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Comment by fireflies_ | Hacker News Reader

Scott Alexander at SlateStarCodex makes some good points about this effect here[1]. The problem isn't the lack of moderation per se but the dynamics of starting an unmoderated alternative to an existing service. The kinds of people that would switch are only occasionally principled advocates of free speech. Most of the time, they're the people whose communities were banned on the moderated platform -- everyone else ignores your new, smaller entrant and continues on the moderated platform where their friends are. You end up with a just the hateful people. A decentralized platform would probably be better and have better social dynamics if it were the default and _everyone_ used it, but I don't know how you'd get there.

[1]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-central...

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That essay is one of my favourites from Slate Star Codex, and it has been a source of inspiration for my current approach.

There is one way around this: to actually not care about user growth. I don’t have any pressure to make this a big thing. I’ve received a very small amount of VC funding to make a private, business version of this, and that (Aether Business Edition) considers this community version effectively a goodwill exercise / marketing expense.

If it doesn’t get users because it doesn’t serve fringe people, great! Fewer headaches for me. I would rather have the community version a small group of nice people. That, to me, is success.

If you use this one, and if you like it, and want to have it as a Slack-like organic knowledge base / productivity tool for your company, that’s already a win for me.

(If you want to pilot the business version, hit me up at the email in my profile - I’m building it as we speak. It’s on a SaaS / on-prem backend, not P2P.)

Scott's inference about the million scoundrels/witches at Voat was a bit off, here's an alternate observation of the same place:

> "You know what we found out during the temporary Voat exodus of r/Gundeals? As famously "toxic" as it is claimed the denizens of Voat are, they were completely drowned out once we hit ~1000 active users."

Building a new community only from rejects of a moderated one is probably still a dumb idea, and it's a great slatestarcodex article, but the popular notion that unmoderated communities will be necessarily overrun with undesirables is wrong - they're so few in number that "even" Voat could be saved.

What we need is better frameworks (both legal and technological) for building decentralized platforms, so that it would have been just as easy for the Reddit founders, way back in the day, to build Reddit as decentralized from day one. Of course, that's really tough. Simply designing the right policies for decentralized platforms is tough, much less implementing them and figuring out how to keep your users compliant with the law in the face of trolls and illegal content. But I'm hopeful we'll move in that direction.

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