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Comment by dbasedweeb | Hacker News Reader

The alternative communities often speak for themselves, while the popularity of the mainstream does as well. For a perfect example, look no further than here at Hacker News. The moderation is very active, but here we are enjoying civil conversation because of that moderation. To go back to my previous example, look at Voat, it’s just the worst place to be. I don’t love Reddit, but it has its upsides, such as science, history, tech, and other subs. Voat has fulminating hate boners and tumbleweeds, and literally nothing else.

So again, we can talk about what we think people want, their declared preferences and ideologies, or we can just look at what they do. The revealed preferences of a significant majority is to be free of trolls and shit stirrers, unless they’re trying to troll or stir shit themselves, then suddenly they’re 1st amendment activists.

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>Voat has fulminating hate boners and tumbleweeds, and literally nothing else.

I go there and I can tell you this is categorically false. No one's asking you about "the JQ" in the gardening or painting communities.

There's a lot of VERY unpalatable content on voat because its free speech and censorship policies allow what nearly no one else will, but to claim that's literally all that's present there is just a case of finding what you set out to find regardless of what's there.

Freedom means accepting the existence or discussion of things you don't like.

I think you're wrong when you say people don't want freedom or a no-censorship environment because reddit is popular. What people want and what people will tolerate are very different things.

Right, no one is asking anything in those communities, because they’re the tumbleweeds.

Voat has fulminating hate boners and tumbleweeds, and literally nothing else.

https://voat.co/v/gardening

Jesus that’s dead. Meanwhile if you want to hear some skinhead rant, that’s plenty active. Accept what you want, but I’m not interested in the internet equivalent of a Klan rally or a skinhead bar. I’ll go to the reputable establishment down the street that 86’s violent drunks, because loud, violent assholes make for a lousy social experience. You can enjoy a post every month or so in Gardening on Voat, because “freedom”.

Or hell, just look at Voat's /v/all page. I just took a look myself, and I saw page of posts that included two posts from a Pizzagate sub, a comic that refers to refugees as "rapefugees", and a self post which unironically used the phrase "anti-White". I only saw one post that looked like it was from a general-interest sub (/v/JustGrowIt); everything else -- even posts from humor subs -- was unabashedly political.

There's one saving grace, and that is that there's very little overall activity on the site. The day's top posts on /v/all have scores in the low hundreds -- the equivalent page on Reddit has scores in the hundreds of thousands.

> a self post which unironically used the phrase "anti-White"

I think one can use anti-White unironically (even if it was not the case here). For example, white farmers in South Africa having their lands confiscated by the Gov without compensation is anti-White.

I think you missed the point of my post. Attitudes about censorship are orthogonal to the desire for ad-free, tracking-free communities. I get it that censorship is the hot-button issue and everyone has an opinion on it, but it is its own separate, complicated issue. I'm strong in my desire to have an ad-free, tracking-free community and I have friends on the Fediverse and other new social networks who echo my belief, and this belief is orthogonal to moderation.

> or we can just look at what they do

I don't really want to debate censorship, but I will say that I think the issue is a lot more complicated than looking at what "they" "do".

I looked at voat and agree that it's terrible -- but I'm not convinced that the big difference between reddit and voat is moderation. My understanding is that voat superficially presented itself as a bastion of free speech, but marginally below the surface it was always pretty clearly targeted at the alt-right. So it was inevitably going to take on a certain tone, somewhat independently of its stance on censorship. (On the other hand, I suspect you're right, and I can't think of any examples of unmoderated spaces that contradict your point.)

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