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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

This sort of thing is predictable. Twitter & co are leaving open a huge window for a competitor to come in and take a big chunk of users. The attempts are going to keep coming until one of them has solid technical foundations and sticks.

There were a lot of knee-jerk calls for some sort of government regulation or similar on the right when the censorship started to kick up a gear. Hopefully they'll learn that the first reaction is a mistake and that the market eventually corrects for that sort of power abuse.

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But if you don't control what's going on on your platforms they become a cesspit that most people don't want to go anywhere near. They either succumb to spam, or just allow the openly racist to dominate, as other participants tend to leave in disgust.

These new platforms have generally all been a fantastic example of that, as have the older reddit forks/splinters (voat?)

They'll figure it out eventually. There'll be a few failed attempts as people figure out that anything-goes doesn't work and eventually someone will find a good balance of moderation and freedom.

There is little doubt that we'll see a lot of unimpressive attempts at a right wing social network. But since Twitter is politically hostile to an entire wing of politics, people will keep trying until a competitor hits the right notes. They don't have much to lose and a lot to gain by trying.

> Twitter is politically hostile to an entire wing of politics

This is really quite a big claim, I'm not sure it's that cut and dried, personally.

But then I don't tweet or care to read other people's tweets anyway. I think the whole thing is overblown and representative only of a few noisy minorities in the first place.

Here's a little experiment anyone can do to test this. Click any tweet from a prominent Republican politician. If the tweet is new, especially very new, the replies will be relatively supportive/agreeing with the politician. Within moments/minutes, anti-Republican messages will dominate the replies something like 95 to 1 and the first few replies will almost certainly be extremely rude, crude and emotionally vitriolic.

The opposite happens to Democrat politicians, "thoughtful and sane" echoing replies are boosted to the top. Twitter gaslights conservatives and anti-gaslights the left.

I saw this happen for the first time in real time when Trump first expressed his outrage when Twitter first amended his tweet that set off the whole S230 discussion. The first 5 minutes were nothing and I mean nothing but supportive tweets. After about 5 minutes, almost all the replies that were visible at the top were vitriolic and expressing anti-Trump views. Since then, I've been spotting this pattern everywhere, just not in real time. I think what probably happened is that the censors at twitter were scared of applying their gaslighting in light of Trump's threats, but that's just a guess. It's extremely obvious to me though that Twitter is purposely gaslighting conservatives by editorializing which anti-Republican replies get the most visibility.

That's twitter users, not the platform itself. I don't see any "free speech" alternative being any different. In fact presumably such mobbing would be more prevalent and more vitriolic there, as there would be no standards of content or behaviour.

What you're asking for there is a republican safe space that suppresses dissent, not free speech.

I would agree that the group of people who spend tons of time on social media tends to lean left, but it doesn't help that the platforms are actively driving away non-leftists.

In other words, it's hardly surprising that the user base of Twitter leans left.

(For example, when they suspended Jason Whitlock for tweeting "Black Lives Matter founder buys $1.4 million home in Topanga, which has a black population of 1.4%. She's with her people!".)

How are they actively driving away non-leftists?

And yet, the anti-democratic spam became a meme https://mobile.twitter.com/its_menieb/status/141183179033191...

Looking through the recent Biden's posts, I don't see the opposite effect you mention. There's lots of criticism at the top.

When I click that Biden tweet, 8 out of the first 10 replies on my timeline are supportive, 1 questions vaccine safety and one is the meme you showed. For a prominent Republican that would be an amazing ratio of the first 10 replies especially if the tweet was older and has a lot of likes or retweets.

So? That's free speech, don't you like free speech?

That's not even close to what I see. The top for me contains 4 "this person got a reaction after the shot, are you going to pay for their costs?" tweets and other not-quite-positive messages. Maybe check the comparison again while logged out?

In a private window for me it's 9 out of 10 supportive replies.

Edit: Conversely here is one of the house minority leader's most recent tweets celebrating the 4th:https://twitter.com/LeaderMcConnell/status/14116560387938140...

8 out of the first 10 replies for me are anti-Republican talking points and anti-McConnell memes. The replies / discussion on every politician is clearly astro-turfed to create a specific narrative that always flows one direction. The house minority leader can't even celebrate the 4th without getting a lot of hateful replies and gaslighting in that anti- replies are boosted even if they have no or few likes or retweets.

Regardless of whether it's true, enough people perceive it to be true to where this social network got half a million sign-ups, and Parler had a few million itself. And when trying to siphon users to your new social network, perception is really all that matters.

> This is really quite a big claim, I'm not sure it's that cut and dried, personally.

If you want to deny the obvious reality that's fine, but there is a huge demand for this from plenty of non-deplorables who aren't ever going to be ok with some jackass at twitter determining what is ok to say. They showed their hand, they are willing to lie and censor and fake fact check enough true and relevant things they don't like that creating alternatives is the only path forward, however long it takes. This is not about allowing _actual_ hate speech, _actual_ harassment cyber-stalking, pedo shit, or planning violence, but if it's not one of those there is demand for a platform that shuts the fuck up about it.

"fake fact check"

This, to me, is what's gone crazy about US politics. Facts are now considered political. Someone who is out and out spewing lies shouldn't be called on that, because my lies are as good as your facts and you're oppressing my politics if you label them that way.

I wish you luck with whatever you're trying to do, but these sites are little more than right wing safe-spaces where reality can be prevented from intruding. Their own policies (whether stated or just how they are acted upon) show that this is the case, and that the free speech angle is merely lip service.

(and where sites do, really, genuinely allow free speech, as mentioned before, they degenerate into places nobody normal really wants to be)

Facts are not political, fact checking can absolutely be, and often is political.

When nobody trusts the fact checkers anymore, as no intelligent person still does to any significant degree, they're not doing any good.

All I see here are a string of assertions, nothing presented that would make me doubt the fact checkers. Especially as the ones I’ve seen also show their working.

What I have seen is the people who have been fact checked mount a campaign to undermine fact checkers, and in fact undermine the idea that there are such things as facts.

You need to be more sympathetic to my lived reality. /s

I don't have the time or energy to try to present a researched case here about this, but to millions of people the "our narrative is your truth" bs has been so thick and obvious that we just don't take most media or the fact checks based thereon seriously. I get it, it's a dangerous game, there are a lot of dumb people who will believe a lot of dumb conspiracy shit, which will inevitably 99.9% of the time devolve into some form of "the jews did it", targeting me, but that's why it's so dangerous to sacrifice all credibility pursuing some political goal.

As an outsider I found it funny that people were so up in arms about trump lying during the campaign, when it was perfectly obvious that he was signalling to his base that he was not one of the hated insiders, not a political correct person or a democrat. The loathing of him by the establishment helped him, it didn't hinder him.

As for fact checking, well with the attempts to stump out the Biden Laptop story and the ban on anybody thinking loud about the lab leak theory, we should assume that political fact checking cannot be neutral.

I fail to see why we should assume such, and “the Biden laptop” thing turned out to be a waste of time regardless.

Tucker Carlson can already barely hold advertisers and he has a massive platform on a pretty reputable network. Any social media site like this is going to be carlson++, so how will it ever stay afloat?

I think Twitter pretty much found the balance already since every extreme group from pretty much every angle is complaining about Twitter being biased against them. Meanwhile Twitter even tries to work around legal moderation requirements by splitting the visible parts of the network by country.

> or just allow the openly racist to dominate

For some platforms, that's a feature, not a bug.

That's a very limited sort of platform, though, and certainly not anything for Twitter to be worried about (in fact, Twitter would _benefit_ from such a platform existing, as it might draw off some of the worst users). At that point you're looking at a platform that's not even attractive to the average racist; just to people whose _hobby_ is racism. So a small niche of extremely nasty people who other social networks don't particularly want to deal with anyway.

It's already happened. There is no hole to fill. 4chan adheres to the law, 8kun (formerly 8chan) does not. The users have already pushed free speech to its limit years ago.

In what way doesn't it?

Child pornography, threats, and conspiracy are not protected speech. In fact, it is illegal to host such content. 8kun does not moderate the content they host because they aim for maximum free speech.

That's not what the disclaimer or the owners say, but it's taboo to see for yourself. Similar to that Byuu situation.

Q: Into the Storm is worth watching. You get to hear what the siterunners have to say rather than what a banner they put up says.

No banners in Watson's videos. What difference, at this point, does it make? The site is dead of activity, which shows how deranged this is. But questioning its state has to be buried and down-voted so it isn't seen.

It's not censorship when the rules are made clear. You are not permitted to make comments or videos that incite violence, such as the insurrection of the Capitol.

Yet the BLM riots and the politicians who praised them got a pass.

> Twitter & co are leaving open a huge window for a competitor to come in and take a big chunk of users.

There are some people that you may not want as your customers.

its a Free market of ideas! Why do we call it censorship when the byers reject buying an idea? Its not!

I don’t think it’s really a tech thing, I mean Twitter was a disaster tech wise for years. The fact of the matter is that there are armies of entrepreneurs out there all dreaming of making the next big social network, and failing. Even google couldn’t do it. It’s going to take more than a few big name right wing backers to get the ball rolling.

> the market eventually corrects for that sort of power abuse.

Oh, yeah, the typical libertarian daydreaming: "eventually markets will always fix themselves" .

Because it worked so well for the last 30 years, right? We didn't get any oligopolies/monopolies in the tech industry, right?

Well ... yeah, it has worked pretty great? The last 30 years has been the best 30 years ever in terms of the minority view vs majority view power balance. Powered mainly by the hyper-liberal environment created by the internet. There has been a maybe 2 year rough spot and there is no reason to assume the market is not going to deliver.

I'd be interested to know what views you consider to be "hyper-liberal".

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