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Comment by AlexMax | Hacker News Reader

Those rules applied today would result in indecipherable cesspools of memes at best or a community of authoritarian sympathizers at worst, who would be oh-so-happy to start conditioning their like-minded members to force undesirables away, either explicitly through bans or implicitly through non-stop hatred and coordinated harassment.

Neither one is the type of community I have any interest in participating in, and if some sort of mandate came down enforcing it on any of the large social networks I would no longer participate in them.

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Your first paragraph describes subs like r/esist, r/againsthatesubreddits, r/fragilewhiteredditor, etc. They just don't do what many people would consider hate speech so they don't get banned. I think this highlights that while your goal many occur in parallel with banning hate speech in some cases, on its own it will not accomplish much because the same thing will just happen on whatever side nobody thinks is "spewing hate"

And fwiw, blocking these subs (and subs like r/trumpforpresident! You can block both sides this way) made me completely forget about them until this comment, which I think also shows that self moderation is a perfectly acceptable answer. Why can't everyone make their own bubble? Why do we have to let other people decide how our bubble looks?

what a topsy turvy world to live in where calling out bigotry is equated with hate subs. maybe on the fronts of brigading or the like, but content wise I don't see how they're morally equivalent

Generally the comments have pretty bad stuff in them, or at least they did before I blocked them.

I'd agree the world is topsy-turvy when the New York Times thinks "are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins" is cool but a white guy wearing a sombrero is beyond the pale.

What made you think I was talking about Trump? I just said "authoritarian".

Nothing, these are just examples that all happen to involve Trump because it's reddit so everything controversial involves Trump

I just found it strange that _all_ of the examples were anti-trump, especially when various conservative pro-trump subreddits were guilty of the exact same thing.

And frankly, I'm A-OK with communities having heavy-handed moderation no matter what side of the aisle you're on. That's great! At least when you join those communities, you know what you're signing up for.

But the trouble comes when you have lightly-moderated spaces that are targeted by authoritarian extremists with the explicit goal of trying to shift people's opinions. That's subterfuge, and lightly-moderated spaces are defenseless against it, since at point you either introduce moderation or throw up your hands and let the extremists win.

Three of the four examples I gave were anti trump because they happened to be at the top of my blocked list, probably because they were the first posts I was annoyed by. I also mentioned r/trumpforpresident.

And in my opinion, your third paragrah applies even stronger to heavily moderated subreddits (/r/the_donald anyone?) because dissenting opinions are just removed. Unless this is super public and regularly discussed, oftentimes I find that it's easy to forget about and fall into the trap of thinking that everyone feels a certain way. Sure at first it is right in the front of your mind but eventually it fades away (at least, in my experience).

Of all the problems that the_donald had, their exclusion of dissenting voices was not one of them. They made it abundantly clear what kind of sub it was, and I think even codified it in the rules.

And I don't quite follow your second concern. Most of the time when I'm socializing I'm not in the mood for pseudo-anonymous debate club, I just want to talk to like-minded people about our shared hobbies. If I want dissenting opinions, I know where to find them.

I've not seen any evidence of authoritarian trends in fragilewhiteredditor. I have seen many "but both sides" types try to fruitlessly argue that pointing out white racists are fragile is somehow in and of itself racist, but that is of course absurd.

Then don't participate. People will form communities and stick with the groups they like and enjoy, like they always have.

If anything, the issue with social media is that it's too vast and anonymous. Things still work just fine in the physical world.

>Those rules applied today would result in indecipherable cesspools of memes at best or a community of authoritarian sympathizers at worst, who would be oh-so-happy to start conditioning their like-minded members to force undesirables away, either explicitly through bans or implicitly through non-stop hatred and coordinated harassment.

It seems like the only point of disagreement between you and "them" is who should be targeted.

I don't like political authoritarianism apologia no matter where it's coming from. I've seen both neo-nazis and stalinist tankies overrun and completely ruin communities and I don't care for either.

An internet community having a solid framework of rules that is strictly enforced that keeps discussions friendly and on-topic is a completely separate axis entirely.

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