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Comment by marbletiles | Hacker News Reader

Deplatforming doesn't work by silencing people, and the environment that you'd have to create to make it otherwise is not an enticing one. So yes, you can often cause the creation of spaces like Voat as a result of deplatforming.

Sure, something like Voat pops up. But Reddit improves. And Reddit is where all the people are.

There will always be dive bars, there will always be rough online neighbourhoods. But start by cleaning up the civic square.

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More and more, as time goes on, people are leaving the MSM including reddit for these off-shoots and it risks creating separate bubbles for every group-think out there. This is what de-platforming and cancel culture does.

It's also not black and white. Sure 99% of us can agree that banning or de-platforming such horrendous stuff like NAMBLA is good. But MSM starts to push out and group non-extremists into the same bucket and ban them all, and you get where we are today, with a good chunk of society that doesn't listen to or trust the MSM.

> And Reddit is where all the people are.

All the people in your echo chamber, that is.

If what you mean to say is that "the subset of spaces that does not include Voat and Gab is an echo chamber", you are probably saying something about your own views that you might not mean to say.

How so?

To be clear, I definitely don't agree with most of what is said on Voat, and I'm not really familiar with Gab.

You might want to familiarize yourself more with services before making sweeping arguments about what excluding them means for the discourse.

Having complete information before forming any opinion is an impossibly high standard. My opinion is based on what I know, and I've been pretty open about what I don't know. If you feel there's some relevant information I'm missing, I'd be really happy to hear it, but pointing out that I don't know everything is fairly uninformative.

Let's keep the discussion on the topic, not on me.

The standard you're being held to isn't "complete information".

What standard am I being held to? Where am I failing to meet that standard? Do you actually have any disagreement with anything I've said, or are you just going to make snide remarks from the sideline?

You aren't making any concrete statements on where you think I'm wrong, and you are evading any questions I've asked to try to get clarity, so to be honest, I have no idea what you actually think I'm wrong about, or even whether you think I'm wrong.

If it were someone else, I'd just dismiss you as a troll, but I've read and respected your opinions in the past, which makes your current method of arguing a bit disappointing for me. You're well-positioned to change my mind if you ever decide to share what you actually think.

It's blatantly true that Reddit still holds echo chambers though, and the majority are far-left leaning. r/politics is as much of an echo chamber as r/The_Donald (but one is a default sub, with a deceptive name).

That's why I was particular about what I was taking them to be saying. I'm not looking to litigate whether there are echo chambers on Reddit. There clearly are. The question, now tacitly answered, is whether the person I replied to believes any space that excludes Voat and Gab is definitionally an echo chamber.

> The question, now tacitly answered, is whether the person I replied to believes any space that excludes Voat and Gab is definitionally an echo chamber.

If that's what you think I was saying, let me clarify: no, that's not what I was saying.

Voat is tiny. Sure there is always going to be a population of die hard edgelords who are determined enough to move to a new site, but in general the vast majority of people are lazy. And most likely it takes the bot / disinformation account owners a while to move all their activity over to a new community

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