How is this going to avoid becoming like Voat?
Reddit already has competitors. It is just that they are cesspools as the only people who have a strong reason to leave reddit are those reddit has banned.
Reddit already has competitors. It is just that they are cesspools as the only people who have a strong reason to leave reddit are those reddit has banned.
Twitch and Discord did well there for instance. Started out as gaming focused, then became more mainstream.
By doing this, you bring in non extremists early on, and tilt the audience pecentages in such a way that most regulars aren't such extremists.
The problem is most 'alternative' platforms market themselves as 'Reddit/Facebook/Twitter/YouTube except with free speech and no rules' rather than 'an art/gaming/music/sports themed alternative to Reddit/Facebook/Twitter/YouTube with free speech'.
Former means you draw in the outcasts and extremists, latter means you draw in another audience that can then be made more mainstream by opening up support for more and more fields of interest.
Saying you have no moderation is attractive to one crowd in particular (there are other people who theoretically favour it, but practically they’ll use a moderated forum anyway). So you get a quick numbers boost but you’ve now fundamentally limited your audience to people prepared to share head-space with that crowd.
Reddit, Facebook and Twitter got in early and got to spend a lot of time learning on the job. Unless you start small, you’re not going to get that luxury now.
(Please don’t take this as an endorsement of any particular moderation policy, in theory or practice. Most of them are kind of awful at times. But the problem is hard.)
The only thing good are the vast majority of users here have good intention. If only HN had multiple boards with various mods.
But when you start to gain popularity, the way you treat "free speech" becomes an issue. Discord is not a great example in that niche communities are not scraped for web search (that I know of).
I would love to switch to Reddit from 2008.
Their developer code of conduct also looks good in that regard
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/master/CODE_OF_CONDUC...
Seeing how the flagship instance is run by people who are socially conscious I don't see this being a problem. Pretty much same thing happened with Mastodon Social, and with millions of users the community is still great. It's far friendlier and more civilized than Twitter.
Simply write "All lives matter" on Twitter (because all lives DO matter, right?) and watch what happens.
Yes if I go trigger the worst kind of people on the worst social network, I will get mean messages. But I don't do that.
If you want a subreddit for enthusiasts of $NICHE, you're likely to find it, and it's likely to be useful.
Monks walk away from pretty much everything, and have been doing so for a long time now. They continue living. Does the result of that qualify as either better or worse than what you have now?
A reddit user was kind enough to spontaneously donate 40 dollar (in btc) to me despite the fact that I didn't solicit donations. It's also been a pretty productive endeavor for learning about front end development, listening to feedback and giving users what they're asking for, learning to use cloudflare/gcp, and now learning to optimize glsl shaders to enable a fancier renderer while still getting reasonable performance on cheap hardware.
I feel like I often learn a lot about one random topic or another when I research so I can accurately correct someone who is being wrong on the internet. The above is an interesting example because there was a concrete deliverable at the end of the process, but I don't feel the fact that I learned from the process is particularly unique.
I also learn a lot of new stuff.
I certainly spend some amount of time on HN replying to things I shouldn't bother with, but the majority of my time on HN is filled with learning new things and hearing interesting perspectives on those things. I consider it a net positive in my life, and over the years I've gotten better at avoiding the negative parts.
A large well formed community can survive a portion of its users with negative comments and posts, but I doubt you can build a community on the back of those users. Instead that negative group poisons the the platform for a more mainstream crowd. People won't join a plateform if the first thing they are exposed to supports extremist views.
That's not the case with the alternatives, most tend to go really hard on one side of the extremism scale (right: voat, left: raddle).
Yes it hosts /r/the_donald or whatever but reddit as a whole is very left-leaning.
Edit: Hey ya'll instead of downvoting me how about providing some evidence of widespread right-leaning thoughts that aren't isolated to individual subreddits and shamed throughout the rest of reddit? Spoiler: You can't
They shut it down. 0 new posts for past 3 months.
It's pointless trying to be a "respectable" right wing intellectual because you have to spend all your time running around justifying the completely incoherent things that Trump is talking about.
Chicago school economics? You can have a discussion with that, and leave it civil. That doesn't work with the_donald.
"Yeah, saving trees and whales sounds fine, but they should stop it with all the LGBTQ, BLM, socialist stuff"
You can't have a civil discussion with those people either. In fact it's getting increasingly difficult to have civil discussions with anyone (HN is an exception because everyone is on their best behaviour, but to a large extent this results in self-censorship; you can see that the least politically correct comments are made with throw-away accounts).
Is it because:
- People on the far-right are magnitudes more vocal and active online than those on the left? That they spend a magnitude more time posting and voting on the internet?
- Or when people are anonymous, they reveal their "true selves" more which exhibits more far-right (selfish, tribal, conservative) values.
- Or we are underestimating how many people are on the far right, because they are constantly censored so in our minds we think they are the minority but maybe they're about half of the online population?
I'm just trying to figure out why it takes herculean effort to shift things enough to the left to be publicly palatable. And if so, then then it seems like any social forum is going to require heavy censorship/moderation to even be tolerable to the general public.
Your own scenarios exhibit this, for example:
- You ask if the far-right are magnitudes more vocal, ignoring the comparison to the extremely vocal far-left which is heard regularly on mainstream social media
- You conflate "conservative" with "selfish", presumably ignoring the selfishness of the extremes at both sides.
Frankly, I think the left (and by extension, most social media sites) are WAY more comfortable with censorship, banning, hiding, etc., especially of ideas that don't align with the left. (Typically characterized as "evil".)
The far-right, on the other hand, I think is a lot more tolerant of at least the notion that "other" speech exists. They'll insult you, make fun, etc., but the compulsion to censor others is far less frequent.
So when you have a whole segment of the political spectrum treated as evil and silenced, they tend to gravitate to fora that enable speech, even if unpleasant speech. The far-right might be most noticable on those platforms, but if you look carefully, you'll see a whole gradient of right-ness.
And even some lefties!
The right thinks explicit "censorship", which happens via the community or site owner, is bad.
Implicit "censorship", however, which happens when the targets of racism/sexism/homophobia/transphobia[0] leave the site, is just fine.
[0] or their allies or people who don't want to be surrounded by assholes.
The Left typically wants to silence/ignore while the Right typically wants to fight/berate about it.
Also, "berating" is a kind word. We're talking about "I have the right to exist" vs "we should systematically exterminate/enslave people like you"
You can read their speech policy: https://legal.parler.com/documents/guidelines.pdf
These large segments of the population will demand moderation from platforms they use to protect them from targeted harassment. It's these sorts of platforms that have the potential to truly become massive.
Platforms that are strongly moderated from day one (e.g. don't allow targeted harassment of minorities) don't need a "herculean effort to shift things enough to the left to be publicly palatable." A good example is the Reddit alternative raddle.me or even hacker news.
The left does this on Reddit/Twitter constantly towards right wing people and no one bats an eye. It's like maybe those in power are extremely biased towards the left.
Perhaps there'd be more legitimacy in a comparison to the vitriol on the left against billionaires and cops, but these are positions of power, not identity groups one is born into. All revolutionaries of all political persuasions will oppose those in positions of power currently.
"People should be marginalised, and made second class citizens, and marginalised people should be kept marginalised" is a pretty common theme on the far right. It is rare on the far left; not that it's non-existent, but there just aren't that many sincere Stalinists or similar left.
What dehumanising content are you seeing from the left? I mean, if it's just "the other side are bad people" stuff, well, everyone does that. The "these classes of people should be socially and politically suppressed" stuff is overwhelmingly from one side, though.
What? Not that there is no one with this view but it is an extreme minority. Same with people calling for the killing of all cops on the left, very small minority.
Just look at the recent supreme court ruling that made it illegal to fire people based on you being gay or transgendered. Tons of conservatives shot back on that one. I don't know how you can look at a viewpoint like, "yes, employers should be allowed to fire you for merely being gay" and think that that doesn't mean they want to keep marginalised people marginalised.
1 - https://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-ga...
As far as I can tell, there are no politicians or indeed anyone with significant power calling for the killing of all cops.
Unless Nancy Pelosi or someone starts retweeting videos demanding the liquidation of the kulak class, you'll forgive me if I don't take your claims of 'extreme minority on both sides' all that seriously.
The far left has people who are also very angry, but they're generally not as bigoted. The demographic they're most angry at is rich people, which is punching up instead of down at least.
And most of the rhetoric there simply isn't as vile. It's stuff like, "take rich people's assets so we can redistribute it equally". I may not agree with seizing wealthy people's stuff, but that's nowhere near as offensive as "kick out all the gay/non-white people".
Depends on how relevant you consider a social "scientist" having build a career on creating a bogeyman on mixing up nationalism, extreme right and white supremacy. A former columnist at "Huffington Post", she is now writing a book on "Undoing White Womanhood". Calls herself a "change agent" on her own webiste.
Sounds rather like "anti-White" activist to me, like an intellectual Robin DiAngelo.
So if 1% of the population are far-right extremists, but most normal platforms ban or restrict them, any new platform with poor regulation will tend to fill with them.
I do think that the very extreme (and thus bannable) far right _are_ probably more common than ditto on the far left; you just don't get that many Stalinists, anywhere. But the normal left (and normal right) aren't generally nasty enough to get banned everywhere, so most of the internet's displaced population of commenters is far right.
I think there is an aspect of option 1, too, though. In Ireland a while back we had a referendum on allowing same-sex marriage, which passed by 62%, and another one, on legalising abortion (until then only legal in very limited circumstances), a few years later, which passed by 66%. Now, if you'd gone based on web polls and opinions being expressed in the comments on mainstream sites, you'd have assumed that both would fail by a landslide; it was really kind of incredible. Comments on news sites etc were grossly unrepresentative of the actual public mood; the right really does seem to be a lot noisier.
or duplicate accounts to give the illusion of larger numbers.
For example there are a lot of Reddit accounts created with in the 3 months or so very active on the same post pushing the same agenda.
In a forum with ten reasonable conversation threads and one highly controversial one, attention is likely to move towards the controversial topic.
The phrase "don't feed the trolls" is well-intentioned but it's difficult to scale the message when so many people are online and can witness and partake in minor and major conversations alike.
It also doesn't help that engagement (regardless of reason for engagement and any human stress created as a result; they're harder for software and metrics to capture) tends to be seen as something to optimize for, both within companies themselves and also by their investors.
Controversial conversations are sometimes necessary. People who repeatedly raise controversial topics to gain notoriety or attention are generally not - although their behaviour may be a sign that they need help in other ways.
I think this is similar to the economics of spam: the cost of spamming is so low that even if a small fraction of a percent respond and convert, it's still profitable to spam.
People who troll are just looking to rile people up. All they need is one or two people to respond (out of hundreds or thousands or more). Even someone who knows better will occasionally be triggered enough to respond to a troll.
I wonder if it's possible to have a community where the moderation is more focused on educating people to identify trolling and discourage posters from engaging with emotionally charged/inciting posters. Instead of warning the troller, encourage people to just downvote and move on instead of engaging.
I consider a troll as someone who is seeking to create a strong negative (anger, hate, frustration, etc) emotion in a reader intentionally or unintentionally. I dont know if this is too subjective and impossible to enforce.
I wouldn't say that technology is full of actual "leftists", more a group ranging from overly-myopic liberals who struggle to do what would actually benefit minority communities in a more positive sense to the libertarian types who only end up restricting what people say because it ends up affecting their advertising revenue. Simply by virtue of being in a position of financial power, it's very difficult to hold truly leftist views.
Deplatforming has been the go to method of the right for at least a century (see mccarthyism) and longer if you include lynching/death as essentially equivalent (ie: you can't speak if you're dead). The left has simply finally got enough critical mass to do it themselves.
- people who disagree with the restrictions of other places on principle and want a freer alternative
- people who can't say what they want to anywhere else, because it's generally disliked
and most people probably do not want to read stuff from the second group.
This did not used to be the case. It's a relatively extremely recent phenomenon, that I would say only really coalesced around 2014-2015.
It used to be that the wild west of the internet was, to the extent that it reinforced anything at all, a boon to liberal and left wing politics and organizing. And a lot of the cultural aspects weren't co-opted the way they currently are. Gamer culture was surely unconsciously sexist, misogynist, but not to the extent that it is now where it's a full-on reactionary identity. Internet atheists didn't used to be misogynist right-wing trolls, but they are now.
Trolling was just trolling, it wasn't organized into mobs or propaganda in the sophisticated way it is now. Anonymity and revealing one's 'true self' didn't channel it into a cultural current of toxicity that is now established and ready to welcome those impulse and stoke them and use them to nudge a person into a right wing trolling infrastructure.
I think it's been weaponized by state actors and by bad actors who figured out how to use the tools, to turn everything into a nuclear wasteland. I don't believe it inherently disposes anyone toward any particular set of politics necessarily, and it didn't used to be the case that it got channeled in this way.
The problem is not so subjectively limited as to be a right-wing problem. Communities, unless extremely well policed, tend to become gravities of like mindedness when there is a visible vote system. This seems to occur because vote counts, whether positive or negative, are viewed as a form of credibility and because people are generally hostile to disruption and originality.
When you step back from a subjective slant the phenomenon of group think has been well studied.
Now the virtually everybody out there already supports gay marriage and legal weed, and those are a baseline for everything left of center and basically mainstream thought now. Everybody right of that gets pushed out of communities, so whenever some new community pops up, you get a whole spectrum of right of center as well as sovereign citizen types again looking to settle down and establish a community like left of center people did with places like reddit all those years ago. One bad thing for these new communities is that the internet is far more accessible now, and the more extreme members see their chance to finally talk, and those with extreme opinions like talking a lot.
Consider two possible statements:
1. Hitler wasn't that bad.
2. Stalin wasn't that bad.
I think, for most people, the first provokes a much more extreme reaction. Both were objectively terrible human beings, but defending Hitler is seen as far more extreme than defending Stalin.
This has two effects:
Firstly, far-right people are continually kicked out of communities. Far-left people are not. So any new unmoderated community is going to attract these "refugees"
Secondly, nobody notices or cares when a community goes far-left. But its far more noticeable when a community goes far-right.
Maybe the figure-head isn't en vogue anymore. The methods are always popular.
Leftists(Socialists, Communists, Anarchists) often publically revel in the idea of when "the revolution comes" to put anyone dissenting up against the wall or sending them to a Gulag camp of some sort. I don't find that exactly reassuring. Seeing how "protesters" in the US and Europe act like chinese Red Guards during the cultural revolution, this day doesn't seem far off.
I'm reading the "Three-Body Problem" right now and the first chapter eerily reminded me of the current situation where not being enough of an "ally" to the racial BLM movement is a thought-crime punishable by having your life destroyed.
There's a large population of people out there with views that annoy left-wing people, who don't really have a place on most internet platforms, because all internet platforms are left wing, because the dominant culture of silicon valley is much more left wing than the mean of, say, US citizens. (And everyone who wants to keep their job pretends to be more left wing than they are, too.)
Anyway, this means there's this mob of people without a place to talk, and they want such a place. So if a place ever opens up that doesn't strictly persecute right-wingers- well, it's like being a town during the inquisition that doesn't persecute witches. Obviously, all the witches are going to flock to you!
There's a large population of people out there with views that annoy left-wing people, who don't really have a place on most internet platforms, because all internet platforms are left wing, because the dominant culture of silicon valley is much more left wing than the mean of your average person. (And everyone who wants to keep their jobs pretends to be more left wing than they are, too.)
Anyway, this means there's this mob of people without a place to talk, and they want such a place. So if a place ever opens up that doesn't strictly persecute right-wingers- well, it's like being a town during the inquisition that doesn't persecute witches. Obviously, all the witches are going to flock to you!
(Witch metaphor courtesy of Slatestarcodex, may it rest in peace.)
Far-right definitely stand their ground, and can easily go unfazed by logical arguments.
Dicks fuck pussies. We need assholes to shit on the dicks.
It's not hard to see why Reddit would ban any of these, but at some point there may be a critical mass of too-controversial-for-Reddit content that isn't just interesting to the Voat crowd. Is that point now? I'll have to wait and see how Lemmy turns out.
The other theoretical advantage of a federated service is that smaller instances are less expensive to run than one big centralized service. There are a lot of people who could afford to run a service on a $10/month VPS as a hobby but who couldn't afford to run anything at actual Reddit scale without corresponding revenue. That's important considering that Reddit leavers are more likely to be posting not-safe-for-brand content even if it's not specifically hateful content.
[1] Not a sub I ever visited, but by most accounts surprisingly non-toxic as a community, considering the subject matter.
https://medium.com/@pylorns/the-reddit-spring-the-great-liba...
Also you have a big "create community" button at the top. Surely that doesn't spin a completely new instance of the application every time? And if not, how can we tell which instance a community belongs to?
Honestly I don't really understand the need for something like that to be federated. In the olden days you had a bunch of forums/BBS/IRC network/Whatever that served various niches but didn't communicate with each other.
For instance, what would we gain if we decided to turn HN into a Lemmy federated service?
If anything it seems like in the long run it would be a disservice, as very large communities with lower standards would end up spilling and wrecking niches where the community is more tightly knit and post higher quality content.
This fediverse thing makes some sense for IM and similar applications where you want to be able to connect easily with anybody. For forums however, it feels rather pointless to me.
> For instance, what would we gain if we decided to turn HN into a Lemmy federated service?
It doesn't have to be a "Lemmy" Service. But let's pretend that dang decides to implement ActivityPub for HN. What would we get? Some guesses:
- Less people trying to game/break HN. There is great value in gaming HN now because of its centralization. If HN is just one in a place with a bigger number of actors, I would guess the incentive to game it would be reduced.
- Easier to have cross-pollination of ideas. There is an overlap between some subreddits, HN, lobste.rs, etc. Now, we can accept these services are big enough that there is always some cross-posting. What about the other topics that are HN-worthy (gratifies one's intellectual curiosity) but are under-represented elsewhere?
- More room for dissenting/non-status quo views. With ActivityPub, your client could easily allow you to subscribe to an account. So let's say that I want to see whatever more controversial people post - e.g, idlewords. With HN, I need to either stalk him or hope that the echo chamber has decided on his favor on a given day.
Granted, I think is highly unlikely that dang or YC would have any interest in doing something like that. They would be giving away control of the conversation and the risks are unknown for very little benefit. But is it really our job to be concerned about this? I'd rather have more people and more actors sharing this control than having to trust entities that become too big to fail.
But anyway: if you are someone that only cares about looking at whatever BigCorp allows you to look, then sure, keep using reddit.
If you'd like to have some form of control over the content you value, create and would like to promote, then your best bet is to fight for alternatives to the current big centralized systems.
How is that different from how Reddit/Voat currently are?
More seriously though, the important thing about ActivityPub is that it removes central points of control. No matter how much you agree/disagree with the governance of Reddit/Facebook/Twitter et caterva, they are just too big for the good of society. Federated systems is one chance to take this power from them and bring to people - if not directly (say, because you don't want the pain of hosting/managing all that crap) at least you can delegate this power to someone closer to you - or at very least to a bigger number of smaller providers who will them have no monopoly and will have to keep your interests first.
He tried to get people to use it for a while, but since it was just a less-functional and empty Reddit, nobody was very interested. Eventually some of the users/subreddits banned from Reddit started using it since they had been kicked off real Reddit, and the developer ended up welcoming them while justifying it as "free speech". I think he mostly just seemed happy that some people actually wanted to use his site.
It's all been downhill from there, and the original creator even abandoned the site a few years ago and handed it over to someone else.
A relatively small group "migrated" for a few days, but didn't stay. Here's Whoaverse one month after the up/down counts were removed from Reddit (notice that they added visible vote counts, which they didn't have before): http://web.archive.org/web/20140718134533/http://whoaverse.c...
Other than the stickied site announcement, almost all of the posts only have a handful of votes and only a few have any comments.
The banned users were the first group that actually stuck around on Whoaverse/Voat, because they didn't have the option of just going back to Reddit.
Take for instance Ruqqus, another site created as a free speech reddit alternative. It consistently has horrifying content on the front page regularly; viciously racist content, anti-Semitic memes, unironic pro-Nazism/pro-genocide discussion posts, and generally terrible content. This is likely because it is exactly this content that is being "censored" from Reddit, not these harmless free speech advocates who are silenced by a big company.
Can anyone actually tell me what valuable discussion is being censored on Twitter, Reddit, etc? Banning this type of content is mandatory if you want a platform that is safe and available for trans people, Jews, gay people, women, etc.
People shouldn't have to tolerate people @ing them with slurs, be exposed to "reasoned" arguments for their extermination, or memes dehumanizing them for the sake of "free speech."
E.g. a large subset of Fediverse (Mastodon etc) communities are communities that avoid Twitter because they don't feel Twitter is doing enough to be safe for them. And instances have a varying policies about how they handle instances with different moderation standards.
Where does the line between "free speech" and moderation exists?
Free speech advocates who aren't convinced by the "just go to another platform" argument in a discussion about Reddit or Twitter censorship likely won't think the argument is worth accepting simply by redefining what a platform is.
I may not have done a good job of illustrating it in the previous post, but the example was mainly focused on platforms that bill themselves as an anti-censorship alternative to Reddit. Censorship and free speech on social media are incredibly complex topics, and the development of an endless stream of tiny, far right echo chambers doesn't seem to capture the spirit of this "town square" that free speech advocates are looking for.
If a mod removes, hides, or takes other mod action on a comment or post, the browser extension and federated storage system still allows me to see and interact with that content and it’s writer (“showdead” globally). You could subscribe to “mod actions” (which is just curation) by mod, which would govern your experience of the content.
I appreciate the mod work here, for example, but I also want to be able to bypass that “filter opinion” so I can still interact with folks and content out of band if I so choose (one person’s “flame war” is another person’s vigorous debate).
I don't understand why people are so hellbent on getting subreddits that exceed their tolerances removed from the platform. There are orders of magnitude more subreddits that I ignore altogether than the ones that I choose to subscribe to.
The answer, of course, is that these people should build their own cities. But first, of course, they'll just have to build their own websites, servers, datacentres, ISPs, and nations.
(And militaries, to stop USGOV from killing them all, presuming they dare challenge the banks by building alternatives to traditional payment processors.)
Yeah! I’m proposing building systems on top of Reddit and Hacker News (just two examples, any forum really that serves its data as http) to backfill their content and discussion data (comments), and prevent global censorship by mod actions. If you can’t censor The Pirate Bay and SciHub, you’d expect such a system to be equally durable. It’s all JSON blobs, identifies, and endpoints.
These sites are temporary (remember Digg?), so you want to build discussion systems that are durable, prevent censorship, and will outlive their underlying websites they sit on top of. These are not unreasonable amounts of data we’re dealing with, it’s mostly compressible text. I can store 100TB in Backblaze for $500/month, and front it from VMs around the world.
Also, Reddit has more moderation than Reddit. Subreddits exist for a reason.
That's the biggest limit of moderated forums, they only reflect the opinion of the most active groups who can steer the discussion helped by moderators who benefit from rewarding the largest groups instead of the best comments
If moderation was visible and moderators were forced to leave a note about why the moderation took place it would be a real discussion platform
HN is not
Slashdot is a lot better than many others in this regards, but it's not popular anymore and you can't make money on it, while a lot of people leave by posting shit on Reddit
Worse is better always wins
If you tried to herd state socialists/tankies and anarcho-capitalists/voluntarists into the same discussion space, they're so violently opposed they'd just be constantly screaming epithets at each other. That's not a useful thing.
Not to mention even when you have ideologically-aligned folks, some people are just anti-social dickwads who will constantly pick fights or argue in bad faith. I don't understand some people's seeming obsession with defending this kind of person, Some people just suck and everyone else is better off if they're not around. A private space is under no obligation to tolerate a poster who adamantly refuses to get along.
If I'm having a discussion with people in real life I decide what I accept or not, there's no third party that decides for me what is right.
Decentralisation is exactly about that: it empowers you and not someone else to decide what you like to read or not.
Yes, and that works fine because there's no platform there, just a 1 on 1 or small group conversation. You can still easily replicate this, unmoderated, with email or various messaging apps.
Once you can talk to potentially hundreds or thousands of people at once, once there's a platform, that model breaks down. Bad actors who would be uninterested in trolling single individuals are very interested in trolling hundreds at a time. And nobody wants to "walk away" from an otherwise good community because of handful of very loud people are spouting hate there.
Any platform that's both popular and unmoderated will eventually be dominated by extreme content, and will push out normal people, who will go somewhere that's popular and moderated.
There's no intrinsical limitation on the number of participants
Don't you like what a user says?
You can ignore them
Don't you like what some instance does, you can block it.
Any platform that is popular has an editorial board and doesn't want you to say things they don't like.
Simple as that.
Newspaper had no comments sections because it's silly to comment the news, they already decide what to publish and what not.
They already chose who to talk to, there's no point in discussing when you can only comment what someone else wants you to talk about.
Have you seen today on HN a post about exactly 40 years ago, when an Italian civil plane, the Itavia Flight 870, was shot down by a fight between NATO and Libyan fighter jets and 81 innocent people died?
You won't, because it's gonna be flagged as politics.
But you're going to read about every cat fight between über rich silicon valley founders because that's not politics for them, it's what they wanna talk about.
Trolling is a problem for the platform, not for the users.
I don't mind trolls, if I can decide who they are and silence them.
If they do it for me, it's censorship.
Censorship is not bad per se, but it's not done in my name, it's only in the platform's interests.
Do platforms ever ask users what do they think about banning someone?
Of course they don't...
This only works for small communities. You can't feasibly block the literally thousands of trolls and petty assholes that are posting on Reddit every day without that task consuming all your time. Multiply that by every single user having to do it personally and it gets even sillier.
There's a reason basically every popular platform is moderated on some level, and it's not because of some grand meta-moderator conspiracy.
Moderation is near-universally used because it works. Non-moderating doesn't work for conversations that eclipse some size. Disliking how moderators behave doesn't change that.
That's simply not true
Ad blocking works because I decide what to block, not because the websites posting the ads are moderating them in a good way
Let me decide, is it really that scary?
My email account is not on Gmail, I manage the spam, and it's ridiculously easy to get just the content I want and delete everything else
It's hard to scale it for hundreds of accounts automatically, but it's not on a personal level
Forums are about what I want to read, not about what it's good for me because a platform says so.
"People have the power" Patty Smith used to say
Ad blocking isn't a community or discussion forum, and most people just use whatever blacklists some 'authority' comes up with.
I guess the equivalent for a forum would be where you could not only block users (which is already common), but also share/combine blocklists. That's an interesting idea.
I think you'd run into the WoW sharding problem where it creates a sort of dissonance where you're nominally in the same space but also not in the same space at the same time. Still, would be cool to at least experiment with.
It's a user's side tool to remove unwanted content based on community generated rules
It's content moderation nonetheless
The error IMO is to think that the current implementation, which is also very young and immature, it's the best possible
It isn't
HN is not really a community, it's a platform run by a commercial entity, with (legit) interests
Imagine if HN was just a node of a larger federated network
They could decide what to post on their node(s) and which comments to remove
I could run my instance and subscribe to their feed or their same source feeds and make different choices
People could share blocklists, whitelists, favourites, ratings and everything else and decide what to use and what not
HN would still be popular, but other nodes could benefit from having more freedom or making different choices
Now HN (and every other UGC out there) is an all or nothing experience
Facebook is facing an ad boycott because they can't moderate the platform the way corporations want, it means advertisers are the ones who ultimately decide which content is valuable and which is not, sometimes it can coincide with what users want, but more often than not it doesn't.
But if we produce the content (like this conversation we're having) we should have control over it, and be able to reproduce it on a instance we control and continue it ad libitum even when HN decides our karma doesn't allow more than a few comments a day or one of us is shadow banned for reasons completely unrelated to what we are discussing right now or because it looks like spam to them or any other reason they think it needs moderation.
It's their right if the content is free for someone else to pick up and they are not responsible for what happens on other nodes.
It should be part of giving back to the community, you generate content for us, we moderate it like a DJ selects music for the listeners, but you can make your own playlists if you want to, because we don't make the music, we just mix it.
Nobody said HN should not moderate their public instance, they have people to respond to, it simply shouldn't be the only instance
If I had a feed of every comment and every link posted, I could read them and make my own rules
Now I can't
If a platform wants people to engage but don't want people to be passionate about their beliefs, it is not a discussion platform, it's a walled garden for a certain type of opinions.
Does it make discussions better? probably, if you already agree with the rules or can (or want) to follow them.
What if you can't?
What if a topic is divisive because on HN people refuse to acknowledge that the general view on HN is simply wrong?
Nobody will ever know.
Imagine a person going to a vegan restaurant asking for a steak. How long will it take to get kicked out?
That's a feature, if you are vegan, but it's not desirable for every restaurant, especially if they want (or like) to serve a broad range of customers.
Of course HN can say that this is exactly what they want, but what about the discussion about "is what they want right?"
I'm talking about HN because one of the post mentioned it like a good example of a free and open platform, but a platform that bans users for talking about politics is not really a good example of good moderation.
Moderation should happen on the receiving side, when it happens on the publisher's side it's called editing.
Any news outlets has editorial boards, there's nothing wrong about it, but it should be clear that the opinions expressed on an editorialised platform are not free.
Decentralisation has, among the many downsides, the advantage of being controlled by the party who receive the content, not the one who generates it.
Which "Fediverse"? As I understand the concept, it applies to social networks in general. But it appears that you are referring to one specific network which contains the Gab server in it.
The most popular of such networks is Mastodon (https://joinmastodon.org/), which everyone can run on their own server (often referred to as an "instance"). By default, you create an account on one server and just speak to everyone like if you were on the same server. If one of such servers turns out to be a cesspool full of bigots (like Gab is), an admin can simply say "my server will no longer communicate with that server". When a bunch of servers do that, Gab is pretty much isolated, even though it's using an open protocol.
To put it in layman's terms: if a lot of spam comes from user@example.com, Gmail can just dismiss the emails coming from all addresses that end in @example.com.
Server owners are usually transparent and keep lists of servers they're not speaking to on GitHub or somewhere.
It has a number of things going for it. First, it's on activitypub, and will have the same kind of granular federating controls as mastodon, at least at the instance level.
And as another commenter mentioned about initial culture, the politics/cultural tilt of the devs are unapologetically anti-righ wing troll, which is a great start, and a lot of the stuff people post about is linux/open source/libre/fediverse stuff, which is a focused interest that doesn't fall back to the lowest common denominator of trolling.
I think it's off to a good start, it's starting with a good culture that's explicitly conscious of the trolling problem, and it shares a lot of the spirit and mission of the other fediverse projects which are driven by conscious concern in mitigating these issues.
In comparison, a large source of Fediverse users (Mastodon etc) are people that leave Twitter because they think it isn't moderated well enough.
However, it’s too far to the left and focused on solidarity to take all of SA’s threads and even forums.
You have such a mix over there, everything from tech to politics, guns, drugs... a lot like reddit.
It does?
> B+R is a community-owned space that seeks to foster solidarity between people from all backgrounds that share a common character. We reject policies of social dominance, Neo-liberalism, patriarchy, the gender binary, white supremacy, and other social ills espoused by capitalism. We support worker/union/trans rights, empowering those without a voice, and each other.
> Do not advocate for obvious bad shit like landlords/cops/capitalism/etc. This is a leftist space.
Sounds like they're quite explicit about what things they're non-open/inviting about.
Their attitude sounds like D&D/C-SPAM turned up to 11. Even as a Bernie-loving social democrat, I'd have to say 'pass'.
https://battlepenguin.com/tech/voat-what-went-wrong/
I think the right answer is federation. Having a lot of instances moderated by different people gives people a lot more freedom of choice.
Sometimes the lack of exposure to real-world problems creates people that are completely disconnected from reality.
Like as in "used by right-wing people who got kicked out of Reddit"? Probably by heavy moderation, the Lemmy developers are left to far-left as far as I can see form a glance.
Like as in "used to create an echo chamber for ideologically aligned people to talk to each other"? That may well be the goal.