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Comment by tomohawk | Hacker News Reader

The big social media sites are in the process of evicting everyone who doesn't 100% agree with them. We've seen this kind of thing in history before, and the one thing we know about it is that it is a process without end. Once one group gets removed, another group becomes the outlier, and they become the next target, and so on. Heck, they're already banning political ads from mainstream candidates for US Congress.

This creates a demand for alternatives. Once a community moves to a system like Mastodon, that creates a demand for that system.

No one cares about myspace anymore. In 10 years, noone will care about twitter. That's the nature of technology.

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>The big social media sites are in the process of evicting everyone who doesn't 100% agree with them.

I think this is untrue. I think social media sites are removing people at .1% outlier belief system that most people deem disgusting enough to warrant taking action to not have associated with their brand.

Your "100%" implies that everyone on say Facebook has to have the same belief system, when that obviously isn't true. You can state many belief system on Facebook, except hateful ones that target swaths of people.

This won't create a Myspace situation, it'll create a 8chan/voat situation.

> I think social media sites are removing people at .1% outlier belief system that most people deem disgusting enough to warrant taking action to not have associated with their brand.

I don't think that's true. Tommy Robinson's beliefs about Muslims are held by a good deal more than 0.1% of the UK population, yet he was banned from Twitter.

> Tommy Robinson's beliefs about Muslims are held by a good deal more than 0.1% of the UK population

Do you have a source for that number?

My main reason for that claim is simply that I live in Britain -- anyone who has done so for a significant amount of time would know that sentiment against Muslims is is a lot more widespread than 0.1% of the population, so I don't think the claim needs defending, any more than the claim "people like sex and money" does.

But I had a look at specific opinion poll results and this one https://yougov.co.uk/opi/browse/Tommy_Robinson suggests that 17.4% of people see Tommy Robinson favourably.

Thanks for finding numbers, but I worry about this one confirming bias against Muslims. For example, one could assume that a 60% approval rate among Republicans of Trump means that 60% of Republicans don't like Muslims, but oftentimes in conversations in my home town in Texas I'll hear something like "oh, he's definitely a jerk about the Muslim thing" or "even if he's racist, he's at least doing something about the economy." So I hesitate to assume that "support" means "wholly support."

In any case, I feel this is splitting hairs over numbers. If 30% of the UK hated Muslims, Facebook still wouldn't be requiring "100% silicon valley values" to use the platform. You just can't post racist stuff on it. I.e. those racists have other aspects of their worldview they'd be welcome to bring to the table.

I suspect the number who hate Muslims is small, maybe 1-5% of the population. The number who have misgivings about the behaviour of some Muslims is clearly a lot higher.

> My main reason for that claim is simply that I live in Britain

Me too, currently coming up to 50 years.

> https://yougov.co.uk/opi/browse/Tommy_Robinson

That's favourability of Mr Robinson, not his beliefs though.

> That's favourability of Mr Robinson, not his beliefs though.

True, but 17.4% is a much larger number than 0.1%

>In 10 years, noone will care about twitter.

If they won’t care about Twitter, why should they care about an open source clone with no users?

It’s also not true of all tech platforms. It’s not true of desktop operating systems for example. Today the desktop is dominated by Apple and Microsoft. Who dominated it 30 years ago? So there’s nothing inevitable about these things.

> If they won’t care about Twitter, why should they care about an open source clone with no users? That’s the worst argument ever.

You’re just assuming the alternatives will have no users. That’s the worst argument ever.

It's actually in Mastodon's best interest not to attract users since users will rip apart their kind, loving, and neat little community limb from limb.

Or is the nature of social media that people switch to get better filtering and a higher signal-to-noise ratio?

Certainly that got Google search and Gmail started.

If Twitter gets better at filtering, maybe they will be more popular?

One of the ways this ends is that people of different political persuasions set up their own (social) media platforms. This has happened before with print media, where the US used to have and most of Europe still does have media with expressly partisan positioning.

This has happened to some extent with Voat, and if there's really a demand for like minded people to communicate without having their discourse contaminated by opposing partisans then I'm sure the same could happen here.

Maybe, but I heard the exact same argument played out around Reddit and Voat, and we all know how that ended. Maybe if the future plays out in accordance with all of the hysteria and slippery slope arguments Mastadon will take off, but otherwise it’s not replacing anything. While I don’t doubt that eventually a replacement for current social media giants will emerge, I doubt we’ve seen them yet. At the very least, I don’t believe the replacement will be a more cumbersome version of an existing service that appeals to technically minded people, or raving ideologues. I’m fact I think it’s possible, if not likely, that people will outgrow social media as we know it today.

“The big social media sites are in the process of evicting everyone who doesn't 100% agree with them”

That is a flat-out lie, unless you disagree with the terms of service. Find me one person that was booted that wasn’t booted for violating the ToS.

If the TOS effectively forbids disagreement, what's the difference?

It doesn't. The question still stands.

You might want to get outside of your bubble a little instead of making accusations like that.

Perhaps you could explain the case of Elizabeth Heng, a candidate in CA of the US Congress?

I think you might need to get out of your bubble, if you think that most of these people are just "disagreeing".

As for your example, she violated the ToS. They then changed their minds. I'm not seeing the grave injustice you're claiming.

Take a step back and look at what you're justifying.

A candidate from a mainstream party for US Congress with mainstream views creates an ad about her past that is true and historical, and that gets banned.

Hiding behind vague TOS does not cut it.

And right at this moment, no one gives a shit about Mastodon.

Myself and many of my followers and the people that I follow are suddenly starting to adopt Mastodon, especially with clients that cross-post to both Twitter and Mastodon - because we just don’t like the official Twitter client and are unhappy with Twitter’s recent killing-off of third-party clients.

I remember when the www was the same and the CompuServe users said the same thing.

Mastodon has a similar feel in that the content is amateurish and free.

As an anecdote, I use chaos.social and they are throttling signups because there are too many new signups. Maybe you will be surprised.

Yeah, but I remember when the same thing was said about Diaspora. I remember when the same thing was said about various indie game consoles. I remember when the same thing was said about a whole bunch of social network alternatives that never went anywhere.

But you can hope right? Or are you happy with your communication, content, attention and ideas controlled for profit?

I get the feeling that regardless of how much more growth Mastodon gets, it's going to be around and in active use for a long time to come, if only because it's provided a space that is meaningfully different to Twitter.

Will it be the biggest social phenomenon? Probably not. But it already has the critical mass to keep funding its continued development, and lot of interesting voices, if you know where to look.

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