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I also have a strong desire for a community tolerant of nuanced conversation, but any attempts I've seen to do so (bitchute, gab, parler, voat), seem to almost

I also have a strong desire for a community tolerant of nuanced conversation, but any attempts I've seen to do so (bitchute, gab, parler, voat), seem to almost immediately be taken over by precisely the worst parts of any other community. So then the sane people who would otherwise not mind sharing the community with those fringe factions tend to avoid participating in the communities at all. It's almost like, ironically, the best way forward would be to create a moderated community that slowly gets a user base of a diverse set of people, and then slowly pull back the moderation over time. Allowing something like subreddits with communities to self-select their own moderation levels is also great, imo. Reddit was perfect until the platform itself stopped being neutral.

boring_twenties 6y ago
Coincidentally this was covered pretty well by none other than Slate Star Codex itself, here: https://web.archive.org/web/20200618093842/https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservative-the-eternal-struggle/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200618093842/https://slatestar... > 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
KozmoNau7 6y ago
I would say to keep the moderation active, and focus it on encouraging reasoned posts, while striking down posts that go too far in a personal direction, ad hominems and so on. Start with warnings, scale up to temporary timeouts, bans and eventually permanent bans. Strike down extremely hard on any kind of doxxing or threats. Have moderators cover only a few subforums, so they don't get stretched too thin, have the moderators/admins confer internally on cross-forum issues and bans. It does require a competent moderator team that knows when to let discussions run, when to gently nudge people towards more reasoned debate, and when to swing the ban hammer. Reddit was absolutely not perfect at any point in time. There were countless cases of power hungry mods in their own little kingdoms, doxxing, inter-subreddit fights and exceedingly virulent hate subreddits that specifically did their best to hurt other people. That's not debate, that's bullying and in many cases criminal.

boring_twenties 6y ago

Coincidentally this was covered pretty well by none other than Slate Star Codex itself, here: https://web.archive.org/web/20200618093842/https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservative-the-eternal-struggle/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200618093842/https://slatestar... > 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

KozmoNau7 6y ago

I would say to keep the moderation active, and focus it on encouraging reasoned posts, while striking down posts that go too far in a personal direction, ad hominems and so on. Start with warnings, scale up to temporary timeouts, bans and eventually permanent bans. Strike down extremely hard on any kind of doxxing or threats. Have moderators cover only a few subforums, so they don't get stretched too thin, have the moderators/admins confer internally on cross-forum issues and bans. It does require a competent moderator team that knows when to let discussions run, when to gently nudge people towards more reasoned debate, and when to swing the ban hammer. Reddit was absolutely not perfect at any point in time. There were countless cases of power hungry mods in their own little kingdoms, doxxing, inter-subreddit fights and exceedingly virulent hate subreddits that specifically did their best to hurt other people. That's not debate, that's bullying and in many cases criminal.