All of those alternatives seem full of hate speech though
Other places on the list are much more reasonable.
The kinds of people who are going to spend a lot of time doing that are likely to be people who like how reddit works a lot, but have an ax to grind against some aspect of it, and usually that aspect is moderation. Most normal people who interact inoffensively have very few interactions with moderators. It's only going to be controversial people who gravitate to that sort of thing, and any platform that's full of people who frequently court controversy is bound to fill up rather quickly with insane freaks.
As SSC says, even if witch hunts are genuinely bad, if you found a town with the founding principle of having no witch hunts, you will end up with a town with 5 genuine civil libertarians, and 100 witches.
I think an interesting strategy would be to found a site with an initially high level of censorship, but a public commitment to reduce the amount/degree of censorship on the site over time with a particular timetable.
My preferences determine what communities I prefer to be a part of.
I prefer to not be part of a community where the majority says super racist garbage.
As such, I choose not to join such a community/website.
That's where idea of public platforms as infrastructure (and actual infrastructure like DNS and carriers) if coming from.
This reminds me of people wanting to ban or filter torrent protocol itself, instead of illegal content on it.
So in theory, voat & co should either shrink or get less radical the more reddit-alternatives there are. That is, unless reddit is turning normal people into witches that will then populate the new alternative platforms.
Also if people are spread sufficiently thin, some of the sites will die from “no one is using this”, I think.
I don’t know how this all balances out, but what you brought up does seem like an important force/mechanism to take into account. So, I’ll say “Further work is needed in order to understand the behavior in this area.”, haha.
The dynamics involved in city districts rising and falling and rising again might be similar. Online communities lack the rent-dynamic however. A "difficult" part of town gets more attractive because the rent is much cheaper. I don't know whether there's anything equivalent in online communities that would "gentrify" a toxic community.
The average person puts their pitch fork back down and enjoys the bonding experience that a successful hunt brings to the community. The out-group isn't just persecuted because they are different, the whole process also helps confirm the unity of the in-group.
I was imagining an organization which from the outset planned to be very permissive in what they eventually allowed, with initial restrictions just being in order to cultivate a desirable community to start with, but now that you mention it, perhaps the motivation behind the policies don’t matter so much as the policies themselves. Good point.
That being said, I don’t imagine that TikTok will become quite as permissive in the end as I was imagining?
Plainly: I want reddit to censor hate speech on their site, but I don't want hosting companies to disallow those alernative sites to exist, nor do I want Chrome to disallow any user to visit any of those alternatives in their browser.
It should be illegal to deny fundamental infrastructure to someone on the basis of his philosophy or point of view. That's what a free society means.
> We don't have to subsidize their free use of internet resources.
We subsidize the FAANG's use of internet resources; the Internet was largely originally created with public money (military, academia, etc).
> They are welcome to buy their own servers or even rent them.
Are they? What if they get banned from there? What if they can't collect money from their community, because all the donation sites ban them? What if their donation sites are killed because all the payment processors drop them?
Your argument leads to the logical end of "they're welcome to make their own internet".
What happens when something you like to discuss falls into the category of hate speech? You think it couldn't happen, but plenty of topics that were totally reasonable subjects of discussion, plenty of totally reasonable publicly-held opinions from 20 years ago are now in this basket. It's totally plausible to imagine some newer topic you feel strongly about eventually becoming so, and you ending up on the side of wanting to have honest discussion about it and being locked out.
Can't imagine it happening to you? Well, maybe you don't like pedophilia, or the huge push of incest porn that seems to be everywhere. Maybe you have legitimate, non-racially-oriented concerns about the riots around the country? Maybe you're worried about some particular changes coming to your children's education, or you're worried about the impact of ideas like UBI? Well, your opinions that are acceptable to post in polite places today might not be in 2030.
The only way anyone should be okay with this continual incursion into free speech is if they have truly tied themselves to the idea of being 100% on board with whatever restriction is coming down the pipe next. Such a person has no principles, and it's hard to imagine defending them.
This is slippery-slope nonsense, just where this conversation always ends up. You can "what if..." you're way to us banning these individuals from driving cars if you want, but it's not what's being discussed.
I am very, very, very in favor of reddit disallowing hate speech on their community as that is an active behavior on the site itself for a community they own. I am very, very, very against any organization barring access to things like domain name registration, hosting, etc. on the basis of their expressed ideas up to the point of them directly enabling clearly criminal behavior (e.g., directly organizing violent attacks, sharing revenge porn, etc.).
Private citizens kicking someone out of a restaurant for being rude is not the same thing as government actors barring them from ever owning a restaurant, or going somewhere else where their rudeness is welcome.
> The only way anyone should be okay with this continual incursion into free speech is if they have truly tied themselves to the idea of being 100% on board with whatever restriction is coming down the pipe next. Such a person has no principles, and it's hard to imagine defending them.
This is a false dichotomy built on the aforementioned slippery slope fallacy.
You can't claim slippery slope if it already happened. Payment processors, domain name registrars, hosting providers, and anti-DDoS services already ban people they dislike. If we slide any further down this slope, the deplatformed will have to lay their own optic fibre.
And their own app stores.
And their own apps.
And their own domain name registrars.
And their own payment processors.
The parent poster simply said that they want to join communities free of (or, mostly free of) hate speech and that being free/mostly free of hate speech is an attractive quality for them.
Not once did they advocate for denying infrastructure or any of the other things your entire comment is based on. In fact, they stated the opposite.
Banning illegal content, spam, harassment, etc (which even the most hardcore "censorship free" platforms do) are also forms of censorship.
The law gives you a legitimate and stable line that you can draw between allowed and disallowed speech. It's fine for a platform to censor what's illegal, because in a sense, we all agree on the law and have a say in its content. But we have no say in big tech content policy, and that's what makes it illegitimate.
My basic point is that it's infuriating and wrong for big tech to impose its values on the public. A public space that's privately owned is still a public space. A free society is one where you don't get barred from public spaces because of your opinions.
You’re not actually against lines being drawn through legal speech — you just don’t like where they fall.
That's a somewhat bold claim. At minimum, CAN-SPAM makes the worst of it illegal.
> [An Act] To regulate interstate commerce by imposing limitations and penalties on the trans-mission of unsolicited commercial electronic mail via the Internet.
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/cases/2007...
Platforms aren't public venues, they're private businesses offering access to a service under terms that serve their interests and business needs first and foremost... terms that everyone agreed to before being able to use the platform.
>The law gives you a legitimate and stable line that you can draw between allowed and disallowed speech. It's fine for a platform to censor what's illegal, because in a sense, we all agree on the law and have a say in its content. But we have no say in big tech content policy, and that's what makes it illegitimate.
The law also allows for private ownership of businesses, contracts and freedom of association. The law says Google's platform is Google's property and Google can do whatever it darn well likes with it.
>You can shut down spam without harming the principle of free expression because you can express any idea in a way that isn't spam.
Who gets to define what spam is? Free expression isn't free if someone has the ability to define any arbitrary speech they don't like as "spam" and censor it. All of the slippery slope arguments applied to censorship of any other form of speech also apply to spam.
Technically you could probably bring it down if you simulate a massive amount of users who only access spam sites but that would probably become rather expensive because you would attack your own nodes and your own nodes would try to help the network. It would also need to persist forever else everything would simply go back to normal shortly after the attack is stooped.
Do you allow any form of speech in your house or is your house a platform that censors speech?
4chan, being the obvious exception, since content can be created anonymously.
That right, and duty, does not exist on a private platform that you don’t own. You are limited by the TOS and license that you, like most, willfully skip over. A private, non-government platform can tell you to STFU and Get Out and they don’t even need a reason, because it’s their platform.
You can easily set up your own free speech platform, but nobody is required to listen. That’s the main attraction of social media, a more-or-less guaranteed audience. At least until someone tells you to GTFO if you’re not hosting.
Counties can imprison or kill you for speaking incorrectly.
Companies? Only have the power to cause me trouble when they are oligopolies, e.g. big tech right now. It can be quite severe trouble, even if it isn’t literal imprisonment.
A house? I am aware that poverty (and being a minor) forces some people to live with abusive persons who can give them a choice of silence or homelessness. That kind of evil doesn’t scale up to affect everyone (perhaps if it did we might try harder to fix it?)
If they deleted the apps already installed on your phone, then I'd agree.