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For anyone else concerned with the recent Big Tech censorship, people are actively building alternative social medial platforms and they are taking off. The Red
by john_moscow 6y ago
For anyone else concerned with the recent Big Tech censorship, people are actively building alternative social medial platforms and they are taking off. The RedditAlternatives subreddit [0] provides a fairly good overview of them. Some are rather extreme, others are more reasonable, but there are alternatives, and it's up to us, the reasonable people, to choose where we want to spend our time and money.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/hi97fz/list_of_active_reddit_alternatives_v5/ https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/hi97fz/...
- bredren 6y agoWeird to see HN just four links away from 4chan.
- cft 6y agoWait till they start blocking those Reddit alternatives in Chrome.
- Icathian 6y agoHonestly such a brazen step might be good in the long run. People are all to happy to be boiled frogs, and an overreach like that might jolt some off their ecosystem.
- moneywoes 6y agoAll of those alternatives seem full of hate speech though
- quotemstr 6y agoSo? Any platform free of censorship is going to have some speech you dislike.
- drdeca 6y agoThere’s a difference between “has some of it” and “is full of it”. As SSC says, even if witch hunts are genuinely bad, if you found a town with the founding principle of having no witch hunts, you will end up with a town with 5 genuine civil libertarians, and 100 witches. I think an interesting strategy would be to found a site with an initially high level of censorship, but a public commitment to reduce the amount/degree of censorship on the site over time with a particular timetable.
- quotemstr 6y agoNo, there's no difference between "has some of it" and "is full of it". Where could the line possibly be drawn between those two? Why should your values in particular control other people's speech? If you don't want to participate on a discussion because it's full of something you dislike, that's your call. But big tech companies have no business shutting down other people's legal conversations.
- drdeca 6y agoQuantitative differences are still differences. 1% is different from 1.01% and from 80% . My preferences determine what communities I prefer to be a part of. I prefer to not be part of a community where the majority says super racist garbage. As such, I choose not to join such a community/website.
- UnFleshedOne 6y ago
- viro 6y agoWhen your content is too cancerous for Reddit ...maybe the issue isn't Reddit.
- RL_Quine 6y agoYes, if the only defense of your content is that it isn't literally illegal to produce and distribute, maybe choose something better to do with your time.
- 95_JL_OK 6y agoIn the context of a lot of Reddit alternatives, the argument of 'not literally illegal' isn't always what is being made. Sometimes it's more along the lines of 'stop interfering with our law breaking' or 'let us openly promote real workd violence'. Sometimes people have migrated to sites where the administration is either legally insulated by strong local laws (ie: Voat in Switzerland), or otherwise ambivalent attitudes towards actually following regulations (Chan sites, self-hosted forms). The incel communities, and many other violent communities come to mind right away.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- omginternets 6y agoBy that logic we should outlaw all things are neither illegal nor valued. I can think of no faster way to stifle innovation, research, and the human spirit.
- core-questions 6y agoReddit is plenty cancerous, depending on how you define that. Certainly in the sense that people aren't arguing in good faith, aren't actively engaging, but are just firing talking points or insults at one another... the sort of thing good moderation used to help limit so that the quality of discussion remained high. I'd way rather read a good-faith, well written exploration into a controversial topic, than someone who toes the mainstream line of acceptable opinions entirely while being rude and belligerent.
- Medicalidiot 6y agoI was an early adopter of Voat during the first Reddit purge but it turned into a racist cesspool. I'm wondering how many of these alternatives will follow that trend.
- vmception 6y agoThey typically get addicted to advertising dollars and clean their sites up Opening an opportunity for someone else to sell the same "my fictional private sector free speech assurances that I imagined were part of the constitution are being upheld here" story to build a community
- gerbal 6y agounmoderated forums tend to drive off anyone but those holding the most extreme and toxic views.
- effingwewt 6y agoI was in the same boat. I ended up bouncing because it was so bad I couldn't stand it. But to me, that should be the solution- if you don't like it, don't participate in it. We live in an age where people seem to think in very black and white terms and if your beliefs don't align you shouldn't have them or be able to voice them. Aside from inciting violence, your beliefs are yours. If they aren't breaking the law, you do you. I don't have to agree with them or support them, essentially 'don't tread on me'. But people need to remember when you deplatform these racist, ugly thoughts and words, you push those people together, galvanizing them and their beliefs. As others in this thread have stated, I believe that's why voat got so bad so quickly. As they say, sunlight is the best disinfectant. I don't know what the end all solution is here, but I know I deal with racism on an almost daily basis in real life, and I'm Hispanic, so I can't imagine how bad it must be for some others. Pretending it doesn't exist won't fix it. Pushing it to the furthest corners of the internet won't make it go away in real life.
- thrownaway954 6y agolook, i'm not trying to cut down alternative platforms by any means, however these alternative platforms are failures waiting to happen. the reason is that although they start low cost, eventually, if they grow, they need some form of income in order to continue. at that point, they need some form of advertising which, cause of their content, they cannot get and as such, they close up.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- newhotelowner 6y ago> Big Tech censorship Pretty much all the subs like the the_donald, republicans, conservative, asktrumpsupporters that are against the big tech censorship will censor (ban) you for just showing their hypocrisy. I clicked on few links or r/RedditAlternatives, and they look like Facebook pages of rural Ohio.
- oehpr 6y agoThey're not unique in this behavior. Basically every political subreddit that exists, and even some that arn't innately political but get taken over, do the same thing. I remember there were a bunch of posts in /r/zerowaste about someone explicitly advocating to be made a mod so that they can moderate the subreddit as an anti-capitalist. I really had to credit that person for the bravado of saying: "I'll ban people I disagree with, voooote for meeeeee". In fact, the ONLY political subreddit I'm aware of that does not engage in this behavior is r/Libertarian. Credit to them for putting their money where their mouth is.
- Miner49er 6y ago/r/libertarian went through a brief period not too long ago where a mod (or mods) took over and started banning a ton of people for their beliefs (mostly socialists). To be fair the creator of the sub came back and fixed it.
- UnFleshedOne 6y agoBut they can't (and shouldn't be able to, even while I agree, they would want to) ban you from starting your own subreddit with your own rules.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- _iyig 6y agoThis problem is common to nearly every subreddit, on every side of the political spectrum. Unaccountable moderators will ban you in a heartbeat for arbitrary reasons, such as disagreeing with the sub's majority opinion. I was banned from my (very liberal) U.S. state's subreddit for quoting Martin Luther King. I quoted a passage from one his speeches that denounced political violence, such as the arson and vandalism we've seen in Kenosha recently. The subreddit moderator banned me within minutes, called me a Nazi, and immediately denied the appeal.