Hacker News Reader

> fail to make it big and remain a niche thing for those trolls who enjoy the edginess,

It would fail on those terms as well due to irrelevance: When your political agenda consists of annoying and offending "the other", they need to be present to take offence. If they're not listening, where's the fun?

The "echo chamber" aspect takes all the fun out of the performative cruelty.

You are making an assumption that it's primarily about performative cruelty. But I would guess a non-trivial amount of them are just looking for a place where they feel safe talking about what they believe. Every slice of the political/cultural spectrum has it's trolls but they trolls are not representative of the general population.

I may think much of what the other side says is reprehensible but I can generally tell when the speaker is trolling vs just speaking their mind.

I like both points here. Twitter gets traction because professional trolls / grifters use it to build their personal brand.

They are frequently newspaper columnists, authors, and TV pundits who benefit directly or indirectly from have a large number of followers (whether they following in agreement or follow out of outrage, it matters not).

Sadly this is true of the left as well as the right; they are all selling something.

These Professionals need large mainstream audiences, which is why they love twitter and twitter loves them, but they are a different animal to the tribalists who want to satisfy their need to mix with like minded people.

Until the fringe sites enable the former as well as the latter it's not immediately obvious how they remain viable.

> Sadly this is true of the left as well as the right; they are all selling something.

citation for the "both-sides"-ism very much needed.

Is this a serious question? Do you honestly believe the left has no agenda or that “mainstream news” is not effectively propaganda?

The news business depends on division to thrive. Division and anger drives clicks and eyeballs. Oh, and let’s not forget the billions of dollars in political advertising that goes into the pockets of corporate news organizations and social media companies — the very same entities that are fomenting the division that necessitates the advertising in the first place. It’s a rage cycle.

As a starting point I would recommend reading Matt Taibbi’s Hate Inc and subscribing to Glenn Greenwald’s substack. They’re two of the only left-of-center commentators who have not lost their integrity over the past five years, and their ideas are worth listening to.

> Do you honestly believe the left has no agenda

Straw man, not what I said. "they all have agendas therefor they're as bad as each other" is dangerous, dismissive and wrong.

> subscribing to Glenn Greenwald’s substack. They’re two of the only left-of-center commentators who have not lost their integrity

Thanks, now I see where you're coming from and I know that I can safely ignore your opinions.

As to the idea that Greenwald is one "of the only left-of-center commentators who have not lost their integrity", https://theintercept.com/2020/10/29/glenn-greenwald-resigns-...

It really doesn't come across as a good-faith argument.

In this case it comes from the very top and is a big factor.

Newly elected U.S House rep telling ppl that voted against him to cry more.

https://i.redd.it/uv97gw1bb5x51.jpg

Trump Jr. in front of Trump asking the crowd to make the liberals cry.

https://twitter.com/VicBergerIV/status/1323527158816333824

I've seen what they post when they're "speaking their mind"

It almost always devolves into "jokes" about getting state approval to shoot immigrants, refugees, minorities in open ranges, or providing "helicopter rides" - a reference to dropping people from helicopters.

This is what currently unifies the right wing of US politics.

This analysis seems narrow.

I use various social media sites for various purposes. For example, this one is tech-heavy, with an academic feel.

Facebook is the family album.

Twitter is for engaging 'the other', for all genuine exchange us rare.

LinkedIn is strictly professional.

Parler is more for coordination amongst the echo chamber.

The only losers here are those who feel some quasi-divine urge to control others and shape opinion.

do note that this isnt that hard a barrier. The earliest reports of bad behavior were from the BBS days, with nazi forums targeting Jewish or holocaust focused boards/sites.

> When your political agenda consists of annoying and offending "the other", they need to be present to take offense.

I'm not sure what you mean by "the other". "The other" is an actual concept signifying people who are somehow excluded from society. Rarely do people get banned for going after "the other". Most of these people get banned for going after mainstream journalists and politicians. Many don't get banned for going after anyone at all. And many get shadow banned without any notice or explanation.

Secondly, I don't think people on the right consider what people like Milo (for instance) do to be performative cruelty. They see it as exposing hypocrisy. They see it as exercising their god-given right to free speech.

Milo was more about the grift than the cruelty. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/milo-yiannop...

(entertaining little detail in there of one of the "anti-immigration" activists getting banned from Australia by their, er, immigration control)

I think they meant things like these https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25046160

There's a "history rhymes" kind of dynamic to this.

The first recognizable, critical-mass online social media(broadcast, topic driven, message posting) came from BBS operators, mailing lists, Usenet and proprietary variants.

The moderated ones gradually disappeared as users migrated; the unmoderated ones drowned in noise over time. Pieces of it still survive as relics.

The next generation was website driven: home pages, forums and weblogging. Again, a similar pattern: moderated places disappeared, unmoderated ones drowned. But, this time the scale was larger, with different dynamics. Self-publishing was getting easier: at first there were web rings, later a "blogosphere" emerged. Forums were more varied.

But again, some relics were left over.

And from there, social media platforms started emerging, aggregating the space. And each one in turn has followed this life cycle, on slower or faster timelines. Moderating keeps the signal alive, but after a few years people tire of the status quo and look for the next thing, somewhere with fewer gatekeepers, perhaps, or more structure, or stronger or weaker identity models. The signal decays in amplitude rather than drowning in noise.

What tends to be overlooked in social networking and virtual worlds discussions is that there's always a quality-of-service tradeoff dynamic to them. If you engineer the rules to improve one area you may lose some others. This is true even when looking at search systems: they retrieve correlated info that often has an intentionally wrong meaning.

> their terms of service prohibit inciting terrorism or acts of violence – issues that 4chan/etc deal with by allowing it

4chan and similar communities typically comply with local laws[1], which means no incitation to violence/terrorism (and if you spent some time there vs. only reading articles about it, you'd see this is enforced).

(footnote missing?)

I'm not entirely convinced by this, since there are a lot of local laws and I don't believe 4chan keeps a big database of which posts are visible in which jurisdictions? Do they have an equivalent of Twitter's is_nazi flag? ( https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/tweet-withhel... / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strafgesetzbuch_section_86a )

4chan's only infrastructure is in California, so they really only have to abide by California and US laws. Only way for other countries to make them abide is via blocking them, which may not really be worth the effort if there are only a smattering of users in your jurisdiction using it

Strange that they would choose a jurisdiction that’s so famously hostile to free speech /s

My bad: [1] https://www.4channel.org/rules

> 1. You will not upload, post, discuss, request, or link to anything that violates local or United States law.

By local laws, I meant US laws for 4chan, and wherever other location the alternative boards may be hosted.

I don,t know about the future, and I,m not into the content, but voat/gab/tdw already have better ui/ux than any of the big players like fb/tw/reddit, whose user experience has devolved to barely tolerable for me. I think a mass exodus to private communities is coming.

I don,t think gab will grow to the size of reddit, rather reddit will be picked apart into a billion pieces like a dinosaur after the astetoid.

I agree that these mechanics will always play out at scale, unless users are in charge of moderation/curation/governance.

Successful cases in point:

Discord: Closed bubbles, users in absolute control of entry and moderation. Still going strong.

8chan: Open bubbles, users in absolute control of moderation. You also had conservative alt-right and LGBTQ communities, cleanly separated, mostly just ignoring each other. Only got killed by "black-swan" events and the subsequent pressure from press attention.

Tumblr: Organic user-powered curation via likes and reposts (vs Twitter/FB style "AI" algorithms having their way), you had LGBTQ, neo nazi, porn/conservative communities existing in parallel with effective but organic and moving boundaries. Only got killed by external pressure from advertisers.

8chan had some administration problems too which didn't help them stay afloat

> We can already see hints of this in the fact that their terms of service prohibit inciting terrorism or acts of violence – issues that 4chan/etc deal with by allowing it, reducing their reach, and Twitter (attempt) to deal with by banning it, increasing their reach as they provide a "safe space".

Inciting terrorism or acts of violence are typically crimes. If Parler's position is to disallow criminal activity in its TOS, that's one hell of a limiting principle, especially compared to Twitter.

In my (right-wing) experience, Twitter became a toxic place after the "trust and safety" moderation was adopted. Before that, when it was "the free speech wing of the free speech party," users with ill intent could not attempt to get others deplatformed. Today, we still have harassment on Twitter, but with the added threat of user mobs brigading those who have the wrong opinions.

The one point I think is important is that the "blue checkmarks" indeed demand protection from the unwashed masses, and that is why the rules are so selectively enforced and biased. Journalists and public figures are typically of one political persuasion (in the US at least), and sometimes perceived alternative ideas as "violence" or just wrongthink no matter what.

Parler had to avoid being beholden to its highest-value users in this way. If Twitter were not so intolerant, I might use it more. But these days, it feels like you need to walk on eggshells to avoid a shadowban.

It will fail for two reasons: A) If you want advertising, you're going to have to censor. B) People like to argue. If it is 100% people agreeing, then it loses stickiness. Might as well just watch Fox News. They need to see the "wrong" people for validation.

Also, there will be trolls that will push the envelop of what non censored can be.

> majority of users on the mainstream end of the spectrum demand protection from those users

This “demanding protection” is one of the root problems with online discourse today. I refuse to concede that words on a screen will ever be something anyone “needs protection” from (short of actual doxxing, stalking and IRL harassment).

Have people forgotten “sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me?” A block/ignore button should be sufficient. We don’t need platforms editorializing or censoring content.

People seek out content that makes them angry (ragebait) and then blame the platforms for disseminating it.

Walk away from the screen. Close your eyes. [0]

[0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/tyler-the-creators-cyber-bull...

That doesn’t mean they don’t have a massive potential market. All the centre right people who see Twitter banning people for questioning unlimited immigration, or trans men competing against women in sport, and feel like current social media companies aren’t for them.

I think in this election Twitter definitely, but also Facebook have taken sides. There are a lot of normal, decent right wing people out there, despite the rhetoric of the left, who also wouldn’t mind a social media platform.

> questioning unlimited immigration

There is no unlimited immigration. Even European Free Movement has limits, albeit rarely relevant or enforced.

This contributes to a ratchet of delusion where the laws are made more and more onerous on immigrants while people complain that it's "unlimited".

Do you have sources for people being banned for those reasons? I have not heard of these cases

It's not exactly the same but this article talks about a gay guy being banned for (supposedly) pointing out that there are very non-binary people in the world, and objecting to the idea that language should be changed to accomodate them:

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/megan-fox/2019/10/19/t...

The article quotes some of his tweets on the topic.

Are we absolutely sure that's what he was banned for? Twitter makes it very unclear, there isn't a "[user was banned for posting this tweet]" report.

Given their failure to ban glinner for far worse stuff I suspect there's something else going on.

Now that is something I wish all the social media platforms would enforce on their moderator staff.

Every ban should be accompanied with at least one sentence of explanation, a quote from the relevant law or ToS, and the text or image (with a nice red circle if required) in question. If the content was illegal then a summary instead.

It should be a choice to view it, as public as the posting itself, and subject to comments also.

As best I can tell, Facebook bans are done by monkeys hitting buttons randomly to get through their queue as quickly as possible. I don't think Twitter is much better.

This vague arbitrariness is another problem. "We just dropped a hammer on you, bye."

This drives people to paranoia.

My point is that I think those people will end up realising that they need some form of moderation that will likely conflict with the core premise of the platform.

Moderation is not binary... There's a hell of a difference between banning misgendering and banning someone who spends all day sending unsolicited replies or shock images.

I'm not going to comment on this example, as we may disagree, but I think that there's more than unsolicited replies and shock images that will happen here, there will be significant rallying against certain groups, and members of those groups will feel unsafe around that.

The problem for Parler is that many of their target market (the right) are in fact in one of these groups. Women, ethnic minorities, the rich, the poor, veterans, the less abled, conservative voters, libertarian voters, the list goes on and more examples will arrive.

Building a platform on being a safe space for division and exclusion can't succeed because that same force will make it an unsafe space for all but the small niche that win the territory.

We've already seen hints of women on the conservative right having a problem with misogyny from others in the community...

Can you expound on the difference between “safe space” and “unsafe space”? I don’t think I understand what these words mean.