Reddit alternative Ruqqus shutting down
ruqqus.com
ruqqus.com
Ruqqus, an open source Reddit clone, is shutting down their main instance - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28799199 - Oct 2021 (107 comments)
> The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservativ...
It's real easy to fake a user community with proper automation and a hand full admins nowadays in order to run a "revenue machine" social media community.
-Just a personal opinion, not fact (nor stated as such) though.
And the other side is important to mention as well: you end up with mainstream communities that are echo-chambers where no-one has ever encountered anything remotely like a witch.
Moderates from both sides are being shunned for not following dogma. It's nice to see intellectuals begin to carve their own spaces in podcasts and substack. We need people willing to engage in thoughtful, nuanced and charitable conversation.
I've held this belief before but now I'm not so sure. Is this actually quantifiable? For example, I'd be interested to know if there are people or groups that have grown in size/reach after (and more specifically, because of) being banned from major platforms.
In fact, you just said that you're not familiar with these alternatives -- doesn't that hint that the banned groups might be now reaching a smaller audience? If they weren't banned, you might have seen them on the more mainstream sites.
Other people who got cancelled or pushed out - like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald - now stand to get really very rich indeed off their new audiences. Writing, it turns out, can be profitable. Just not the sort of writing you find in most media outlets. This also applies to Scott Alexander, quoted above, though he wasn't directly cancelled, "just" doxxed by the New York Times.
Does this fuel extremism? Well it certainly fuels distrust of large institutions and mainstream media narratives, although what "mainstream" means is increasingly unclear. Joe Rogan pointed out the other day that given CNN's tiny audience sizes, it's really Rogan that's mainstream and CNN that's the fringe now. Groups like CNN, MSNBC, even the BBC seem increasingly extremist to me. The rationality and moderation you might hope for from older journalistic institutions is now to be found elsewhere, like the places they like to insinuate are full of extremists.
There were certainly limits on speech that did not fall in line with t_d's world view. As there are in all conservative venues aside from r/tuesday AFAIK.
If anyone is aware of somewhere that is conservative, and is interested in honest debate, I am interested.
By definition, conservatives want to conserve the status quo, someone who is a conservative wouldn’t rock the boat as much as Trump did.
If you want to hear somebody arguing the conservative case, try the early podcasts with Joe Rogan.
"Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them."
This is the naive weakness exploited by every strain of authoritarianism, the idea that if we only object to every form of constraint of expression, we will always be free. Sadly, that is exactly what leads democracies to fall into authoritarian states.
Played out here in a free-speech site falling into an abyss of hatred that no non-idiot would want to support, so it failed for lack of support.
What in fact leads to that, is states declaring certain views they oppose as "intolerant", and starting being intolerant to these views.
If this was really a paradox, such a transition should be impossible. But since such transitions took place, the same forces that enabled them can also prevent a society from becoming intolerant.
Of course in practice this paradox is only ever invoked by those that get to define what counts as "intolerance", or those that agree with the current definition.
Most often, they do NOT actually manage to transform their intolerant society from within, but leave to find tolerance elsewhere. This is the most basic history of the worlds largest superpower - it's European inhabitants fled the various forms of intolerance at home, and then declared and fought for their independence when the rulers tried to extend their intolerance into the new lands.
This can also feedback to provide assistance to those still in the original lands. Also, the intolerance occasionally gets so bad that it will cause revolts and uprisings, which is typically how new tolerance is created.
The tolerant countries also can feedback and support such fights. One of the more notable ones was when Intolerance rose to a severe form in Germany in the 1920s, and we fought WWII to overcome it. Tens of millions died to fight intolerance, showing that fighting intolerance is a rather strong drive in humans.
I can think of few examples where tolerance gradually grew.
What happens is that a tolerant society is created first with great vigilance, and then after a few generations of getting comfortable with it, vigilance declines, and vacuous arguments like this pop up, attempting to separate freedom from responsibility for maintaining it, and an opening is created for the few to exercise their intolerance on the many.
So, nonsense, just because intolerant societies can be overthrown by the majority that just want to be left alone and 'live and let live' —and this usually requires massive effort and usually bloodshed —, that has zero bearing on whether intolerance can grow and drive out tolerance in a tolerant society.
In fact, the situation is the opposite.
If tolerance was the metastable state, then intolerance would never be able to grow in tolerant societies, yet it almost always does grow — and that paradox is how it does so.
So what exactly was this "intolerance" that the UK tried to extend to the US? Does it still exist in the UK? What about in Canada, that waged no war for independence? What about the countries of the former Soviet union? Were they fighting against "intolerance" in WWII, and were beacons of tolerance after their victory? Heck, was the US? If I recall correctly, at the end of WWII, the US still had segregation and a whites-only immigration policy, which would not change until the Hart-Celler act 20 years later. Is that your idea of a tolerant society?
As long as you keep "tolerance" sufficiently vague, you can spin any tale you like.
I thought /r/gendercritical and /r/nonewnormal both fit into the bucket of “I can see why this is controversial, but it’s more dissent from mainstream opinion than clearly ban worthy.” Again I’m not espousing views in those subreddits I just didn’t view them as ban worthy.
All sorts of “misinformation” is totally fine as long as it goes with the group think such as the Rolling Stone story on Oklahoma covid units being overrun that turned out to be false.
Reddit has unpaid moderators who wield way too much power and blackmail the company into getting their way. Now Reddit has raised money so we can expect even more purges to become as advertiser friendly as possible.
Some sort of app that would connect federated backends would be ideal, Lemmy was on the right path but yet another dead on arrival project due to ideology.
I know we seem to be on a path for increasing centralization but I predict the pendulum swings the opposite way as the user experience on centralized sites keep deteriorating due to pressure to monetize and people get fed up of a few power mods on these sites dictating permissible opinions.
Some /r/nonewnormal participants went to Ruqqus, some went to communities.win, but the racist and anti-semitic posters on those sites kept trying to subvert the existing positive culture and it wasn't fun browsing there.
Anyone who can solve the the "less echo chamber than Reddit but less racist than Ruqqus" hosting dilemma stands to gain a large audience.
Do you believe that is possible? Ruqqus would lead me to believe that it's not. The moderation needed to make it less racist is anathema and unpalatable to the audience that would need to support it in the first place. And that's not even mentioning the lack of a viable business model if it's not brand-safe.
I think moderation, by a human being, is key. HN wouldn't be HN if it didn't have Dang.
And I browse tech and other news sites a lot.
Talking about finance? Well, who do you think controls the world's money? And on and on.
Note to dang/admin: I'm sure it is clear that I am being illustrative of a hateful argument, but I am happy to redact.
If I had a nickle for every not dead comment on HN saying "everything is political" (though it seems to be in a lull these past couple months) I could get a pizza delivered a couple times a week.
[1]: https://lemmy.ml/
[2]: https://tildes.net/
I'm reasonably sure that in far left forums, though you can (for example) find quite a bit of antisemitism and similar toxic opinions, you won't get a lot of "Stalin was Right" memes, or admiration for the Khmer Rouge.
There is a qualitative and quantitative difference between the extremes of the right and left in US political discourse as well as the amount of cover the mainstream is willing to extend.
You definitely do. Take a look at this Tankie community on Lemmygrad [1]. You'll also find a lot of denial about Uigyuhr genocide on behalf of China and a lot of revisionism about the atrocities of both the Soviet Union's military interventions and its pogroms.
And yet it's going to happen again, and again, and again. Voat, Parler, whatever.
But I do think this kind of low value and lazy opionionating should be discouraged.
There's a pretty decent size thread of interesting discussion beneath it, demonstrating that it is of value.
> I don't understand why this comment was singled out
I don't moderate this site, but if I did I might be tempted to use a script to scrape for keywords and phrases that sound like violations of the guidelines and issue replies at a key press or automatically. And that's a good way to do it, except occasionally it causes... well... a shallow dismissal?
"Decent size" does not indicate value on HN. We want quality, not quantity. The responses that the root comment generated were mostly either generic (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28995221) or outright flamewar crap.
Digg died and the population moved to reddit. MySpace is deader than most zombies.
So maybe the question is how does one beat the network effects that are so prevalent?
The answer is and has always been to emphasize user equality and to hold each user individually responsible for their actions.
Reddit screwed up all it's integrity when it stopped showing downvote stats in addition to upvote counts.. They needed brigading and skewed voting to allow sponsored posts, celebrity and popularity, and promoted ideals to be artificially promoted as favorable by a majority.
Faked/limited stats, limited controls, and misleading numbers are trademark characteristics of an artificially skewed or profit-biased platform these days.
> So maybe the question is how does one beat the network effects that are so prevalent?
You can't. And in fact, these doomed-to-be-shut-down sites are in fact exhibiting an extremely strong network effect. The founding group of malcontents has an existing network of relationships with both strong and weak ties, and the whole lot of them get pulled in en-mass.
That's what you have to overcome in these cases, not the network effect that the mainstream sites exhibit. FB, Reddit, and Twitter don't necessarily have to be beaten in order for a smaller site to succeed on it's own terms.
There are tactics that would make it likelier for such a site to endure, but the site would have to commit at the outset to a whole hearted strategy of weapons-grade muffling of the toxic sludge. Pretty much implement every undeployed UI trick and algorithmic tweak that can be found in the recent FB leaks. Implement shadowbans. Use rate limiting. Suppress the display of posts that have a higher ratio of angry emoji reactions. Brigade detection. Virality and repost limits.
Anyway, if you're willing and prepared to dial the soft-moderation and filter-bubbles up to 11, you MIGHT be able to run a free-speech-centric site that is capable of withstanding an influx of Nazis and Trolls without degenerating into a festering cesspool that repels anyone else. But you're going to have to have a crew with pretty strong stomachs looking at all the sludge just in order to continually maintain and adjust the knobs on those measures.
None of that will be cheap or easy, and in the end you'll have accomplished a rather dubious feat: a site that allows conspiracy theories and racist Nazi rants to be posted while limiting their spread as much as possible. So you can 'friend' your crazy uncle frank and comment on his fishing photos without having to deal with his anti-masking posts or Alex Jones fan-fiction.
Of course the folks you're muffling will complain loudly, but realistically speaking that won't prevent them from using the site.
I'm not sure you can build a viable business model around that value proposition, but from a technical and social standpoint it might work.
The shutdowns will happen so long as 1) there's not enough market share for the competing product (presumably from the network effects) and 2) there's market suppression from the current players. In other words: as long as there is a competing first-landing player and that player is actively working against any newcomers will there be a change? Probably not. To put this into a historical context: Standard Oil was notoriously gobbling up or destroying small players as a very successful attempt to own the market. This is no different.
The forever mission to stop them is still incomplete. It is only going to get harder as they keep on being resilient and censorship resistant.
Done by none other than the ones who love chasing so-called 'nazis' for a living.
I don't think "remaining up" is the totality of their goals. I think what the writer of the post is getting at is that pursuing this direction leads to no outcomes better than a marginally sustained existence.
Conservatives want a place on the internet.