talking about why racism is true or sites talking about why it's wrong, but I can't find resources talking about why it's false!
If you happen to have links about eugenics/racism/sexism that talk about their falseness (I mean, I presume you have actually seen arguments against them that makes you so sure they are bad/false?) then please let me know.
> As someone who has been looking for good anti-racialist arguments for a long time...
Racism isn't useful and isn't actionable at a policy level.
Let's suppose there is some trait X (could be IQ test score, high jump ability, whatever) that is statistically variant by rigorously defined race. Group A scores on average 98, group B scores on average 103.
The median difference between groups doesn't actually matter, because individual scores are spread on a normal distribution. Therefore some percentage of individuals of group A will score higher on trait X than individuals of group B even if on average they do not.
So how can you effectively filter out individuals for entry into some special program? (for example, the high jump event in the Olympics)
Well, you have to test each individual. And if you want the very best, it behooves you to test each individual as fairly as possible, because there's always a chance that you will sample an individual from group A who is a super star, and also find an individual from group B who is a dud.
And it is the same for any other trait you would like to filter for.
Racism is an attempt to find a convenient mental shortcut so that it may provide cover for hatred of an out-group. But racism is ineffective and stupid.
Actual discussion of racist thought is pretty off topic, I am more interested in where one could find good anti-race realist resources (and arguing for why attemptibg to censor racist thought can cause the problem of lack of said resources) then trying to rehash hundred thousand word arguments on an extremely complex topic in comments.
That said, it would be rude to ignore the effort you've made, so:
The main actionable things the HBDers I've spoken to want include no longer automatically treating mismatches between demographics in employment, prison, etc as a problem and introducing testing for those coming emmigrating into their country.
Also, there is a weakness in testing, namely that even racialists think things like intelligence are partly non-shared environment, so if you set a lower bar filter from a population with lower average IQ, then while the people you get will meet your threshhold, their children would often not (assuming this supposed genetic difference exists), which is relevant to immigration rules.
> Also, there is a weakness in testing, namely that even racialists think things like intelligence are partly non-shared environment, so if you set a lower bar filter from a population with lower average IQ, then while the people you get will meet your threshhold, their children would often not (assuming this supposed genetic difference exists), which is relevant to immigration rules.
So are we going to kick out in-group children from the country when their IQ scores aren't high enough? No? Then that is a a bad argument.
Also, I have been trying to avoid the whole debate on what IQ test actually measure...
While I agree with the point of the article that current genetic imbalances are horrifying, underappreciated and getting worse (and mostly not race based), there's still plenty of suffering to be had due to racism.
If race realism is correct then job quotas, immigration and education policy will cause a fair few problems, and if it's wrong then the very large amounts of suffering enduring by some ethnic minorities will be fixable.
So while this is far from the most important issue (that goes to things like ageing, possible dysgenic trends and the possibility of true AI), it's still pretty important by the standards of modern policy debates.
> You seem to be describing a meritocracy which, if I understand correctly, is an ideal promoted by white supremacists?
White supremacists might say they want a meritocracy, but most/all of them actually don't. They just want to create filters slightly more subtle than "no X allowed" signs for their establishments.
As I mentioned, if you are going to test, it needs to be fair and accurate, or else it isn't useful. If you want chess champions, you don't hold a quiz on trivia, you stage a chess competition.
A metriocracy being preferable isn't just the viewpoint of white supremacists. However, anyone expressing that view is labelled as a white supremacist. The game is rigged.
It seems like you and the word meritocracy have some issues. I never brought it up and frankly it has nothing to do with my argument. You inserted it into the conversation, then immediately played victim. I can’t tell if you are trolling or legitimately can’t figure out what we are talking about here so trying to switch the subject to your own grievance, but in either case, please stop.
"why we think there aren't substantial sex differences that make the sexes on average more suited to different things"
I don't know any sane person who thinks that.
Feminism was about that woman have the right to choose a role, that was traditionally reserved for men (and the other way around).
That women does not get discriminated for being women.
The fight against the idea, that women are made for household and kitchen (and bed).
But yes, that originate idea got forgotten quite a bit, to the point where women get he idea hat it is wrong for a woman to be at home and take care of the kids and not pursue a carieer.
I am not sure what you mean by racism/sexism/eugenics being false. If you mean why they are bad ideas, I can only do so much in terms of links, since I learned that these ideas are bad before the web was popular. I guess here are some things you might want to consider:
I am not going to spend more time Googling for you on this, but feel free to continue the research yourself. Try searching “effects of X on Y” and “morality of Z” and “why is W wrong” if you want to see those points of view. Form your own opinion, but keep one thing in mind: the often cited argument for a lot of this stuff is that “we’ve never implemented it correctly”. I hear this a lot about communism nowadays. There are a lot of setups where the idea inevitably leads to an outcome. For example, the US political and elections system inevitably leads to a two party system. It can be mathematically proven that this is the case. Similarly, ideas like racism inevitably lead to human and economic suffering, and those who try to separate the idea and it’s effect as implemented should be suspect of making arguments in bad faith. Examine their theories more closely.
Lastly, there is only so much you can learn from short form articles on the web. Read Sapiens. Read a couple or history books on WWII. Talk to a concentration camp survivor if you can find one. Talk to a Nazi solder. Talk to almost any woman in your life. I guarantee you that your mother experienced sexism, sexual harassment, and chances are outright sexual assault, since a very large percentage of women have in their lives statistically speaking.
I greatly appreciate you taking the time to find things, it displays a good will and charitable nature that's often lacking in the world. :)
That said, I have done a fair bit of googling and for various reasons, which would be too much of a digression to go into, have found most of those kinds of resources unsatisfying (e.g. the idea that differences are only skin deep is trivially refutable by racists). By possible coincidence I've already looked at most of the resources you linked (e.g. Sapiens and Uncle Tom's Cabin) and the HBDers still make a more convincing case. And I think this is mostly because while the HBDers can easily read the arguments of anti-racists and come up with counters, anti-racists are not even aware of the content of HBDer stuff and so cannot argue against it.
I think the censorship of racist thought (and other outside-Overton-Window thought) has indirectly lead to anti-racist argumentation weakening due to lack of understanding of what their opponents actually think and argue.
What you are describing isn’t a situation of refuting arguments. If I tell you that you can’t find the resources you seek because the racists have bugged all your devices and are constantly messing with your search results and reading material, I wouldn’t refute your argument. I would simply be ignoring reality or outright lying. That’s the reason why it’s so easy for a racist to come up with a counter argument to “turns out we are not genetically different): their argument needs only to appeal to a feeling, not be rooted in fact. In fact, the speed with which they come up with counter-arguments indicates mental gymnastics more than knowledge of the subject. Arguments for racism often center around specific “self-evident” truths which if you examine closely turn out to be simply circular arguments. As an example, one argument is that black people commit more crime than white people. If you look at certain statistics a certain way, you could come to that conclusion. But this ignores certain facts. For example, crime is much more strongly correlated with socioeconomic status. A poor white town is going to have just as much crime as an equally poor town occupied primarily by any race. But because white people got a bit of a head start in the US (as in were not bought and sold as property and not worked to death against their will), the median income for a black family is lower than for a white family. And of course keep in mind that most white collar crime is committed by white men who make up the majority of the C level at most corporations. We rarely prosecute that kind of crime even though it can be a lot more damaging (as in murder of one person means a murder charge. Dumping toxic waste into rivers that leads to hundreds of thousands of birth defects and genetic dresses is “white collar” so we fine the company and fire the exec, but nobody goes to prison).
Look closely, and you will find inconsistencies in these arguments. Oh, sure there are plenty of them but none of them seems to really hold up to scrutiny. Few will cite scientific studies (some will go as far as saying that science is censored so you shouldn’t trust it which is an obvious red flag for someone making shit up), and ones that do often misinterpret or misquote it. If you’d like we can try it out: find the best written argument for any of these points of view and we can together break down exactly where the lies and fabrications are.
As someone on the other side of this (who can defend their position if given the chance), I think the idea that censorship of my position is going to help it be more broadly accepted is probably false. On an intellectual basis, it doesn't indicate a defensible position, but we've moved past that: the debate is not a reasoned argument anymore. People are not naturally inclined to follow reason, and if people's values are adjusted to prioritize anti-racism over reason, then there is no contest; reason will lose.
Again, as with other comments above: I am not advocating for a slippery slope type of thing. I am however saying that specific groups mentioned above are widely (though not universally) considered undesirables. The specific groups: men who beat women, racists, and Nazis. Do you have a better ruler by which to measure those people and whether we should create software tools to help them communicate better/easier with each other? Do you condone any of those group and do you want to publicly defend their ideas as moral or valid? Because if not, feel free to get off the high horse and shut the fuck up.
This is either misinformed or just directly a bad faith argument. Leaving these communities around is, indeed, very much like letting a wound fester. There isn't really any doubt now that people can use platforms to radicalize others to extreme and often dangerous viewpoints. What's being banned is not a rational space for discussion between reasoned gentlemen, it's a place where people escalate emotions and whip each other into a frenzy. They're not banning earnest discussions of World War II history, they're banning "hey let's role play Nazis semi-ironically until one of us flinches and shoots someone in real life."
The differences between your stance and our parents stance emerge from different world views not from different information levels or a difference in academic rigor. (Or faith!)
> There isn't really any doubt now that people can use platforms to radicalize others to extreme and often dangerous viewpoints.
What you actually said here ("people can use platforms to radicalize") is true but also trivial. They can use platforms for all kind of things.
More broadly:
It's neither proven that the possibility of radicalization is a problem related to new technologies nor that censorship is a tool effective in mitigating it. Last but not least there's the philosophical question: it's not even clear that this problem we're perceiving is something that should be mitigated on a technical level.
That is very much an ongoing research project and will continue to be for a long time as long as communities continue to adapt to new communication technologies.
> Leaving these communities around is, indeed, very much like letting a wound fester. There isn't really any doubt now that people can use platforms to radicalize others to extreme and often dangerous viewpoints."
Interesting... I don't think I've previously seen the argument that such communities are, in effect, an "attractive nuisance".
A similar argument applies to pro-anorexia communities, although the danger there is self-harming behavior.
Gab has similar problems. The thing is Reddit is making the definition of objectionable broader and broader. At this point it includes basically anyone with mainstream conservative political views. They have gone (way) too far and people are looking for alternatives anywhere and everywhere where they won't be banned, shadow banned or quarantined. I just got text from a high school friend inviting me to something called Parler. I have no idea if it's worth while but I am happy to see that people are pushing back.
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.
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. The vertical centering is a bit of a mess, and the size of icons is also either way too big or way too small [2].
EDIT: Huh, I hadn't used new reddit in a long time, I actually took a look now and it seems like it has improved significantly. I actually don't hate it as much, it looks much closer to old reddit now, with full width content and much less padding [3]
New reddit must be the slowest website out there, on mobile where I'm not logged in it takes ages to load. Then ages to kill all sort of pop ups that force me to use their app. I believe they don't care about UX and speed of the site, it's all about the app. They measure app downloads, not the experience on the site.
I still am in awe regularly at how damn sluggish the site is. Even with an ad blocker it is at least an order of magnitude slower than every other website I've seen.
Not even the "feature" which hides most comments in a post and makes you click on a button to load a bit more of them? And to make it even better, even when you open a post, it still renders other posts directly beneath the comments of the current one so it's easier to miss where the comments end!
> 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.
In the case of very wide screens they should probably restrict the header width too, just not quite as much.
The latter is objectively worse. I understand that > 1080p monitors are a small fraction of your user base, but that's still not reason to not test your UI on larger resolutions, for a site as big (and prominently used by devs with large screens) as GitHub.
My eye still has to jump back and forth long distances if I want to fork the repo for example.
Do that many people use maximised windows on 16:9 or greater screens? Maybe it’s just because all my early experience was on 4:3, but I’d never maximise a browser window on a modern screen.
I’d agree this is bad design, but I’d be somewhat surprised if it’s a big practical problem for most people.
There are many many people who keep a single window maximized at all times and alt-tab between windows.
It's the most basic form of window management, and it works pretty well.
It's especially helpful if you want to be able to focus on one thing at a time only, and not have multiple different windows with disparate screen noise visible at once.
I often operate in that mode, using a tiling window manager to have a single maximized window on my primary monitor, and optionally a tile of auxiliary windows on my secondary monitor.
I agree. I will do side by side quite often when I'm programming or doing a specific multi-tasking work, but my "regular" browsing is fullscreen. I don't see why I would browse the web (single focused task) on the left or right half of my monitor, that just seems... silly?
I maximize the window height, but limit it in width precisely because so many websites aren't designed for wide screens. Windows makes this easy: just double click on the top or bottom edge of the window. It's also sticky, so I can easily drag it to the centre of the screen.
I'm in quite a small niche: tiling window managers. When there's only one window open it takes 100% width and height. Every app I use other than some websites handles this extra space well.
You can reduce it by making real or fake windows on the left and right. Haven't gotten around to making a macro for that yet. If it's an article reader mode also exists.
I do not maximize some of my applications because i want to have several of them visible at any time when i'm working on more than one. I do maximize some other applications, depending on what i'm doing. I do not maximize the browser because i want to have the content i'm working with/looking at/reading in front of me (especially on the reading aspect since reading long lines is tiresome) and maximizing on a 16:9 monitor means that a lot of content will be at the sides.
Now combine the above with the fact that i'm using a ~23" 1366x768 monitor, the tendency of pretty much every site out there to use the window width as a means to differentiate between mobile and desktop sites and the stupid trend to use ginormous font sizes everywhere and you get an idea of how much i like browsing many sites out there (at least HN and old Reddit is perfectly fine). Well, i'm thankful that browsers have a zoom option at least, many of the sites out there are only usable at a 70-80% zoom for me.
But yeah, last time i had my browser maximized all the time was when i had a 4:3 monitor.
There are better monitors at my local thrift store for 5 dollars. It's like 68ppi the last monitor I had like that
had a huge floppy drive and kings quest III.
No there are certainly not better monitors at your thrift store for $5 dollars.
This is a brand new monitor i bought some months ago (late 2019) and the cost was much bigger than 5 dollars. In fact it was the most expensive VA monitor at this resolution (i avoid IPS because i actually want to be able to see dark colors and contrast and every single IPS monitor i've used, regardless of resolution, is garbage when it comes to that with the awful backlight glow), it has a ton of inputs at the back, relatively fast response time (for VA), etc. It is one of the best monitors i ever had.
The resolution was something i explicitly opted for, partly because at the time i had an APU-based system that i wanted to game on and i didn't want the blurry mess that a higher resolution would have and partly because 1366x768 on a monitor (as opposed to laptop) makes for very sharp icons, fonts (after you disable antialiasing) for everything (as opposed to using a hidpi monitor where some apps look crisp and others look either too tiny or blurred from scaling). Also as a (very high) bonus, it looks great when playing older games that often use 1024x768 as a resolution since i have 1:1 mapping there.
Finally 1366x768 is currently by far the most common resolution on PCs (mainly thanks to laptops, but desktops use it too - see mine) according to statcounter and the second most common on gaming PCs according to Steam, so it isn't something you'd only find in obscure old PCs, it is as mainstream as it gets.
>1366x768 is currently by far the most common resolution on PCs
According to steam 10.9% of users are running at that resolution. Only 4% are running at worse and 85% are running at higher resolution mostly at 1080p at a whopping 65%. Calling it the second most common is true but deceptive is it just means that its so old that there are so many different better choices that people are spread out over the many and varied better choices.
If you mean that your apu is so weak that it can't do more than 720p and this would look bad at 1080p you are correct but that seems like a uniquely bad choice given that one would logically want to either get an actual gpu or give up on gaming and get a screen worth using instead of picking a compromise that is the worst of both worlds.
Regarding scalling 800x600 scales evenly to a 1920x1200 with black bars on the sides. 1152×900 scales to 1600x900 in the same fashion. You can also run the game in a window and avoid having to match it up evenly.
>1366x768 on a monitor (as opposed to laptop) makes for very sharp icons, fonts (after you disable antialiasing) for everything (as opposed to using a hidpi monitor where some apps look crisp and others look either too tiny or blurred from scaling).
I think your eyesight is bad.
Your PPI: 68
Common Resolution for your screen size: 95
Best in class: 191
> According to steam 10.9% of users are running at that resolution.
Which is why right after the part you quoted and apparently ignored, i wrote "and the second most common on gaming PCs according to Steam". Gaming PCs are more likely to have higher resolution, but not every PC is a gaming PC. Statcounter.com has 1366x768 above 1920x1080.
Also 10.9% of Steam's user is still around 10 million active users, which is a lot of people.
> but that seems like a uniquely bad choice
That is your opinion, i find it a great choice and i like my monitor.
> given that one would logically want to either get an actual gpu
I have an actual GPU nowadays.
> or give up on gaming
I do not think you are in position to tell anyone give up anything.
> and get a screen worth using
I find my monitor worth using.
> instead of picking a compromise that is the worst of both worlds.
That is your opinion that i disagree with.
> Regarding scalling 800x600 scales evenly to a 1920x1200 with black bars on the sides.
1920x1200 is not 16:9 which will cause either black bars or stretched UIs on actually new titles and videos, i wouldn't personally buy a non-16:9 monitor these days. Also 800x600 looks fine on my 1366x768 monitor centered (even if a bit smaller image) with 1:1 pixels.
> 1152×900 scales to 1600x900 in the same fashion.
Pretty much no game where you have to use fixed resolutions (mostly 2D games) uses 1152x900. Earlier 3D games work at 1366x768 by centering 1024x768 but almost all of them have workarounds to work at higher 4:3 resolutions (when i used a 1920x1080 monitor i often ran older 3D games at 1440x1080).
> You can also run the game in a window and avoid having to match it up evenly.
If i had Windows 7 or using Linux, perhaps, but with Windows 8+ and the forced compositor that adds input lag i avoid running games in a window.
> I think your eyesight is bad.
Yes it is, which is why i sit close to the monitor so i can see stuff (and the reason i prefer smaller monitors). But i can clearly see the pixels, which is what i mean with "sharp" here.
> Best in class: 191
Subjective and it has all the issues with scaling and blurring i mentioned in my last message.
By using some mobile specific pseudo-selector? There are pseudo-selectors for printing, there could be selectors for mobile too.
Not sure, i'm not into web development, i just see using the window width as the wrong way. I keep my window down to that size even when i'm using monitors with larger resolutions (1080p or 1440p), it is a bad idea to assume window width == monitor resolution == device type.
That's my feeling as well. I bought a large monitor with nice resolution and I want to run my applications at full size. Window tiling is nice but its also a distraction for me and I always seem to forget which app has focus.
I use a tiling window manager, meaning all windows combined take up 100% of the screen, and all of them are always visible.
The only UIs that never handle this correctly are modern, responsive websites which sometimes become unusable and show baffling design decisions at certain window sizes.
Although in the case of Reddit the old design isn't perfect either, because if the browser window is narrow enough it'll have a bug where you can shift the whole website out of the visible area by writing a long line in a comment.
To be clear, I know this is not a trivial thing, but when UI designers don't know how to handle certain viewport sizes they should rather just let the browser's scrollbars do the job they've been doing fine for decades.
Wow, you're right. It did improve quite a bit. Not in an "OMG I'm switching right now" kind of way, but definitely in a "maybe I'll play around with this and see if I can configure it to my liking."
Never would have happened if someone hadn't made a post like this, so thanks!
edit: Aaaand instant regret, wow. Are you guys seeing this "Top Broadcast Right Now" shit? The best part for me is not just the ~1000px high random garbage video that takes up my whole screen, but before the video itself loads I actually get a ~1000px "white noise" animation, except it isn't just white but brightly colored, too.
I had a brief urge to heat up my soldering iron and stick it in my eye.
Hah, yeah I played with it more myself too and instantly found still many issues. The biggest one for me was the comment section is still using the short width format, which is a no go for me.
"New" reddit (not that new anymore) still _frequently_ just gets stuck on the spinners. Also with some frequency, when navigating to a page I've been to before, it will load everything from cache nicely, and then REPLACE THE CACHE WITH SPINNERS THAT NEVER LOAD THE CONTENT. Sometimes it will do this with a page I've never visited before, ie it will load the page and then replace it with the spinners and never load. Worst of both worlds. Grinds my gears.
The _old_ reddit always just worked. I never had to reload the page multiple times, sometimes giving up entirely.
Obviously I'm still using the site or I wouldn't be complaining, but like, what exactly was wrong with old reddit again?
I just tried it for 30s, and on my first try opening a comment section, it just failed and gave me an error, then I had to press retry to get it to load. I get reddit failures maybe once a month normally, so I'm either super unlucky or new is very broken.
I'd be interested to know what the rationale for the new design was. Some kind of dark patterns? Make people so disgusted with the web version they just download the native app, which provides better monitoring and "stickiness"? I mean, is anyone at Reddit actually proud of the redesign?
I assume a little of column A, little column B. Web devs who wanted a greenfield project and a PM willing to be convinced, because 1) old reddit still exists to fall back on and 2) in retrospect outcomes pushing users to mobile seemed to be good for monitoring and stickiness.
I blame typical tech dysfunctions and the interests of users not align with short term stakeholder interests.
> What kind of UX designer ever approved such a mess and why do so many sites do this?
UX design used to be about good usability.
Now it's all about shoving the latest hipster trends from Dribbble and Behance that look all "Shiny" and gives the CxOs orgasms.
One more odd thing that I found - maybe this is anecdotal - Developers who design interfaces based on OTS frameworks (Eg. Bootstrap) have a much better sense of UX than dedicated UX designers.
takes you back to web and them gets annoyed with open Reddit app feature. Yet baconreader is awesome, yet I find 8t difficult with Search like the native one.
Well, I'm glad to report that I'm working on a federated link aggregator project that tries to keep the good parts of old reddit. A test instance can be found at https://littr.me
Regarding content width, shorter lines are far easier to read, so there is some justification for the ridiculous amounts of padding on your widescreen. 2500 pixels wide lines are very hard to follow.
I think OP doesn't take issue with the content being narrow, but with the headers being wide while the content is narrow. The whole looks quite unbalanced and jarring (at least on the new Github).
I had to go into my user settings and change the feed display to compact instead of (what I presume is the default of) card, which is the nasty timeline-like display.
My biggest anger with new reddit is that it just doesn’t work. It’s rare that a video will play twice without a reload, infuriating if you want to share a funny video with a spouse, and it will regularly go into a mode where all videos stop working until a complete reload happens. This has been a consistent drag on my reddit usage now that my primary consumption of sites like this is via my iPad, and I suspect I’m not alone.
Reddit has been garbage on mobile browsers for a while have you tried any of the unofficial reddit apps? I in particular like RIF but there are several.
Yeah, enabling JS meant it's already worse than old reddit, but I gave it the benefit of the doubt just to give it a read and enabled JS, only to be greeted with a neverending spinner. No console errors either, just the eternal spinner of doom.
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.
> the UI is a breath of fresh air compared to new Reddit
I agree. I find this interface extremely readable (It clearly displays "JavaScript is required for this page") and simple to use; I close it and move on to something that actually works. Very minimal and intuitive. I approve.
I joined Reddit when the new UI was the default. I was relieved when I discovered old.reddit.com and i.reddit.com. I use them on PC and mobile respectively.
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.
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.
Has anyone thought about building something like Twitter blacklists for Reddit so a group of mutually trusting subreddits can share their list of who they ban (for reasons not unique to their own rules) to a list then all ban that person/account proactively?
Doesn't matter because reddit accounts don't hold the same weight as twitter accounts. Making a new reddit account is trivial and you lose absolutely nothing.
On Twitter you follow people, on a site like Reddit you subscribe to subreddits.
Switching between accounts on Twitter means your follows/followers are lost, switching accounts on Reddit doesn't lose you anything (unless you're subscrived to private subreddits or are a moderator for a subreddit)
Twitter sometimes requires a verified email and phone number, which I assume they globally ban when they can. Not sure how effectively they are, but they do at least something make throwaways harder than Reddit does.
The mods only have themselves to blame. They create insanely broad rules allowing them to ban anything and then limit mod positions to concentrate their power.
The role of mods is to delete off topic submissions and remove illegal content. Nothing more.
The role of mods is to establish and maintain the community they wish to have in the space. That takes a lot more than deleting off-topic submissions and removing illegal content.
And deleting off topic submissions and removing illegal content is what they do the most. Just because you read that some seemingly related post got removed, does not mean everything the remove are those.
I admit, I don't understand the tendency of people like this to insist that their hyper-libertarian ruleset must be so. That for a community to have its own set of rules that they enforce is inherently wrong somehow.
I don't think modlogs and otherwise increasing moderation transparency on reddit would have any effect whatsoever.
Many mods of popular subreddits abuse their power and enforce their world views on redditors. This is only possible because reddit admins don't care.
That's why there is so much drama now and again when mods will wholesale-ban or delete legitimate content that doesn't break the rules and they just won't respond to questions. Or even worse - they respond by taunting the redditors who would like to know the reason behind the decision.
I was banned from a large sub for linking to statistics on official government website to help support my argument.
This happens all the time on reddit.
And it's not like it's only my experience. Ask anyone on reddit what they think of mods and you'll hear the same story.
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.
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.
> 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.
> Those that want to keep full control over their system can easily do with a federated system: they just run their own instances.
Is running your own instance hard? Then at best you’ll inevitably have some users who lack the know-how or time to set up their own instance. At worst, federated systems often link identity to home instance, so you can’t switch to a new instance without giving up your profile. Or they may even require other instances to have a human agree to federate with you, which is a big ask for a one-person instance.
Or is running your own instance easy? So easy that anyone can do it? Then there should be no disadvantage in bundle that into the client app so that everyone does do it. But now you have a decentralized system.
> Then at best you’ll inevitably have some users who lack the know-how or time to set up their own instance.
Yes, and those users will use managed services, something that the "principled" decentralized community (not your keys, not your money/not your identity/etc) is completely against and invariably leads to re-centralization of the system around market players that go to serve this market. Case in point: Github, Coinbase, MtGox, Signal, any of the big cloud providers...
> At worst, federated systems often link identity to home instance
Why? I can have a domain name and move email providers freely. Same for XMPP, Matrix, websites in general, etc. The identity part of the system can be separate from the service provider.
If anything, this idea is more of an argument against decentralized services. It is an all-or-nothing approach: do you want to run this service with your identity? Great, then you need to be responsible in managing the service and secure your identity.
> Or is running your own instance easy? So easy that anyone can do it?
There is no such thing. Nevermind the case for those simply can not control the hardware where they run their systems, UI/UX of decentralized systems is always an afterthought. Even something as "easy" as bittorrent requires so much of a learning curve that most people simply do not want to be bothered to learn.
Besides, it's not just "running". It's keeping it up. Paying for operational costs. Decentralized systems by definition need to be able to do everything by themselves. There is no way to achieve any kind of economies of scale.
Worst of all: it's not having any one to blame/be responsible for things when it breaks. Oh, you got scammed into downloading a keylogger: fuck you, you lost all of your keys. Oh, you "just" bought something with Bitcoin from a site that seemed legit, but they delivered a counterfeit product? "Consider it an lesson in how to look for things online"
What I am trying to say is that decentralization vs centralization should be considered as a continuous spectrum of choices and trade-offs that need to be made by users. Federated systems allow basically everyone to be whatever is best for them on this spectrum, while this "decentralize all the things!" and treating it as binary choice does little to non-technical users and basically guarantees they will be confined in the walled gardens.
The trade-off is that when you run your own instance you have to then attract users to it for it to be useful, which burdens others.
In a fully decentralized network you can meet new people and moderate your own view of the world without putting any burden on others to adapt to what you want. Moderation can be done with a system like this: https://adecentralizedworld.com/2020/06/a-trust-and-moderati...
> The trade-off is that when you run your own instance you have to then attract users to it for it to be useful, which burdens others.
This really depends on the design. Email is "federated" but that doesn't require you to get anybody else to use your email server in order for you send or receive emails with them.
What I'd kind of like to see is a system that separates hosting and accounts from moderation.
So you have a host, like email, and a username on the host. Then you have a forum, which has operators/moderators (who are users), but the forum is host-independent. Maybe it only actually runs on a specific host at a given time, but the operators can move it without anybody noticing and anybody can use it regardless of who their own host is.
It makes it so you can be a forum operator without having to be a host.
Sorry, either you don't understand the concept of federation, or you are bullshitting me.
I can run a single-user Mastodon instance and follow people from any other instance. They can follow me as well. I can send emails from my personal server to anyone on gmail, and vice-versa.
Where do I need to "attract other users" to my instance? It's quite the opposite!
I thought you meant similar to hosting a forum or Lemmy like site.
With Mastadon if say I'm on another instance and the host of that instance blocks yours (because they don't agree with your politics or whatever) then won't I be unable to see your feed? I'd have to setup my own Mastadon instance to get around this? What if I'm not technically inclined enough to do this? Then I'm subject to the whims of the moderators of the instance.
What if I live in China and they block access to the biggest instances so I'm cut off from all the big communities and can't participate?
What if an instance of Mastadon crashes and the admins can't be bothered restoring it. As a user on that instance haven't you lost everything?
These are the problems decentralized networks are solving, being subject to the whims of other people.
> With Mastadon (sic) if say I'm on another instance and the host of that instance blocks yours...
First: Mastodon, with an "O".
Second: I already had this discussion before. This "blocking" of instances is something that is going on only on Mastodon, AFAIK, because most of the current members are conflating the idea of federation with tribes. They want to be insular at this point. This will change as soon as there are more people using ActivityPub like email or Matrix and stop associating the instances with the identities/ideologies of its members.
So, no. You won't have to "setup your Mastodon" instance to get around this. You can do it, but you also can just find a more professional hosting provider that is not managed by a fourteen year old or tweenagers that love to spout their love for diversity and yet can only tolerate any conversation that is exactly aligned with their existing preconceptions of their uniform peer group.
> What if I live in China and they block access to the biggest instances so I'm cut off from all the big communities and can't participate?
What if you live in China and they block the decentralized service altogether? What if they use the decentralized nature of the service and set up honeypots to find dissidents? "Decentralized" != "Private" != "Secure"
> What if an instance crashes (...) the admins can't be bothered restoring it.
If it is important to you, then (a) you run your own service or (b) you pay someone that actually cares about this. With a decentralized service, the only alternative you have is (a). Then not only you have to make this choice, but also everyone that you would like to join the network.
My point all along is that federated systems are already enough for those that do not "want to be subject to the whims of other people", while decentralized systems shut out those that don't care about it or would rather trust/delegate these concerns to someone else.
"Decentralized systems" bring no benefit that can't be had by federated systems and remove all sorts of free options from the potential users. It is limiting instead of liberating.
Perhaps I shouldn't have mentioned it, given that he retracted it on the grounds that too many people subverted the idea to justify all of bad practices related to social software.
> 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.
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.
There's a fully JavaScript implementation of gRPC[0] that you may be able to use should you implement a web app using Service Workers[1]. This would be installable for browsers in a manner that should provide long-lived access to the network.
The way it works in Aether is that we have a few rules on choosing what 'effective' mods you have on your view. From weakest (as in, most prone to be overridden) to strongest:
- Default mods, which are either the creator of the community or those that are assigned by that person
- Elected mods, mods which are chosen by the community. Election goes both ways, you can both be elected or impeached. For example, a default mod can be impeached by the election system, and that would render that mod a non-mod for you
- Mods you've personally chosen. Choosing someone to be a mod for you is your vote in the election.
So the system isn't 'enforcing' mods you haven't chosen onto you as a result of the elections. Elections only make the decision only if you haven't made a decision for that mod in either way — if you make a decision that is ironclad (for you, in your personal, local view), since nothing can override your personal vote for or against somebody. The more you vote in elections, the more you shape your own view of the universe.
The article is long, but what I can see there that is not implemented in Aether is the transitive property of trust, instead of having a vote which is binary, he seems to be advocating for a 0 to 100 trust, and the idea that trust of the people you trust means something to you. (Let me know if I got this wrong).
This is great in theory — and this was actually considered for implementation at one point. The issue isn't that it doesn't make sense but it is quite literally impossible to implement, since it makes it so that almost every trust decision made by someone on the network at some point in time affects almost all other entities, which leaves you with an almost entirely 'dirty' graph that you have to traverse in entirety and recompile.
This can be done on a centralised service since there is one graph to compile and everyone submits to it. However, in Aether, what we try to do is that we try to keep the graph compilation part on the user end, both because it's a P2P network, and also because custom graphs compiled on the client end is what allows the votes to be able to modify the graph structure itself. That sort of gradual outflow of trust across a social graph making decisions on what to show or not show for every single piece of content is an intense amount of computation to do for every new modification to the trust gradient.
That makes sense. With the trust system described trust is only calculated for you personally rather than calculating how much everyone trusts everyone else.
From the benchmarks [1] of a simple naive JavaScript version is can recalculate one persons trust in a huge network in just a few ms. With partial updates when new ratings come in it could be done even faster.
Yeah — trust level is only one component of a multivariate calculus that we call graph compile. So it's very possible for the trust only to take milliseconds when it's the only thing you compile with objects that only carry trust, but Aether compiler also moves the content around too. To give you a sense of the real world results, our initial compile takes multiple minutes even with binary (0 or 1) trust, even if only a vanishingly small portion of it is actually calculating trust. If an object is made dirty, regardless of the reason, it has to be touched, loaded into memory and processed. The disk is where you it the bottleneck. If your dataset fits into memory (mind that Aether has to work with computers with 4gb of RAM) then yes the whole thing is milliseconds. But once you start to do sequential reads on what might not even be SSD, you want to avoid any sort of dirtying if you can. Gradient Trust is one of the worst offenders in that almost any change to it dirties almost the whole graph.
We have proof of work to rate-limit spam (of both content and signals), and there would be no reason for anyone to spam the network (for votes - for other things there are plenty of reasons) because anyone can get exactly the moderation they want by picking out their mods. Elections cannot override local selections — they exist as 'recommendations' to the local user, in the case the user has not made a selection.
That said, there is still quite a bit of power in controlling the view of those who can't be bothered to make a decision, so we make it so that an election vote only counts after the user actually first posted in that community 2 weeks ago. So if there's a flood of new votes, the mods can temporarily suspend voting process.
Lastly, the elections are not mandatory for all communities, so if a community is created as a 'monarchy', for the lack of a better word, the elections are not applied by default. This makes it so that there is no incentive for mods to keep 'temporary suspension due to vote flood' state indefinitely, since they can just switch to monarchy if they want to do that.
Mind that in that case, the user can still make choices, or even enable elections - the only thing that would change is that the default user would not get election results applied to the default mods. But if that user wants, it can still enable elections and vote, and by enabling that it would get the election results applied — but due to his or her own explicit choice, not by default.
This sounds pretty interesting, but is it a lot of work to moderate a home server yourself?
> You are the home server, so no one can control what you see. We call this user sovereignty
I’m wondering what I’d have to do to just bare minimum make sure no illegal content gets onto any hardware that I own. Just to use the obvious extreme example, I don’t want to see any illegal pornography, which in addition to not wanting to see I’d have to report to authorities, which I’d presumably have to explain the presence of, which I’m guessing worst case involves them confiscating my devices for some time. There’s a practical benefit to me in having some middle manager taking responsibility for making sure that never gets to my network.
All the content on Aether is text — it's pretty hard (but not impossible) to make text illegal. Of course what is on your computer is your responsibility, nothing changes that. There is a SFW list enabled by default that only shows the 'safe' communities to you in the app, but your app still communicates everything as of today.
However, this is actually the most common feature request we have right now, an ability to block certain communities from transmitting. We are converting the SFW list to a 'filter lists' feature, much like adblock filter lists. These lists can be whitelists or blacklists, and they will be able to control not just visibility, but also the receiving and transmittance of content as well.
So the expected behaviour is that if a community is in your blacklist, your computer will never fetch that content from that community by checking against its fingerprint. That should be helpful to solve this issue. We'll be providing a default whitelist as well.
At first I kinda found the idea of an Aether Pro (and I'd go so far as to say using the "Pro" moniker is rather misleading as it's kind of an entirely different product altogether!) existing kinda iffy, but after reading up what it truly was I think it makes sense to have something similar to that and avoid many common pitfalls when it comes to securing funding for an open source project, so kudos for that!
I do think both decentralized and federated platforms can coexist just fine. They serve slightly different needs and both provide alternatives to the centralized platforms that pervade the Internet these days.
You guys are on the right track with Aether. I love the features especially decentralized sovereignty and the moderation based on that. This needs to get adopted widely to stop censorship.
What does it mean the communities are ephemeral? Because reddit archives is one their strengths. Public Slack channels are lame to me because of their limits.
Sounds like there's some really interesting ideas here.
> Two people with two different mod lists for the same community can see drastically different communities
Reminds me of the 'sharding' idea in World of Warcraft. I'm really curious if you'll end up with issues of 'social dissonance' where your perception of a community differs drastically from someone else's because you literally see different content, and if that affects how people engage with the community.
Also, it seems like with user sovereignty and decentralization, that there will be various objectionable or even vile communities is inevitable, right? Is there a plan for how to deal with that, should Aether ever become popular enough to get more mainstream news attention? I imagine responding to tech blogs with, "yes, there are white supremacist sub-communities, but you don't have to see them if you don't want to" won't come across as a very satisfying answer from their perspective.
> I imagine responding to tech blogs with, "yes, there are white supremacist sub-communities, but you don't have to see them if you don't want to" won't come across as a very satisfying answer from their perspective.
It's always irked me that most people seem to think that people with different politics to them shouldn't be allowed to communicate.
1. Referring to them as just "different politics" covers up the hateful, violent ideologies we're talking about.
2. Wanting them to be banned from a particular platform isn't a general ban on communication. Private communities are under no obligation to tolerate the intolerant.
The domain-name removals, the mastercard and visa bans, and the app bans are the actions of private companies in name only. What this is, despite pretending otherwise, is an exercise of a form of state power. When exercised against a nation, we recognize it as a sanction. But when exercised against an individual, it is something different. In reality, there is no practical difference between this and state censorship in China.
Personally, I don't object to this kind of power in principle, I just think that it is used in the wrong direction in the United States. Rather than being used to target and remove individuals who promote instability, it has been used to target and remove individuals who promote stability. Much of the United States now believes property destruction is acceptable if it achieves honorable ends.
> The domain-name removals, the mastercard and visa bans, and the app bans are the actions of private companies in name only.
No, they're completely the actions of private companies.
It turns out, private companies exist in a mostly-shared culture and often have similar ideas about how to behave. Currently -- thank god -- deplatforming blatant bigots is generally agreed upon as A Good Thing. No conspiracy here, just good sense.
> Rather than being used to target and remove individuals who promote instability, it has been used to target and remove individuals who promote stability.
Seriously? White supremacists are now "individuals who promote stability"?
> Much of the United States now believes property destruction is acceptable if it achieves honorable ends.
I mean, yeah, the US has always believed that. The country had basically two starting points, after all: stealing the natives' land, and then later on destroying property as part of a protest.
> It turns out, private companies exist in a mostly-shared culture and often have similar ideas about how to behave. Currently -- thank god -- deplatforming blatant bigots is generally agreed upon as A Good Thing. No conspiracy here, just good sense.
It currently is recognized as a good thing, but it wasn't before. Before the consensus was "I may disagree with what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it." That said, a consensus cannot be defended simply because it has previously existed.
> Seriously? White supremacists are now "individuals who promote stability"?
I'm talking about people who opposed defunding the police. In a healthy society, people who supported defunding the police would have been fired from their jobs and sanctioned, but the opposite has happened. 'White supremacy' has been redefined to include fundamental state structures that are required for the functioning of society.
> I mean, yeah, the US has always believed that. The country had basically two starting points, after all: stealing the natives' land, and then later on destroying property as part of a protest.
The United States does not need to justify its existence. Almost every nation in existence today was formed on the backs of millions of deaths, and most of the natives died through communicable disease that was inevitably spread once any european landed on the North American shores. The only major mistakes the United States ever made were 1) allowing the establishment of slavery in North America and 2) trying to spread 'freedom and democracy' around the world.
Otherwise, the United States is responsible for almost all fundamental technology that the developed world employs and may (hopefully) be responsible for spreading human life to another planet. If the latter happens, then that alone justifies the sins of the United States.
Allow me to add one of my own: Journalists' jobs aren't to share their "concerns", it's to report the facts. So much of the media's pathology is a result of the problem that news doesn't even try to be impartial anymore.
If you want to "share your concerns", the place to do that is an op-ed, or a blog post, or twitter, or something. But it isn't journalism anymore.
News never was impartial. Just by selecting what to report and the order in which you report things you influence the reception of the world. I'd argue that it's impossible to have objective news.
The word 'bigoted' is getting thrown around all over the place in this post and most commenters, including this one, seem to have never actually looked it up in the dictionary.
Bigoted does not mean right-wing, objectionable, or things one disagrees with.
Bigoted means unwilling to change one's opinion. Which certainly applies to the hard left wing end of the spectrum just as much as it does to hard right.
Bigoted: obstinately or unreasonably attached to a belief, opinion, or faction, and intolerant towards other people's beliefs and practices.
If anything, so-called journalists using a platform to express 'concern' over things they disagree with is a better fit for the term. The job of a journalist is to report, not to preach their own brand of politics or dislikes or concerns.
> The word 'bigoted' is getting thrown around all over the place in this post and most commenters, including this one, seem to have never actually looked it up in the dictionary.
On the contrary:
"""One who is strongly partial to one's own group, religion, race, or politics and is intolerant of those who differ."""
It applies very well to people intolerant of other groups, ethnicity or race.
It's not restricted to ethnicity, groups or race. Bigotry is merely the refusal to entertain different beliefs; whatever their groupby factor may be. Cherry-picking parts of the definition to meet one's idea of what it 'should' be, is the actual meaning of bigotry.
Please refer to the Oxford dictionary definition if you're still confused.
You focused on unwillingness to change one's opinion. That's certainly a definition, but the more common one in use is about prejudice, especially prejudice based on inherent traits like sex or race or sexuality. I'm sure you're aware of that, which is why it's confusing that you're acting as if you're not.
I don't dispute that it's extraordinarily difficult to get people to change political opinions, especially on the fringes. That was never my contention, I made that pretty clear with the example of bigoted communities I chose being white supremacists. Not sure how you could misread that, unless you wanted to.
No, it's not just that. I don't understand why you're being intentionally obtuse here, other than that the framing helps your viewpoint if you can trick others into accepting it.
Words can have more than one definition. Yours isn't the one I was using, no matter you wish it was otherwise.
Again, since you apparently missed this the first time around, or intentionally ignored it:
> especially : one who regards or treats the members of a group (such as a racial or ethnic group) with hatred and intolerance
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all."
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
No, making it a default makes sense. Users will not get mad if they get a warning telling them email support will no longer be possible. Alternatively you can opt with giving them a recovery code by which they can contact support or with which email will be enabled for an account when the user forgets their password. The only time you can't turn on email on your account is if you lose the password. Email is not secure, a user that has their login compromised is very likely to also have their email compromised. Moreover, if their email is compromised this completely silly dependence on email will get their account on your site compromised as well so you should be using a non-email means of authenticating users for support or account recovery!!
Email must die. No buts or ifs. It must die. You are a poor or ignorant engineer and architect if you build new things that depend on email in 2020.
If you give the most mediocre hacker 100 emails of users of your service that depends on email for account security, I am confident he/she will compromise at least a 3rd of accounts.
>Alternatively you can opt with giving them a recovery code by which they can contact support or with which email will be enabled for an account when the user forgets their password.
This is absurd, you either have an extremely idealistic view of the abilities of users or your thinking is warped by your extreme hatred towards a ubiquitous protocol.
What do you recommend to replace long form correspondence online? I cannot see anything that can replace it currently. Especially not in corporate, nothing beats email.
Thanks for sharing, I'm working on a new convo site called sqwok.im and I've debated whether to ask for email. I ended up with it being an optional field at sign up that's only used to help with account recovery/notifications. Having the ability to generate an account recovery token sounds like a cool idea! You can still chat on the site with only a username/password.
Thanks for sharing as well. I have signed up and I will try to promote your service. Thank you for listening to users. I hope we see more services like this, we've lost too much of the good experience of the old internet.
Thank you! I appreciate you checking it out, I'm @guac. I agree that we've lost the aesthetic of the old net and that we need more choices when it comes to these types of things. I grew up chatting on irc, aim, icq, etc and have fond memories of those times. A neat aspect of current technology is that we can build similar experiences that are now accessible to everyone w/o e.g. "download and install the client, configure the server" (most ppl have no idea what you're talking about). The goal is to create a simple, frictionless, open chat site that lets ppl talk about news/current events/etc with no hassle. Admittedly I'm a news junkie and started building this because I want to use it myself!
hey badrabbit, was thinking some more, I'm interested to know what other aspects of "the old internet" you are missing? feel free to reply or email me guac@sqwok.im, cheers!
>email is being used in many nefarious ways and it is an ancient protocol with many insecurities
Yes. But this doesn't make it a bad protocol to use. Email is one of the best things that remain for individiuals who value their privacy. It's pretty much the only popular messaging tool that doesn't require a phone number and isn't tied to one vendor.
>Both reddit and HN prospered as a result of not requiring email
This is untrue. HN and reddit prospered because users wanted to use the service, not because they don't require email to set up an account. If you have any evidence that suggests otherwise, please tell me, I'd be very interested in resources on that topic. To contradict your point: Pretty much every other website, regardless it it's a small one man operation or a giant company require email or even a working phone number, and those seem to be doing just fine.
>Email was not meant to be abusef this way
Well, how is it "abused" in it's current form? It's electronic mail, so people use it as such
>and I have seen first hand how it can be used against people
And how would that look like
>Email abd phone number collection is a modern tech evil for me
You should strike email from that list. Phone confirmation is the real problem, because it is tied to your identity in most of the western hemisphere now. However, there's still plenty of serious email providers where you can start a trial account to sign up of whatever requires it, just don't use the usual blacklisted expiring address suspects. I can highly recommend mailbox.org, they provide a very good service and have a 30 day trial period for new accounts.
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.
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?
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...
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
I made a new reddit account until recently and still could register without email, when it asks you for email you can just press continue without providing an email.
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?
why are there so many comments assuming that the point of this project is to facilitate lighter moderation than Reddit has? the code of conduct on the site is pretty clear, actually.
now, can you start a federated instance with that kind of content? sure. but just like how none of the normal mastodon servers federate with Gab, no one would have to federate with the cesspool.
Lacking global moderation, eventually every one of those subreddits will end up in Lemmy. Also somethingawful/4chan/8chan style "asshole feedback loops".
Everyone at HN likes to claim they want free speech and hate moderation, but in fact moderation is the foundation of our discourse.
>That way I can sub to a hatepost sub if I want and a mature tech sub if I want and get the best of both worlds.
Is a hatepost sub the best of a world?
>Everyone here who disagrees is just saying, "I don't want to join those communities, so they shouldn't even be allowed to exist."
There is a huge leap between "I don't want to be a part of a hate platform" and "hate platforms shouldn't be allowed to exist."
Look, if a super laissez faire social media platform attracts a huge amount of neo-nazis then I have no interest in spending time on it's alternative vanilla areas. I don't owe anything to websites or decentralized torrent-like systems that harbor these groups. They can decide to win me over or not. My eyeballs on their vanilla shit provides legitimacy to their horrifying shit. That is very different than saying they shouldn't be allowed to exist.
What I've learned from talking to people is that though people say they support freedom (specifically, freedom of speech) almost no actually does. Almost everyone wants to restrict what other people say, even if they're never going to hear it or see it. People want to destroy everything in the world they don't agree with, including discourse itself.
This isn't a new trend of course, but I personally find it sad that the very people who claim to champion freedom and civil liberties are now actively trying to destroy them.
I think the diversity of people and their opinions in the world are scary. In the past, you could ignore or were unaware of just how different other people seemed. Now, this diversity is in the forefront, and people are scared shitless.
Ultimately, I believe that being exposed to people that disagree with you existentially shakes you and exposes you to the most scary thing imaginable: that nothing is actually true and that nothing matters. After all, if some guy believes everything I don't believe and vice versa, then maybe what I believe is arbitrary, made-up, and confabulated. And if that is the case, maybe none of us know anything at all. Or, as Heidegger would put it, this contradiction of beliefs removes us from being-in-the-world, and replaces it with being-towards-death.
The trouble these communities face is when the online words spill out into real world action. I have no conceptual issue with nazis talking online about loving Hitler, but we have learned that these communities tend to become rallying points for those who wish to act upon the ideas being shared.
If you created a platform, then later found out that ISIS was using it to coordinate attacks on hospitals around the world, how would you react?
So sad, nobody remembers Imzy, the "nice reddit" founded by Dan McComas. It really was nice, had highly varied, friendly communities and a pleasant UI. Couldn't get traction, apparently.
I was unaware of imzy, but reading between the lines of that article the cause of demise seems to be "not enough traction to be successfully run as a business". sounds like there were communities there who were using it and enjoying it, so the real failure was the expectation that it would get as large as reddit and sustain a business model, not in the lack of usefulness to its users.
This has been tried and tried 1000 times. The problem is reddit is good enough for most people so an alternative will never take off until reddit starts being not good enough
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.
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/
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.
The hiring ads here seem completely relevant and appropriate for this forum. Very few other websites can say the same for their ads. YC saves money on recruiter fees and job listing fees, you reach your target audience, and you don't need tons of analytics.
I think simply having a Reddit clone run by a non profit (or owned by the members themselves) would go a long way in promoting freedom and fixing the issues.
I guess use a people solution instead of a technical one.
There is one made by previous Reddit admin/dev who understands how reddit works. It is nonprofit, developed in open and all policy discussions go through community.
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.
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.
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.
Reddit already has competitors. It is just that they are cesspools as the only people who have a strong reason to leave reddit are those reddit has banned.
It's a weird issue honestly. I've been on reddit for almost a decade, and I don't like what it has become. I would love to switch to a better alternative, but the problem is any alternative that pops up seems to be filled with extremists as soon as it starts. This doesn't imply that anyone who wants to leave reddit is a neo-nazi, a lot of us are stuck with reddit because everything else is filled with shit.
The best way to stop an alternative becoming filled with extremists is to start it off as a community for a specific audience, then expand to a more general one later on.
Twitch and Discord did well there for instance. Started out as gaming focused, then became more mainstream.
By doing this, you bring in non extremists early on, and tilt the audience pecentages in such a way that most regulars aren't such extremists.
The problem is most 'alternative' platforms market themselves as 'Reddit/Facebook/Twitter/YouTube except with free speech and no rules' rather than 'an art/gaming/music/sports themed alternative to Reddit/Facebook/Twitter/YouTube with free speech'.
Former means you draw in the outcasts and extremists, latter means you draw in another audience that can then be made more mainstream by opening up support for more and more fields of interest.
This is a seriously good observation. To add to it: moderation is _the_ hard problem of discussion forums. A nine year old can write a discussion board in python, any five decent developers can write one that scales reasonably. Or, you know, copy an open source codebase. Way harder is getting any actual users, but even that’s nothing compared to community maintenance.
Saying you have no moderation is attractive to one crowd in particular (there are other people who theoretically favour it, but practically they’ll use a moderated forum anyway). So you get a quick numbers boost but you’ve now fundamentally limited your audience to people prepared to share head-space with that crowd.
Reddit, Facebook and Twitter got in early and got to spend a lot of time learning on the job. Unless you start small, you’re not going to get that luxury now.
(Please don’t take this as an endorsement of any particular moderation policy, in theory or practice. Most of them are kind of awful at times. But the problem is hard.)
I see what you're saying, but I have to say as someone who was there, this was not the problem with Reddit. Early Reddit (as in first year) was extremely tech/programming/"netizen" focused, and it was really a lot like HN has been for years.
But when you start to gain popularity, the way you treat "free speech" becomes an issue. Discord is not a great example in that niche communities are not scraped for web search (that I know of).
But if you're just copying reddit, why would someone want to go to "a reddit for art" if reddit already has a section for art? You have to offer something substantially better, otherwise it's easier to just stay where the traffic is.
The interface on Reddit is garbage, a huge chunk of the existing users are garbage, people brigade into subreddits, the admins have the final word over you; and, finally, Reddit has no features for specific communities (e.g. image tools for art).
I was just the right age to enjoy the 90s to full effect. So much happened (to me) musically and culturally in that decade, that it has to be the best.
It's such a large site now with so many different communities and types of users. My opinion is it has transitioned from a forum to a social media platform. I think it caters to people who like the content side of social media, but do not wish to see people they know in real life (which can evoke jealousy and other negative emotions).
the developers of Lemmy are very clear about their stance regarding nazis at least, and that's more than I can say for Reddit https://dev.lemmy.ml/post/34286
Their developer code of conduct also looks good in that regard
Seeing how the flagship instance is run by people who are socially conscious I don't see this being a problem. Pretty much same thing happened with Mastodon Social, and with millions of users the community is still great. It's far friendlier and more civilized than Twitter.
What do you mean by "it," in "what it has become?" Also, what value(s) you're looking for in "better alternative," because none of anything in your comment is specific besides "neo-nazi." I'm aware of the site's problems with them of course, but they don't encroach on my daily usage, so I'm curious what might be pushing you away if it's something other than a constant barrage of neonazis in every subreddit you subscribe.
I really liked the idea originally. Unfortunately it turned into a pretty hard left leaning echo chamber. This was partially driven by mods from extreme left subreddits being very active on the site.
Here’s another question: Would any of our lives be any worse — or would they be better? — if we simply chose to walk away and not be a part of any of these platforms, HN included? How much of our lives is made up of karma whoring, level grinding, and falling into the <https://xkcd.com/386/> trap?
I dislike this framing because I think the important thing here -- the need to resist false equivalences between different platfroms -- gets papered over, when it's a really practical and important question with real implications. I don't think 'all platforms are bad' represents forward motion in a conversation about what platforms are able to do differently to make them better than others.
> Would any of our lives be any worse — or would they be better? — if we simply chose to walk away and not be a part of any of these platforms
Monks walk away from pretty much everything, and have been doing so for a long time now. They continue living. Does the result of that qualify as either better or worse than what you have now?
I made 40 dollars last weekend by falling into the https://xkcd.com/386 "trap". Thursday before last weekend someone released a starlink coverage map that was wrong, specifically it made arbitrary circles on a globe and pretended they were coverage. In order to fix this mistake I made https://droid.cafe/starlink.
A reddit user was kind enough to spontaneously donate 40 dollar (in btc) to me despite the fact that I didn't solicit donations. It's also been a pretty productive endeavor for learning about front end development, listening to feedback and giving users what they're asking for, learning to use cloudflare/gcp, and now learning to optimize glsl shaders to enable a fancier renderer while still getting reasonable performance on cheap hardware.
I feel like I often learn a lot about one random topic or another when I research so I can accurately correct someone who is being wrong on the internet. The above is an interesting example because there was a concrete deliverable at the end of the process, but I don't feel the fact that I learned from the process is particularly unique.
I think you could credibly ask that question for nearly anything outside of human basic needs. But the answer is simple: people are entertained and enriched by different things.
I certainly spend some amount of time on HN replying to things I shouldn't bother with, but the majority of my time on HN is filled with learning new things and hearing interesting perspectives on those things. I consider it a net positive in my life, and over the years I've gotten better at avoiding the negative parts.
I think the problem is that because reddit banned a lot of extremist communities there is pent up demand within those groups for a new host platform. If you start a new reddit competitor, users with those extemist views are looking for a home and will be the first to find and adopt it.
A large well formed community can survive a portion of its users with negative comments and posts, but I doubt you can build a community on the back of those users. Instead that negative group poisons the the platform for a more mainstream crowd. People won't join a plateform if the first thing they are exposed to supports extremist views.
Agreed, but at least reddit is unique in that it seems to get accused of being accused of both kinds of extremism, Tumble/Twitter/HN seem to think it's a right wing shithole, while the 4chan/Imageboard ilk thinks it's a leftie propaganda machine.
That's not the case with the alternatives, most tend to go really hard on one side of the extremism scale (right: voat, left: raddle).
I can't imagine thinking reddit is right-wing in any way whatsoever. Just looking at the front page (/r/all) I counted five explicitly left-leaning posts (on subreddits like /r/whitepeopletwitter), three that alluded to left-leaning subjects in a positive way (such as a post on /r/atheism), and 0 posts that even came close to kind of sounding like it might have been right-leaning. And this doesn't even consider the comments which is where the real hivemind exists.
Yes it hosts /r/the_donald or whatever but reddit as a whole is very left-leaning.
Edit: Hey ya'll instead of downvoting me how about providing some evidence of widespread right-leaning thoughts that aren't isolated to individual subreddits and shamed throughout the rest of reddit? Spoiler: You can't
I've observed the same thing honestly, most default + biggest subs are pretty left leaning. Though reddit does tend to host some right wing subs for which you have you go out of your way to find. There's also some old hate subs they removed few years back, people tend to get the perception of reddit from that time.
This needs a larger comment, but the "intellectual right" has largely self-destructed, leaving the focus entirely on white supremacy, homophobia, anti-contraception, anti-abortion, global warming denial, and weird conspiracy theories in general.
It's pointless trying to be a "respectable" right wing intellectual because you have to spend all your time running around justifying the completely incoherent things that Trump is talking about.
Chicago school economics? You can have a discussion with that, and leave it civil. That doesn't work with the_donald.
This is just you choosing which part of right-wing ideas you like.
I could make the exact same argument with the left.
"Yeah, saving trees and whales sounds fine, but they should stop it with all the LGBTQ, BLM, socialist stuff"
You can't have a civil discussion with those people either. In fact it's getting increasingly difficult to have civil discussions with anyone (HN is an exception because everyone is on their best behaviour, but to a large extent this results in self-censorship; you can see that the least politically correct comments are made with throw-away accounts).
Can we try to figure out sociologically, why by default unmoderated social forums become far-right oriented?
Is it because:
- People on the far-right are magnitudes more vocal and active online than those on the left? That they spend a magnitude more time posting and voting on the internet?
- Or when people are anonymous, they reveal their "true selves" more which exhibits more far-right (selfish, tribal, conservative) values.
- Or we are underestimating how many people are on the far right, because they are constantly censored so in our minds we think they are the minority but maybe they're about half of the online population?
I'm just trying to figure out why it takes herculean effort to shift things enough to the left to be publicly palatable. And if so, then then it seems like any social forum is going to require heavy censorship/moderation to even be tolerable to the general public.
Most social sites lean left, and far-left dialog is generally tolerated in those places, while anything right of center is demonized in a gradient of intensity the further right you go.
Your own scenarios exhibit this, for example:
- You ask if the far-right are magnitudes more vocal, ignoring the comparison to the extremely vocal far-left which is heard regularly on mainstream social media
- You conflate "conservative" with "selfish", presumably ignoring the selfishness of the extremes at both sides.
Frankly, I think the left (and by extension, most social media sites) are WAY more comfortable with censorship, banning, hiding, etc., especially of ideas that don't align with the left. (Typically characterized as "evil".)
The far-right, on the other hand, I think is a lot more tolerant of at least the notion that "other" speech exists. They'll insult you, make fun, etc., but the compulsion to censor others is far less frequent.
So when you have a whole segment of the political spectrum treated as evil and silenced, they tend to gravitate to fora that enable speech, even if unpleasant speech. The far-right might be most noticable on those platforms, but if you look carefully, you'll see a whole gradient of right-ness.
> The far-right, on the other hand, I think is a lot more tolerant of at least the notion that "other" speech exists. They'll insult you, make fun, etc., but the compulsion to censor others is far less frequent.
The right thinks explicit "censorship", which happens via the community or site owner, is bad.
Implicit "censorship", however, which happens when the targets of racism/sexism/homophobia/transphobia[0] leave the site, is just fine.
[0] or their allies or people who don't want to be surrounded by assholes.
Do you know what happens when people don't want to deal with harassment due to a certain position they hold? It's called self-censorship, and the far right censors people all the same by harassing, berating, demeaning people etc until they leave or censor themselves. That's a common tactic of sites like Voat.
Weird, r/anarchocapitalism will ban anyone who is on the left, and r/conservative will ban conservatives who speak out against Trump. Even r/TheMotte will ban people for things like tone. I've yet to find these mythical spaces where conservatives tolerate speech they in particular don't like.
The chans are the exception, and not the rule. Most normal human beings don't use any of the chans, but there are tens of tens of millions of subscribers to the online conservative spaces on Reddit and Facebook, and they're all ban happy.
Another popular story today was about parler, a twitter clone which allows mostly all legal speech besides obscenity. It may be a conservative safe space, but its not ban happy.
People don't want to be exposed to content that dehumanizes them, argues for their extermination, or targets harassment against them. There are large swaths of the population who are targeted by the far right in this way. These targeted groups simply wont deliberately return to a site that consistently provides them that experience, there's simply no reason for them to.
These large segments of the population will demand moderation from platforms they use to protect them from targeted harassment. It's these sorts of platforms that have the potential to truly become massive.
Platforms that are strongly moderated from day one (e.g. don't allow targeted harassment of minorities) don't need a "herculean effort to shift things enough to the left to be publicly palatable." A good example is the Reddit alternative raddle.me or even hacker news.
> people don't want to be exposed to content that dehumanizes them, argues for their extermination
The left does this on Reddit/Twitter constantly towards right wing people and no one bats an eye. It's like maybe those in power are extremely biased towards the left.
I don't think that there's an equivalency between the advocacy for the genocide of black people, Jews, trans people, etc and opposing someone for their political beliefs.
Perhaps there'd be more legitimacy in a comparison to the vitriol on the left against billionaires and cops, but these are positions of power, not identity groups one is born into. All revolutionaries of all political persuasions will oppose those in positions of power currently.
> Yes there are a very small minority of people who do call for this
I agree with you. We are talking about how targeted groups will demand moderation to avoid persistent targeted harassment from a comparatively small number of people.
Conservatives are also often targets of hate. There are black, Jewish, gay, and trans conservatives who are also targeted not for the content of their politics, but due to attributes they were born with and cannot change. I can always set aside my politics, but one cannot set aside their race, gender identity or ethnic group.
Since the discussion is the sociological cause, the fact that the group doing the harassing is small, it will nearly always be banned by the larger majority that is targeted.
> Conservatives are also often targets of hate. There are black, Jewish, gay, and trans conservatives who are also targeted not for the content of their politics, but due to attributes they were born with and cannot change. I can always set aside my politics, but one cannot set aside their race, gender identity or ethnic group.
I agree. One thing to note though is it's one thing to remove bad law such as outlawing homosexuality as such and it's another to try to force everyone to promote you're life style. Harassment is bad. One problem is that there is no agreed to standard of harassment. So a lot of the left don't like that as a Catholic I will not promote or think that a homosexual lifestyle is something positive. This is not harassment nor is them disliking Catholics and saying mean things about our people and positions.
I think the best comparison for gay marriage is interracial marriage. If you are okay with interracial marriage legally, but personally oppose it, people will have a negative reaction to that sentiment. Likewise, people will have a negative reaction to your personal opposition to gay marriage in a similar way to the way they'd be disgusted by one's opposition to interracial marriage, no one is entitled to having their views accepted.
I think how people react to your positions is a very different discussion than the sociological and political questions we've discussed so far though.
Im glad someone is standing up to protect those poor billionaires and racist cops. Because maybe they get hurt when they read someone online saying they actively hurt the world by existing! And as we all know, being a billionaire with hurt feeling is just as worse as being murdered by racist cops, or dying because a billionaire didn't want to pay taxes so he lobbied to lower taxes, causing public services to disappear!
> This is a misdirection. Yes there are a very small minority of people who do call for this but it is what I'm talk about is simple opposition to others political beliefs. If I say that there are only two sexes and you cannot change your sex, I would be banned from many of the most popular subreddits. This is not advocating for the genocide of trans people. It's a scientific and political position.
A comparison can be made to other positions which may be a tad extreme here, but I think it's arguably appropriate. If someone advocated for climate change denialism on any public forum, they'd be laughed out of the metaphorical room. However, even if attempts are made to persuade said people with logical arguments, often they will continue to hold such beliefs to the same strength or even stronger than before.
Is it appropriate to silence people for holding specific views? No. But ultimately some compromise has to be made. A decent solution may be the use of a debate section, but I'm sure better ones exist.
> If someone advocated for climate change denialism on any public forum, they'd be laughed out of the metaphorical room
The problem is that no one online has any sense of nuance. Any questioning of the absolute worst prediction, or disagreement about public policy regarding it are looked down on as climate change denialism.
They seem to be specifically calling out the far right, not just conservatives. Far right is synonymous with for example, calls for an ethnostate that would exclude certain people.
Firstly, no, that position isn't 'scientific'. The scientific portion of the equation comes from the separation of gender and sex along with the psychological and sociological expectations of how someone conforms to a given gender role. I see this often that people take a disingenuous stance and then claim it's 'scientific' when its anything but.
Secondly, that argument has a lot of baggage associated with it. Transgender people get banned from the military because they 'cannot change their sex' or 'transgender people lose their jobs because they don't conform'. It's an argument around taking away the rights of a certain group of people and it shouldn't be surprising that people don't want to associate with that.
Look, I agree. I shouldn't be forced to do something for someone who makes me uncomfortable, even if it's something that they can't change, and which doesn't materially impact me in any way.
But at the same time, do you not see how this reinforces existing disparities in opportunity and social acceptance? If you have a better solution than mandating that businesses don't discriminate, I'm all ears. However, if you simply allow businesses to freely discriminate, then the world will only become more unfair over time.
I mean, now we've established why you would end up getting banned from many subreddits. You're essentially arguing to treat one group of citizens as second-class citizens because you don't like them. A lot of things aren't 'rights' until they're codified in law, but that doesn't mean people don't deserve to be treated equally with others.
I would never agree to take away rights from a Catholic, but it's disappointing to see a Catholic argue to take away rights from someone else using their faith as a bludgeon. Especially when I know many Catholics whom treat gay people the same as everyone else.
What exactly do you mean by "scientific position"? The term seems, to me, an absurdity.
> Doesn't make it okay.
Putting aside any actual wrongdoing, attacking those with privilege is infinitely better than attacking those without: the former have the resources to defend themselves; the latter do not.
> In the same way your stance on climate change is a scientific position regardless if your stance is correct or not.
Can you please just give the definition of "scientific position" that you are using?
Do you mean an assertion regarding reality? Because I think everyone agrees on the reality. The question of what the words "sex" and "gender" constitute is not a question of reality: it is a question of social and legal constructs.
> It's still an evil to unjustly attack someone even if to different degrees.
I love how you explicitly avoided the use of the word gender and don't actually address that you're uncomfortable that some people don't fit into the social boxes of male and female.
As for vitriol against billionaires and cops, taking a stand against people abusing power is as American as the Boston tea party. If you're advocating for people to shut up and take the abuse you sound pretty authoritarian to me. Is it that hard to look at the situation and say "give me liberty or give me death" applies to poor people and black people too?
> If you're advocating for people to shut up and take the abuse you sound pretty authoritarian to me.
No I never said that nor do I think it. There are definite problems with some cops and there are many instances of gross abuse. I have no problem with billionaires.
Approximately no-one on reddit or twitter is saying that straight people shouldn't be allowed marry. Plenty of people on both are saying that I shouldn't be, though. To take just one example.
"People should be marginalised, and made second class citizens, and marginalised people should be kept marginalised" is a pretty common theme on the far right. It is rare on the far left; not that it's non-existent, but there just aren't that many sincere Stalinists or similar left.
What dehumanising content are you seeing from the left? I mean, if it's just "the other side are bad people" stuff, well, everyone does that. The "these classes of people should be socially and politically suppressed" stuff is overwhelmingly from one side, though.
> People should be marginalised, and made second class citizens, and marginalised people should be kept marginalised" is a pretty common theme on the far right.
What? Not that there is no one with this view but it is an extreme minority. Same with people calling for the killing of all cops on the left, very small minority.
No it's not. For example, being against gay marriage is still a fairly mainstream social conservative position; opposition in total is around 35% across the US[1]. You don't hear much about it anymore because it's viewed as politically infeasible even within those circles, but if they could do it they absolutely would.
Just look at the recent supreme court ruling that made it illegal to fire people based on you being gay or transgendered. Tons of conservatives shot back on that one. I don't know how you can look at a viewpoint like, "yes, employers should be allowed to fire you for merely being gay" and think that that doesn't mean they want to keep marginalised people marginalised.
You should reflect on your privilege if you think it's only a small minority holding views that people that aren't straight white males are worth less.
An extreme minority explicitly hold the view publicly, but what's not an extreme minority are people who take the long road around saying it and people who have kneejerk reactions to any proposed changes to the status quo.
Mike Pence is one example and he's the VP. Calling it an 'extreme minority' when there are multiple examples of high-level politicians holding views like that seems disingenuous.
As far as I can tell, there are no politicians or indeed anyone with significant power calling for the killing of all cops.
Unless Nancy Pelosi or someone starts retweeting videos demanding the liquidation of the kulak class, you'll forgive me if I don't take your claims of 'extreme minority on both sides' all that seriously.
Normal people won't tolerate being on the same forum with huge assholes. Especially assholes who are bigoted, rather than just generally angry/jerk-ish. The far right happens to contain a lot of this kind of person.
The far left has people who are also very angry, but they're generally not as bigoted. The demographic they're most angry at is rich people, which is punching up instead of down at least.
And most of the rhetoric there simply isn't as vile. It's stuff like, "take rich people's assets so we can redistribute it equally". I may not agree with seizing wealthy people's stuff, but that's nowhere near as offensive as "kick out all the gay/non-white people".
One of the funniest parts of this is that a common critique by liberals in the US against the modern left is that the left is largely too CIS, white, and male.
Police sure, and you could argue for conservatives maybe. The others, no.
The far right thinks black people are flatly inferior, and tolerate or encourage violence and oppression against them because of this.
The far left's attitude toward white people is "it's bad that white people are dominant in society because of historical/structural racism", even in cases like affirmative action the clear goal is eventual equality, not that they want white people to end up structurally oppressed instead.
If you can't see the difference in how toxic each of these attitudes are, I'm afraid I can't help you.
But I'd love to see you explain how the left is apparently bigoted against straight people.
As a straight white dude from the rural United States who regularly hangs out in extremely far-left circles in very far-left places... you're out of your mind.
I've never once heard a 'leftist' advocate for the murder of men, whites, straight people, conservatives, or rural dwellers (although, to be fair, occasionally the police). However, growing up and still when I visit home, I regularly hear how black people, queer people, and just liberals in general, aren't worthy of being left alive. These sides are not equivalent, no matter how desperately you want them to be.
Also, my induction into these liberal circles went so far as "you want people to be treated equally? cool.". I didn't have to hand in my cis-white-man card and tattoo an anarchy symbol. In fact, we regularly talk about all sorts of controversial subjects. My friends often enjoy hearing what it was like to grow up in the world of pocket knives and bar fights. I take my communist friends out to shoot guns. Ask me how many of my rural friends have ever asked to experience life among the queers?
You're comparing a rose bush with thorns to a semi-automatic rifle in terms of aggression towards the other party.
And. To the point of 1984-style revisionist history, old man. Statues are symbols we use to celebrate heros and victors. It's plain-as-day simple to look at a statue of a treasonous black-hating slave owner and say "maybe a statue of these pricks isn't the best way to memorialize history". It's not re-writing history to say "the union won and let's not celebrate slave owners". It's re-writing history to say "these slave owners are heros, lets memorialize them in statues".
There's a lot of problems with your comment but I'll stick with the most egregious/shocking point.
Are you really suggesting that confederate leaders are republican heros? And if-so... are you acknowledging that republicans admire and would like to celebrate treasonous bigots that went to war against the United States so that they could own slaves?
Sounds to me like you're admitting that the platform of the republican party is literally that of racists. So, in that way, I understand why these groups would respond to being oppressed by racists with violence.
Depends on how relevant you consider a social "scientist" having build a career on creating a bogeyman on mixing up nationalism, extreme right and white supremacy. A former columnist at "Huffington Post", she is now writing a book on "Undoing White Womanhood". Calls herself a "change agent" on her own webiste.
Sounds rather like "anti-White" activist to me, like an intellectual Robin DiAngelo.
It's because mainstream moderated sites don't censor far-left views, so those people have no incentives to move to unmoderated sites. For example, /r/MoreTankieChapo isn't even quarantined.
Option 4: poorly moderated forums tend to fill with people banned by most other forums, such as Nazis. And various other undesirables, too; I gather voat had a big influx when Reddit banned its paedophile subreddits, and another one when FPH et all were killed.
So if 1% of the population are far-right extremists, but most normal platforms ban or restrict them, any new platform with poor regulation will tend to fill with them.
I do think that the very extreme (and thus bannable) far right _are_ probably more common than ditto on the far left; you just don't get that many Stalinists, anywhere. But the normal left (and normal right) aren't generally nasty enough to get banned everywhere, so most of the internet's displaced population of commenters is far right.
I think there is an aspect of option 1, too, though. In Ireland a while back we had a referendum on allowing same-sex marriage, which passed by 62%, and another one, on legalising abortion (until then only legal in very limited circumstances), a few years later, which passed by 66%. Now, if you'd gone based on web polls and opinions being expressed in the comments on mainstream sites, you'd have assumed that both would fail by a landslide; it was really kind of incredible. Comments on news sites etc were grossly unrepresentative of the actual public mood; the right really does seem to be a lot noisier.
Ok, I've not lived in Ireland for 15 years but I find it hard to believe that it has a 'right' that falls into the same definition as that of the US. You can't say that being anti-abortion means you're right-wing and therefore must also hate black people. It is actually possible for people to have a foot in either camp, to varying degrees, on multiple issues.
Twitter recently deleted 170k bot accounts that pushed a Chinese controlled narrative related to covid. It's not hard to imagine that other actors are doing the same on reddit in order to stir shit up, and that impressionable real users are falling for it.
My guess would be that attention-seeking and disruptive behaviours are part of the explanation.
In a forum with ten reasonable conversation threads and one highly controversial one, attention is likely to move towards the controversial topic.
The phrase "don't feed the trolls" is well-intentioned but it's difficult to scale the message when so many people are online and can witness and partake in minor and major conversations alike.
It also doesn't help that engagement (regardless of reason for engagement and any human stress created as a result; they're harder for software and metrics to capture) tends to be seen as something to optimize for, both within companies themselves and also by their investors.
Controversial conversations are sometimes necessary. People who repeatedly raise controversial topics to gain notoriety or attention are generally not - although their behaviour may be a sign that they need help in other ways.
> The phrase "don't feed the trolls" is well-intentioned but it's difficult to scale the message when so many people are online
I think this is similar to the economics of spam: the cost of spamming is so low that even if a small fraction of a percent respond and convert, it's still profitable to spam.
People who troll are just looking to rile people up. All they need is one or two people to respond (out of hundreds or thousands or more). Even someone who knows better will occasionally be triggered enough to respond to a troll.
> The phrase "don't feed the trolls" is well-intentioned but it's difficult to scale the message when so many people are online and can witness and partake in minor and major conversations alike.
I wonder if it's possible to have a community where the moderation is more focused on educating people to identify trolling and discourage posters from engaging with emotionally charged/inciting posters. Instead of warning the troller, encourage people to just downvote and move on instead of engaging.
I consider a troll as someone who is seeking to create a strong negative (anger, hate, frustration, etc) emotion in a reader intentionally or unintentionally. I dont know if this is too subjective and impossible to enforce.
Hacker news has excellent moderation, and high standards for comments. Relax them a bit to allow for memes and harmless troll threads like Rick rolls while strictly moderating against those participating in bad faith. Mind you, moderation needn't be by paid or even volunteer moderators. There are various solutions axiall available and the most successful are always multifaceted in their approaches.
Maybe I'm naive, but it seems pretty obvious that it's because technology is mostly full of leftists, so they tolerate their own extremists and ban their opponents. Deplatforming has been a tactic of the left for a while now.
> Maybe I'm naive, but it seems pretty obvious that it's because technology is mostly full of leftists, so they tolerate their own extremists and ban their opponents. Deplatforming has been a tactic of the left for a while now.
I wouldn't say that technology is full of actual "leftists", more a group ranging from overly-myopic liberals who struggle to do what would actually benefit minority communities in a more positive sense to the libertarian types who only end up restricting what people say because it ends up affecting their advertising revenue. Simply by virtue of being in a position of financial power, it's very difficult to hold truly leftist views.
>Deplatforming has been a tactic of the left for a while now.
Deplatforming has been the go to method of the right for at least a century (see mccarthyism) and longer if you include lynching/death as essentially equivalent (ie: you can't speak if you're dead). The left has simply finally got enough critical mass to do it themselves.
>Can we try to figure out sociologically, why by default unmoderated social forums become far-right oriented?
This did not used to be the case. It's a relatively extremely recent phenomenon, that I would say only really coalesced around 2014-2015.
It used to be that the wild west of the internet was, to the extent that it reinforced anything at all, a boon to liberal and left wing politics and organizing. And a lot of the cultural aspects weren't co-opted the way they currently are. Gamer culture was surely unconsciously sexist, misogynist, but not to the extent that it is now where it's a full-on reactionary identity. Internet atheists didn't used to be misogynist right-wing trolls, but they are now.
Trolling was just trolling, it wasn't organized into mobs or propaganda in the sophisticated way it is now. Anonymity and revealing one's 'true self' didn't channel it into a cultural current of toxicity that is now established and ready to welcome those impulse and stoke them and use them to nudge a person into a right wing trolling infrastructure.
I think it's been weaponized by state actors and by bad actors who figured out how to use the tools, to turn everything into a nuclear wasteland. I don't believe it inherently disposes anyone toward any particular set of politics necessarily, and it didn't used to be the case that it got channeled in this way.
The current state of slashdot is good place to investigate. These days the comments are filled with people switching to anonymous mode to inject some sort of political statement even if it has no relevance to the story. Sometimes it's just people posting giant ascii swastikas.
I'd assume another reason is that given that a small number of far-right threads/communities exist, you're going to have people leaving simply because people who are against, or at least frustrated with, your existence isn't a great place to be around.
The problem is not so subjectively limited as to be a right-wing problem. Communities, unless extremely well policed, tend to become gravities of like mindedness when there is a visible vote system. This seems to occur because vote counts, whether positive or negative, are viewed as a form of credibility and because people are generally hostile to disruption and originality.
When you step back from a subjective slant the phenomenon of group think has been well studied.
When reddit first launched, the media and mainstream leaned a bit more right. Reddit had people with pretty heavily left leaning views and also borderline anarchist libertarians flocking to it. Gay marriage and legal weed were actually not incredibly mainstream ideas back then and people who supported these things were often pushed out of many places, but virtually everyone posting on reddit supported it and topics like it popped up daily, mixed among programming news. There was also batshit sovereign citizen stuff and videos of people walking out of court because the court flags had gold fringes and that meant it wasn’t legit, and quite a few people on reddit praised stuff like this.
Now the virtually everybody out there already supports gay marriage and legal weed, and those are a baseline for everything left of center and basically mainstream thought now. Everybody right of that gets pushed out of communities, so whenever some new community pops up, you get a whole spectrum of right of center as well as sovereign citizen types again looking to settle down and establish a community like left of center people did with places like reddit all those years ago. One bad thing for these new communities is that the internet is far more accessible now, and the more extreme members see their chance to finally talk, and those with extreme opinions like talking a lot.
I think it is because far-right is far less palatable than far-left.
Consider two possible statements:
1. Hitler wasn't that bad.
2. Stalin wasn't that bad.
I think, for most people, the first provokes a much more extreme reaction. Both were objectively terrible human beings, but defending Hitler is seen as far more extreme than defending Stalin.
This has two effects:
Firstly, far-right people are continually kicked out of communities. Far-left people are not. So any new unmoderated community is going to attract these "refugees"
Secondly, nobody notices or cares when a community goes far-left. But its far more noticeable when a community goes far-right.
I think both of those examples would provoke a pretty extreme response in most people, but sincere Stalinists just aren't very common, at all. You see a _bit_ of "Stalinism was actually good" stuff on the internet (weirdly, occasionally from the right; some more confused Russian nationalists have a bit of a Stalin fetish), but you'll see a lot more holocaust denial.
Maybe the figure-head isn't en vogue anymore. The methods are always popular.
Leftists(Socialists, Communists, Anarchists) often publically revel in the idea of when "the revolution comes" to put anyone dissenting up against the wall or sending them to a Gulag camp of some sort. I don't find that exactly reassuring. Seeing how "protesters" in the US and Europe act like chinese Red Guards during the cultural revolution, this day doesn't seem far off.
I'm reading the "Three-Body Problem" right now and the first chapter eerily reminded me of the current situation where not being enough of an "ally" to the racial BLM movement is a thought-crime punishable by having your life destroyed.
It's the paradox of tolerance. If you tolerate the intolerant (e.g. right-wing assholes) they will push out other groups through their intolerant behavior. The only solution is to rabidly ban hate speech and similar behavior.
It's because everyone puts up this herculean effort.
There's a large population of people out there with views that annoy left-wing people, who don't really have a place on most internet platforms, because all internet platforms are left wing, because the dominant culture of silicon valley is much more left wing than the mean of, say, US citizens. (And everyone who wants to keep their job pretends to be more left wing than they are, too.)
Anyway, this means there's this mob of people without a place to talk, and they want such a place. So if a place ever opens up that doesn't strictly persecute right-wingers- well, it's like being a town during the inquisition that doesn't persecute witches. Obviously, all the witches are going to flock to you!
It's because everyone puts up this herculean effort.
There's a large population of people out there with views that annoy left-wing people, who don't really have a place on most internet platforms, because all internet platforms are left wing, because the dominant culture of silicon valley is much more left wing than the mean of your average person. (And everyone who wants to keep their jobs pretends to be more left wing than they are, too.)
Anyway, this means there's this mob of people without a place to talk, and they want such a place. So if a place ever opens up that doesn't strictly persecute right-wingers- well, it's like being a town during the inquisition that doesn't persecute witches. Obviously, all the witches are going to flock to you!
(Witch metaphor courtesy of Slatestarcodex, may it rest in peace.)
It’s true that “thing but not” sites tend to have issues with getting the unwanted population of the original “thing” website. And of course, some of that “unwanted” population is actually not necessarily bad, but a lot of it certainly is. I think the main way you can combat this is by disincentivizing users to bring their unwanted behaviors to the new site while incentivizing existing users to check it out. Obviously network effects dominate, but that hasn’t stopped there from being small niches where Mastodon instances and Matrix chats are good and healthy. OTOH, the point of sites like Voat and Gab were to support users who were not welcome on Reddit and Twitter, and therefore it quickly became a problem. But I don’t like the notion that you can’t directly compete with established sites - I feel like back in the day this is Exactly what happened with news aggregators. Digg and Reddit were once fairly similar sites; although Digg always had a nicer interface, they served an extremely similar purpose at the end of the day, and yet it was possible for them to compete. I think it’s harder now, but probably still doable if you can be novel enough, or if the big site becomes too annoying (Reddit seems to really be trying at this, to be honest; just try using their website on a mobile browser!)
Most of the arguments about social media content policies center around American politics, but Reddit has been banning other potential lightning rods for controversy. They banned DarkNetMarkets, Deepfakes, and SanctionedSuicide in 2018. They banned WatchPeopleDie last year [1].
It's not hard to see why Reddit would ban any of these, but at some point there may be a critical mass of too-controversial-for-Reddit content that isn't just interesting to the Voat crowd. Is that point now? I'll have to wait and see how Lemmy turns out.
The other theoretical advantage of a federated service is that smaller instances are less expensive to run than one big centralized service. There are a lot of people who could afford to run a service on a $10/month VPS as a hobby but who couldn't afford to run anything at actual Reddit scale without corresponding revenue. That's important considering that Reddit leavers are more likely to be posting not-safe-for-brand content even if it's not specifically hateful content.
[1] Not a sub I ever visited, but by most accounts surprisingly non-toxic as a community, considering the subject matter.
It's federated, each instance would be a subreddit. Don't like a instances because it is run by a deplorable? Don't subscribe to it. Is a deplorable posting deplorable things on the instances you are subscribed to and trying to piss on your pool? Downvote/mute/ban them.
Also you have a big "create community" button at the top. Surely that doesn't spin a completely new instance of the application every time? And if not, how can we tell which instance a community belongs to?
Honestly I don't really understand the need for something like that to be federated. In the olden days you had a bunch of forums/BBS/IRC network/Whatever that served various niches but didn't communicate with each other.
For instance, what would we gain if we decided to turn HN into a Lemmy federated service?
If anything it seems like in the long run it would be a disservice, as very large communities with lower standards would end up spilling and wrecking niches where the community is more tightly knit and post higher quality content.
This fediverse thing makes some sense for IM and similar applications where you want to be able to connect easily with anybody. For forums however, it feels rather pointless to me.
Well, currently Lemmy does not even have a working federated implementation. Maybe it's too early to guess?
> For instance, what would we gain if we decided to turn HN into a Lemmy federated service?
It doesn't have to be a "Lemmy" Service. But let's pretend that dang decides to implement ActivityPub for HN. What would we get? Some guesses:
- Less people trying to game/break HN. There is great value in gaming HN now because of its centralization. If HN is just one in a place with a bigger number of actors, I would guess the incentive to game it would be reduced.
- Easier to have cross-pollination of ideas. There is an overlap between some subreddits, HN, lobste.rs, etc. Now, we can accept these services are big enough that there is always some cross-posting. What about the other topics that are HN-worthy (gratifies one's intellectual curiosity) but are under-represented elsewhere?
- More room for dissenting/non-status quo views. With ActivityPub, your client could easily allow you to subscribe to an account. So let's say that I want to see whatever more controversial people post - e.g, idlewords. With HN, I need to either stalk him or hope that the echo chamber has decided on his favor on a given day.
Granted, I think is highly unlikely that dang or YC would have any interest in doing something like that. They would be giving away control of the conversation and the risks are unknown for very little benefit. But is it really our job to be concerned about this? I'd rather have more people and more actors sharing this control than having to trust entities that become too big to fail.
If i'm a redditor that looks at r/dankmemes and r/gifs all day, or a creator for those subreddits, I don't see why I would leave reddit for a competitor. Without these people coming from reddit, it'll have the same problem as voat where nobody is looking for - or even willing to try - alternatives unless they were rejected.
You know it's not an either/or proposition, right? You can still use reddit even if you also have an account at the competitor.
But anyway: if you are someone that only cares about looking at whatever BigCorp allows you to look, then sure, keep using reddit.
If you'd like to have some form of control over the content you value, create and would like to promote, then your best bet is to fight for alternatives to the current big centralized systems.
The difference would be for the deplorable, who now has no "mah free speech" and "reddit is censoring me!!11!!" excuses to fall on and justify its deplorability.
More seriously though, the important thing about ActivityPub is that it removes central points of control. No matter how much you agree/disagree with the governance of Reddit/Facebook/Twitter et caterva, they are just too big for the good of society. Federated systems is one chance to take this power from them and bring to people - if not directly (say, because you don't want the pain of hosting/managing all that crap) at least you can delegate this power to someone closer to you - or at very least to a bigger number of smaller providers who will them have no monopoly and will have to keep your interests first.
how is this different from reddit governance where subreddits are already responsible for self-moderation? I don't think a lot of users care whether the instances are technically separated, in the case of Mastodon this is probably what stops people from using it because it's not intuitive to understand.
Voat was created intentionally and specifically for the (mostly far-right) trolls too unsavory for Reddit. So, if Lemmy is not that, it'll have a head start.
No it wasn't. Voat was originally "Whoaverse", a reddit clone that the developer created as a school project. He literally copy-pasted the HTML/CSS from Reddit and then started gradually rebuilding some of the backend in C#. You can see the original version in the internet archive: http://web.archive.org/web/20140427060403/http://whoaverse.c...
He tried to get people to use it for a while, but since it was just a less-functional and empty Reddit, nobody was very interested. Eventually some of the users/subreddits banned from Reddit started using it since they had been kicked off real Reddit, and the developer ended up welcoming them while justifying it as "free speech". I think he mostly just seemed happy that some people actually wanted to use his site.
It's all been downhill from there, and the original creator even abandoned the site a few years ago and handed it over to someone else.
As the person that hid those upvote/downvote counts, I definitely remember that uproar well.
A relatively small group "migrated" for a few days, but didn't stay. Here's Whoaverse one month after the up/down counts were removed from Reddit (notice that they added visible vote counts, which they didn't have before): http://web.archive.org/web/20140718134533/http://whoaverse.c...
Other than the stickied site announcement, almost all of the posts only have a handful of votes and only a few have any comments.
The banned users were the first group that actually stuck around on Whoaverse/Voat, because they didn't have the option of just going back to Reddit.
This seems to be the outcome of all of these Reddit clones, even the ones made with the best of intentions.
Take for instance Ruqqus, another site created as a free speech reddit alternative. It consistently has horrifying content on the front page regularly; viciously racist content, anti-Semitic memes, unironic pro-Nazism/pro-genocide discussion posts, and generally terrible content. This is likely because it is exactly this content that is being "censored" from Reddit, not these harmless free speech advocates who are silenced by a big company.
Can anyone actually tell me what valuable discussion is being censored on Twitter, Reddit, etc? Banning this type of content is mandatory if you want a platform that is safe and available for trans people, Jews, gay people, women, etc.
People shouldn't have to tolerate people @ing them with slurs, be exposed to "reasoned" arguments for their extermination, or memes dehumanizing them for the sake of "free speech."
Why do you assume that all alternatives have to be "free speech = allowing abuse" alternatives?
E.g. a large subset of Fediverse (Mastodon etc) communities are communities that avoid Twitter because they don't feel Twitter is doing enough to be safe for them. And instances have a varying policies about how they handle instances with different moderation standards.
The problem is access to platforms. We haven't found a good way to do this. People should be free to opt in or out of the content they want. What offends one will not offend another. For example a thread on hunting will offend some who love the animals they hunt. There is no universal right or wrong there. On should have access to an online community the other should have the ability to disagree or avoid that community. The problem is when an organisation like Twitter picks a side that free speech becomes an issue. Only because of the monopolistic nature of the platform. But that's what makes the platform good, everyone is there.
When free speech on the internet is discussed, it is within the context of freedom from excessive moderation on a platform. To call a Fediverse a "platform" doesn't seem quite analogous, these communities are more like their own platforms that are far more intensely moderated than even Twitter or Reddit.
Free speech advocates who aren't convinced by the "just go to another platform" argument in a discussion about Reddit or Twitter censorship likely won't think the argument is worth accepting simply by redefining what a platform is.
And what stops a network of lemmy instances from being that more intensely moderated Reddit alternatives? That's my point: just because other reddit alternatives have branded themselves as "free speech" doesn't mean all of them have to. And federated platforms might make that easier than one-offs.
Ruqqus is nowhere near as bad as voat is. Moreover, in threads, they are well aware of what happened to voat. They know they have to walk a line between free and open speech and not devolving into a haven for nazis and racists. However, the best way to help them is for more sane users to participate in that community.
I'd argue that raddle is far more intensely moderated than Twitter or Reddit, probably more so than most subreddits.
I may not have done a good job of illustrating it in the previous post, but the example was mainly focused on platforms that bill themselves as an anti-censorship alternative to Reddit. Censorship and free speech on social media are incredibly complex topics, and the development of an endless stream of tiny, far right echo chambers doesn't seem to capture the spirit of this "town square" that free speech advocates are looking for.
Moderation should be similar to a database view. I would love a browser extension and backend store like Lemmy that posts to both the site I’m on but also Lemmy (each site would be a distinct “namespace”). What is a forum but a collection of post identifiers with a corresponding tree of comments.
If a mod removes, hides, or takes other mod action on a comment or post, the browser extension and federated storage system still allows me to see and interact with that content and it’s writer (“showdead” globally). You could subscribe to “mod actions” (which is just curation) by mod, which would govern your experience of the content.
I appreciate the mod work here, for example, but I also want to be able to bypass that “filter opinion” so I can still interact with folks and content out of band if I so choose (one person’s “flame war” is another person’s vigorous debate).
Yes. Even just the existence of different subreddits with different moderation policies is already close to a perfect solution.
I don't understand why people are so hellbent on getting subreddits that exceed their tolerances removed from the platform. There are orders of magnitude more subreddits that I ignore altogether than the ones that I choose to subscribe to.
Speaking only of the US legal framework, hate speech is still free speech. Ignore speech you prefer not to consume instead of supporting the curtailment of rights.
No, I mean it's about removing people you hate's ability to speak to each other (and to you) in a completely legal manner, by getting reddit to destroy the place where they congregate and hounding them out of the digital cities.
The answer, of course, is that these people should build their own cities. But first, of course, they'll just have to build their own websites, servers, datacentres, ISPs, and nations.
(And militaries, to stop USGOV from killing them all, presuming they dare challenge the banks by building alternatives to traditional payment processors.)
> The answer, of course, is that these people should build their own cities. But first, of course, they'll just have to build their own websites, servers, datacentres, ISPs, and nations.
Yeah! I’m proposing building systems on top of Reddit and Hacker News (just two examples, any forum really that serves its data as http) to backfill their content and discussion data (comments), and prevent global censorship by mod actions. If you can’t censor The Pirate Bay and SciHub, you’d expect such a system to be equally durable. It’s all JSON blobs, identifies, and endpoints.
These sites are temporary (remember Digg?), so you want to build discussion systems that are durable, prevent censorship, and will outlive their underlying websites they sit on top of. These are not unreasonable amounts of data we’re dealing with, it’s mostly compressible text. I can store 100TB in Backblaze for $500/month, and front it from VMs around the world.
Good luck! We do need something more robust than individual company-owned websites. My optimistic side hopes that when we get good enough protocols for this sort of thing entrenched, things will stay good.
I’m hopeful. The Distributed Web movement appears to have legs and momentum. Time will tell if it delivers the aspirational value supporters believe in.
I would say it's not "more moderation" but rather "better moderation". An unbelievable amount of human effort is spent moderating reddit. It is very, very far from unmoderated. The issue is that the moderation going on is not intended to help along things like constructive conversation. Moderation on Reddit by and large exists to make subreddits as insular and myopic as possible.
That's the biggest limit of moderated forums, they only reflect the opinion of the most active groups who can steer the discussion helped by moderators who benefit from rewarding the largest groups instead of the best comments
If moderation was visible and moderators were forced to leave a note about why the moderation took place it would be a real discussion platform
HN is not
Slashdot is a lot better than many others in this regards, but it's not popular anymore and you can't make money on it, while a lot of people leave by posting shit on Reddit
That's just the nature of discussion basically anywhere. Every person and group have lines that you're not allowed to cross, and when people cross them you just get unproductive blow-ups, and someone or some sub-group will leave.
If you tried to herd state socialists/tankies and anarcho-capitalists/voluntarists into the same discussion space, they're so violently opposed they'd just be constantly screaming epithets at each other. That's not a useful thing.
Not to mention even when you have ideologically-aligned folks, some people are just anti-social dickwads who will constantly pick fights or argue in bad faith. I don't understand some people's seeming obsession with defending this kind of person, Some people just suck and everyone else is better off if they're not around. A private space is under no obligation to tolerate a poster who adamantly refuses to get along.
> If I'm having a discussion with people in real life I decide what I accept or not, there's no third party that decides for me what is right.
Yes, and that works fine because there's no platform there, just a 1 on 1 or small group conversation. You can still easily replicate this, unmoderated, with email or various messaging apps.
Once you can talk to potentially hundreds or thousands of people at once, once there's a platform, that model breaks down. Bad actors who would be uninterested in trolling single individuals are very interested in trolling hundreds at a time. And nobody wants to "walk away" from an otherwise good community because of handful of very loud people are spouting hate there.
Any platform that's both popular and unmoderated will eventually be dominated by extreme content, and will push out normal people, who will go somewhere that's popular and moderated.
There's no intrinsical limitation on the number of participants
Don't you like what a user says?
You can ignore them
Don't you like what some instance does, you can block it.
Any platform that is popular has an editorial board and doesn't want you to say things they don't like.
Simple as that.
Newspaper had no comments sections because it's silly to comment the news, they already decide what to publish and what not.
They already chose who to talk to, there's no point in discussing when you can only comment what someone else wants you to talk about.
Have you seen today on HN a post about exactly 40 years ago, when an Italian civil plane, the Itavia Flight 870, was shot down by a fight between NATO and Libyan fighter jets and 81 innocent people died?
You won't, because it's gonna be flagged as politics.
But you're going to read about every cat fight between über rich silicon valley founders because that's not politics for them, it's what they wanna talk about.
Trolling is a problem for the platform, not for the users.
I don't mind trolls, if I can decide who they are and silence them.
If they do it for me, it's censorship.
Censorship is not bad per se, but it's not done in my name, it's only in the platform's interests.
Do platforms ever ask users what do they think about banning someone?
> I don't mind trolls, if I can decide who they are and silence them.
This only works for small communities. You can't feasibly block the literally thousands of trolls and petty assholes that are posting on Reddit every day without that task consuming all your time. Multiply that by every single user having to do it personally and it gets even sillier.
There's a reason basically every popular platform is moderated on some level, and it's not because of some grand meta-moderator conspiracy.
Moderation is near-universally used because it works. Non-moderating doesn't work for conversations that eclipse some size. Disliking how moderators behave doesn't change that.
> Ad blocking works because I decide what to block
Ad blocking isn't a community or discussion forum, and most people just use whatever blacklists some 'authority' comes up with.
I guess the equivalent for a forum would be where you could not only block users (which is already common), but also share/combine blocklists. That's an interesting idea.
I think you'd run into the WoW sharding problem where it creates a sort of dissonance where you're nominally in the same space but also not in the same space at the same time. Still, would be cool to at least experiment with.
It's a user's side tool to remove unwanted content based on community generated rules
It's content moderation nonetheless
The error IMO is to think that the current implementation, which is also very young and immature, it's the best possible
It isn't
HN is not really a community, it's a platform run by a commercial entity, with (legit) interests
Imagine if HN was just a node of a larger federated network
They could decide what to post on their node(s) and which comments to remove
I could run my instance and subscribe to their feed or their same source feeds and make different choices
People could share blocklists, whitelists, favourites, ratings and everything else and decide what to use and what not
HN would still be popular, but other nodes could benefit from having more freedom or making different choices
Now HN (and every other UGC out there) is an all or nothing experience
Facebook is facing an ad boycott because they can't moderate the platform the way corporations want, it means advertisers are the ones who ultimately decide which content is valuable and which is not, sometimes it can coincide with what users want, but more often than not it doesn't.
But if we produce the content (like this conversation we're having) we should have control over it, and be able to reproduce it on a instance we control and continue it ad libitum even when HN decides our karma doesn't allow more than a few comments a day or one of us is shadow banned for reasons completely unrelated to what we are discussing right now or because it looks like spam to them or any other reason they think it needs moderation.
It's their right if the content is free for someone else to pick up and they are not responsible for what happens on other nodes.
It should be part of giving back to the community, you generate content for us, we moderate it like a DJ selects music for the listeners, but you can make your own playlists if you want to, because we don't make the music, we just mix it.
Nobody said HN should not moderate their public instance, they have people to respond to, it simply shouldn't be the only instance
If I had a feed of every comment and every link posted, I could read them and make my own rules
This post is being downvoted but it's a well known feature of HN that heated discussion are immediately flagged and they disappear very quickly
If a platform wants people to engage but don't want people to be passionate about their beliefs, it is not a discussion platform, it's a walled garden for a certain type of opinions.
Does it make discussions better? probably, if you already agree with the rules or can (or want) to follow them.
What if you can't?
What if a topic is divisive because on HN people refuse to acknowledge that the general view on HN is simply wrong?
Nobody will ever know.
Imagine a person going to a vegan restaurant asking for a steak. How long will it take to get kicked out?
That's a feature, if you are vegan, but it's not desirable for every restaurant, especially if they want (or like) to serve a broad range of customers.
Of course HN can say that this is exactly what they want, but what about the discussion about "is what they want right?"
I'm talking about HN because one of the post mentioned it like a good example of a free and open platform, but a platform that bans users for talking about politics is not really a good example of good moderation.
Moderation should happen on the receiving side, when it happens on the publisher's side it's called editing.
Any news outlets has editorial boards, there's nothing wrong about it, but it should be clear that the opinions expressed on an editorialised platform are not free.
Decentralisation has, among the many downsides, the advantage of being controlled by the party who receive the content, not the one who generates it.
The reason Voat is so bad is because it's the only alternative so the extremists are all shunted there. If a federated group of many forums was available with different moderation policies, then there would be breathing room for non-extremists.
See how the Fediverse works - it has largely avoided becoming like Voat. Most alt-right instances, such as Gab, are hugely defederated by instance admins and therefore isolated from most of the network.
You speak in a language too cryptic for regular consumption ;)
Which "Fediverse"? As I understand the concept, it applies to social networks in general. But it appears that you are referring to one specific network which contains the Gab server in it.
"Fediverse" = federated universe. Basically a bunch of smaller social networks speaking together through common protocols. Think: being able to follow a YouTube channel straight from your Twitter account — no need to create a YouTube account.
The most popular of such networks is Mastodon (https://joinmastodon.org/), which everyone can run on their own server (often referred to as an "instance"). By default, you create an account on one server and just speak to everyone like if you were on the same server. If one of such servers turns out to be a cesspool full of bigots (like Gab is), an admin can simply say "my server will no longer communicate with that server". When a bunch of servers do that, Gab is pretty much isolated, even though it's using an open protocol.
To put it in layman's terms: if a lot of spam comes from 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.
Which has the same problem of the community being an echo chamber, the only difference being that it's a left wing echo chamber instead of a right wing echo chamber like voat.
It has a number of things going for it. First, it's on activitypub, and will have the same kind of granular federating controls as mastodon, at least at the instance level.
And as another commenter mentioned about initial culture, the politics/cultural tilt of the devs are unapologetically anti-righ wing troll, which is a great start, and a lot of the stuff people post about is linux/open source/libre/fediverse stuff, which is a focused interest that doesn't fall back to the lowest common denominator of trolling.
I think it's off to a good start, it's starting with a good culture that's explicitly conscious of the trolling problem, and it shares a lot of the spirit and mission of the other fediverse projects which are driven by conscious concern in mitigating these issues.
There a situation going on at SomethingAwful where if ownership isn’t transferred, a vocal group of users is going to leave. Some of them have suggested BreadnRoses.net, which advertises supporting an open community and being inviting to all.
However, it’s too far to the left and focused on solidarity to take all of SA’s threads and even forums.
You have such a mix over there, everything from tech to politics, guns, drugs... a lot like reddit.
> Some of them have suggested BreadnRoses.net, which advertises supporting an open community and being inviting to all.
It does?
> B+R is a community-owned space that seeks to foster solidarity between people from all backgrounds that share a common character. We reject policies of social dominance, Neo-liberalism, patriarchy, the gender binary, white supremacy, and other social ills espoused by capitalism. We support worker/union/trans rights, empowering those without a voice, and each other.
> Do not advocate for obvious bad shit like landlords/cops/capitalism/etc. This is a leftist space.
Sounds like they're quite explicit about what things they're non-open/inviting about.
Their attitude sounds like D&D/C-SPAM turned up to 11. Even as a Bernie-loving social democrat, I'd have to say 'pass'.
As someone that has probed this community on different basic morality subjects for years and gotten downvoted to the lowest possible score (-4), I can reliably say that there's a portion of the user base that hold beliefs and perspectives that are not making the world a better place and sometimes make this feel like a cesspool.
Sometimes the lack of exposure to real-world problems creates people that are completely disconnected from reality.
True, but just don't fall into the trap of thinking Reddit is a centrist, unbiased platform that only bans those that upset the equilibrium. Reddit is partisan, applies bans selectively, and permits astroturfing when it agrees with the cause.
Reddit is infiltrated with corporate sock puppet accounts. A documentary has been made about it. Any reddit that supports Trump and becomes popular get's dismantled. A good example is the the_donald, who's moderators were kicked out and the community had to leave.
Like as in "used by right-wing people who got kicked out of Reddit"? Probably by heavy moderation, the Lemmy developers are left to far-left as far as I can see form a glance.
Like as in "used to create an echo chamber for ideologically aligned people to talk to each other"? That may well be the goal.
Is it possible to make fonts smaller to resemble old.reddit.com? My perception field is vastly larger than the amount of text displayed (i.e. my brain can search for keywords without actually consciously focusing on them).
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.
There are still a few servers that allow one to access usenet to access text based groups without a monthly fee. Barring that, you can access usenet newsgroups via Google Groups (groups.google.com), but only via HTTP.
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.
The fact that Reddit is an echo-chamber is one reason I never joined, & never will, but there are some communities that would be useful like the android & kustom subreddits, the former of which already exists on Lemmy. I'm only holding off with Lemmy because they don't (yet at least) have a privacy policy, which to me is essential especially considering the nature of the site. The fact that they didn't at least put up some sort of template of a privacy policy before the site was ever available to the public when that's a common part of any site that provides accounts, as a way of informing you how they will handle the data you give them, is very troubling to me.
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.
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.
Well, now yours does, and thinking of federation, that is what I thought of, too. And, I think also, to be based on NNTP. I think at at least what should be done includes: Use NNTP, and avoid namespace collisions if you are defining your own newsgroups. I don't know how to request adding newsgroups to Big 8, or to the alt hierarchy, or others, but I invented the "Unusenet" convention for avoiding namespace collisions, which I use on my own NNTP server. Make the web pages contain the message ID, newsgroup name, and information to connect to the NNTP server, even if JavaScripts are disabled. Users who want NNTP can use it even if they do not have a compatible browser. If you want to use Markdown, add a "Content-type: text/markdown" header to articles that use Markdown (and do not try to render articles without such a header as Markdown), and preferably using a subset of Markdown without HTML.
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?
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.
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.
I softened on it a little over the years since, but I think that was just the dearth of new things coming out that ran on it. Now I'm starting to think that was just a reflection of the fact that the obvious, low-hanging fruit was handled (write.as/Pixelfed/PeerTube/Mastodon) and the next round will take a while as people who got on later get ideas and develop them into something like, for example, Lemmy.
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.
I'm not sure that usenet could scale to the degree that reddit has. Part of what reddit does that makes it good(though it's both a blessing and a curse) is that a lot of the curation and moderation is handled by the community via the upvote downvote system. That means that you don't need as much dedicated moderation handling things which at the scale that some of the subreddits operate at is huge.
"This is an Antifa instance" stickied on the front page by an admin no less.
If I wanted a politicized cesspool reddit-clone I would just use Voat.
Fail to see the point.
I'm convinced that implementing so-called "free speech" sites in public doesn't work. Real free speech happens in closed networks, invite only. The only downside is those take more time to grow.
Another poorly crafted SPA app. Click on a post then go back and it jumps to the top on its own. Sometimes there is just a blank screen. Please make it a simple MVC app without JavaScript BS.
For anyone looking at this type of web application, I believe dev.to has similar functionality and licensing, but also has a mobile app on both iOS and android.
Obfuscation? I've seen this in other sites (discord comes to mind). Maybe there's a hypothetical efficiency from reusing the websocket connection for all requests? for the site sqowk.im Im working on I use http for content requests and websocket for realtime stuff
>We are never going to remove the slur filter completely (or add an option to that effect), because we dont want to make it easy for right-wingers to use Lemmy.
Welp, I just completely wrote off this site and I'm about as middle of the road as they come in America. What a short sighted and ignorant way to look at the world.
"I think we should eliminate all of (((those people)))." I didn't use the k-word, but everyone knows what the sentence means.
On the other hand, you can't post "tranny" or "bitch" but, bitch is contextual: it's definition is a female dog, but even in the context of "wow she's such a bitch" bitch is not a slur. "Tranny" is derogatory in the context when used against trans people, but it's also used quite often in mechanics to mean "transmission." There are so many different contexts in which these words aren't derogatory, and in some cases represent the power of people to reclaim what was previously a slur.
Banning certain words is incredibly short-sighted, and punishes everyone who uses the platform while not addressing the real issue: extreme right-wingers can still use it just fine, and have absolutely no problem coming up with new dog whistles in order to get around your elementary word filter.
In restaurants I worked in a long time ago, servers would just call black people "Canadians" -- for instance, "Nope, don't sit those Canadians in my section, they don't tip."
Good luck filtering for stuff like that. And even if you did, people would just come up with new version.
Re: The core problem... Why would having extreme right wingers use your site even be a problem? Presumably extreme left wingers are okay?
> why would you want to see offensive slurs by default?
If I don't want to see offensive slurs, I won't associate with people who use them. Let me decide what is a slur or not, and let me decide who to associate with.
Pretty gross to respond that only people on the right use "slurs," after being given several examples of why various minorities would want to use them.
I'm pretty sure the n-word is used a lot more by black people than by "right wingers"
The problem with Reddit isn’t the technology. I mean, yes open source is good, and I want more of that. Even Android is a good thing even if only one company actively contributes to it. At least when you hit a bug or don’t understand how something works, you can go read the code. But the problem with Reddit is community management, and re-writing it won’t solve that.
Reddit has been a mostly free for all in terms of moderation, and it is explicitly set up to allow thought bubbles, which gives rise to communities that dox activists, that incite violence, that promote conspiracy theories, etc. I love Reddit’s good parts and really detest its bad parts. Problem is that you can only solve that with strong application of content guidelines, or by not even pretending to be a good place a la 4chan. There is no model as far as I’ve seen, not even an academic one, that allows for mostly moderation free or self-moderated content while also not prominently featuring at least one neo-Nazi group using it to communicate and coordinate.
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. "
I think it tries to solve a problem reddit doesn't have. Reddit has a content parity problem, by making content distributed just makes the community stops growing.
A new reddit alternative should think what makes Reddit useful in the first place. A community drive social bookmarking. Today's Internet have large volume of info hidden behind paywalls and walled gardens, something like Thread Reader App could replace Reddit from ground zero.
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.
It's all "Trump, Trump, Trump" and tolerates anti-white sentiment. Actual conversations are rare, it seems to mostly be impressionable young people trying to out-do each other in taking offence to things and being angry.
It seems you can't block subreddits like r/politics without making an account.
/r/cpp has some good stuff sometimes.
What would a reddit alternative bring? More of the same? No thanks.
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.
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.
I hope that this will democratise political discourse. At the moment, people having opposing view to the main stream opinion are having exceedingly difficult time sharing their content.
Reddit's main fault is their willingness to participate in politically motivated banning. I'm talking about the fate of The_Donald. (There are also other examples.) Reddit first persecuted and then effectively banned The_Donald because, in my opinion, Reddit is run by people who hate president Trump.
It's important to understand that the hate is not something that will go away after Trump but it will be replaced by hate for the next guy. It's driven by political tribalism, not Trump.
As basically all social media platforms are doing the exactly same thing as Reddit, we are not in a good place. We really can't allow our political discourse and views to be dictated by a handful of group thinking denizens of Silicon Valley blinded by political tribalism.
> It's important to understand that the hate is not something that will go away after Trump but it will be replaced by hate for the next guy.
This seems to presuppose that all presidents are equal in terms of the acts they perform that generate hate or upset in the supporters of their political opponents.
I don’t think that is true. Not all presidents have been, or need to be, culture warriors.
Indeed, it would appear that Americans are way more united on a number of huge issues now more than ever: COVID response, racial equality, economic recovery.
Just based on circumstance, I think whoever next holds the office of POTUS, regardless of party, stands to polarize people less than they have been in the past due to the fact that many, many people are in agreement about federal government priorities right now.
That seems, to me, relatively unprecedented in recent times.
