I've said this before and got downvoted for it.
But if companies allow extremists on their platforms then the moderates will leave. It's not so much a paradox but a cause and effect.
But if companies allow extremists on their platforms then the moderates will leave. It's not so much a paradox but a cause and effect.
You see this all the time. As a kid I posted on a forum Opa-Ages that was just weirdos banned from Gaming-Ages (NeoGAF).
This isn’t so much about free speech and moderation. You also need to answer the question of how to compete with Reddit with these facts in mind.
The only people who ever had reason to use Voat were those with unsavory opinions. Ok, you’ve banned all of your users. Now what?
So, all the times you’ve said this before, did you ever pitch a solution?
As for the next step, it looks less like starting a reddit competitor and more like building individual, independent communities that can stand or (more likely) fall apart from any others.
For example, I was pleasantly surprised to see Discourse have so much success and high profile roll outs (like Boing Boing and Blizzard). It turns out that everyone was ready for a modern revitalization of the forum experience, not that forums were doomed.
I think I'd liken it to the explosion of Slack/Discord popularity. It would have been a mistake to look at the slow death of IRC and conclude "I guess people don't like chatting anymore."
You mention it in your post. It's Discord. We're looping back to IRC. Give forums another 5 years or so
Forums (Discourse) are probably next up when we remember forums have great SEO benefits and discord none
Other groups might be people who feel harassed by people who aren't banned from the incumbent. For example, I think Mastodon saw early large influxes of LGBT users who were getting tired of Twitter's lack of moderation.
(Though of course, Mastodon has seen other influxes as well that might have helped it get over a specific niche - IIRC many Japanese who had different ideas about what is tolerable than Western platforms, and of course techies enthusiastic about federation.)
The solution is to attract small communities off reddit. There are countless decent communities on reddit that have issues with the vast majority of the website outside their niche interest. If each of these small communities will have their own little place to discuss and share ideas without having the Damocles sword of the larger reddit assholery and bad design over their heads, I feel like there's a chance they'll move to a different platform.
I am planning such an alternative to reddit that targets these small communities. I hope it will actually be useful to people.
One only need to look at /r/news and /r/politics to see this happening on the original site.
- Blue checkmarks claiming lockdowns are a net benefit to the world
- Twitter adding their corporate opinion on the recent US election to some tweets
The aforementioned left-wing extremism has caused many of us to move to Parler.
I don't doubt someone is repeating the CCP party line on Twitter, but are you actually saying anyone is taking those accounts seriously?
Come on now, I'm on lefty Twitter, and nobody is saying Chinese flavoured capitalism is the answer.
[0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2020/10/01/some-busi...
Bad example of leftism run amok and off target
> “I’ll happily provide video commentary”
And your knee-jerk response is to defend other parts of his statement? It’s a perfect example of leftism amok because it’s a common one I’ve increasingly heard over the past few years about the indifference or glee to rich people dying.
We can easily flip this into a right-wing statement and it will be highly disapproved of.
“Right wing nationalists will think your statements excuse leftist tendencies towards violence, and shoot your for this in an uprising. I’ll happily provide commentary.”
Turnabout, sure, let's look at it. Your version of the statement hits me the same way as the original.
Kudos for that, btw. It's a really good equivalent statement.