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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

by _opc6 6y ago

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.

phponpcp 6y ago
I dont know about that... Twitter has a huge problem of leftwing extremism.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- qlm 6y ago
  Can you provide an example of what you perceive to be "left wing extremism"?
  - whatthesmack 6y ago
    Here's a couple that some folks consider to be leftist extremism on Twitter: - 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.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - nkrisc 6y ago
      What's extreme about any of that? Seems pretty tame.
      - anshumankmr 6y ago
        There are a tonne of tankies on the site. Some who claim Holodomor was fake, Tianmen square was an exaggeration and the DPRK/China are heroes, Fidel Castro was a benevolent dictator and that everyone who escaped his regime was a slave owner.
        coolgod 6y ago
        Where is the lie?
        pii 6y ago
        ? 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.
        anshumankmr 6y ago
        Yeah. People do. They get a lot of RTs (not in the millions) but I have seen tweets with several thousand likes and shares. There are more psychos like anarchists and some other buzzwords that are popular nowadays etc... one of them even wrote a book saying rioting is good because all businesses are inherently promoting white supremacy. I am not even joking. This article on The Atlantic covered the sheer lunacy of the person. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/09/there-no-defense-looting/615925/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/09/there-no-d...
        pii 6y ago
        We can certainly agree that this is too much. You have inspired me to keep an eye out for such nonsense.
        UncleMeat 6y ago
        Here is the secret: most leftists don't like tankies. Ban them as well I say! I people want to defend Stalin's murderous regime then I don't want them there either. Appealing to some hypocrisy here isn't super useful since the large bulk of people who don't want fascists on their webforums also don't want tankies.
    - tolbish 6y ago
      That's... pretty mainstream actually.
  - reducesuffering 6y ago
    “Me-first capitalists who think you can separate society from business are going to be the first people lined up against the wall and shot in the revolution,” he tweeted. “I'll happily provide video commentary.”[0] - Dick Costolo, former Twitter CEO [0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2020/10/01/some-business-leader-should-face-a-firing-squad-former-twitter-ceo-dick-costolo-suggests-in-angry-tweet/?sh=5ad059907b94 https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2020/10/01/some-busi...
    - pii 6y ago
      Context: he's not saying he'll start a revolution, he's saying one is coming regardless. And he doesn't want to be shot as a rich person. Maybe he also doesn't like how tech tends to ignore the consequences of the decisions they make. Bad example of leftism run amok and off target
      - reducesuffering 6y ago
        > people will be shot > “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.”
        pii 6y ago
        No my knee reaction is not to have a knee jerk reaction. 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.
Barrin92 6y ago
not really sure why you were downvoted for it. You let nazis openly rant in your bar I'd bet you won't have any normal guests there pretty quickly, it's just a broken window dynamic. Unmoderated, a few bad users will scare most of the civil people off.
hombre_fatal 6y ago
What almost every comment about Voat here misses though is that when you start a competitor clone to an incumbent like Voat did, there’s literally zero reason for most people to join. The only people who have an incentive are people banned from the incumbent. 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?
- andrewflnr 6y ago
  There's no "solution", just like there's no "solution" to "politics". Everyone just has to keep trying really hard all the time so we don't drown in shit. That's it, until the lights go out for good. 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.
  - hombre_fatal 6y ago
    Yeah, it's hard for me to envision what the next iteration on Reddit could be. Maybe there isn't one and instead we're seeing a resurgence of forum silos again that's winning back the mainstream. 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."
    - corobo 6y ago
      > hard for me to envision what the next iteration on Reddit could be You mention it in your post. It's Discord. We're looping back to IRC. Give forums another 5 years or so
konjin 6y ago
>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. One only need to look at /r/news and /r/politics to see this happening on the original site.

by _opc6 6y ago

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.

phponpcp 6y ago

I dont know about that... Twitter has a huge problem of leftwing extremism.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
qlm 6y ago
Can you provide an example of what you perceive to be "left wing extremism"?
- whatthesmack 6y ago
  Here's a couple that some folks consider to be leftist extremism on Twitter: - 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.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - nkrisc 6y ago
    What's extreme about any of that? Seems pretty tame.
    - anshumankmr 6y ago
      There are a tonne of tankies on the site. Some who claim Holodomor was fake, Tianmen square was an exaggeration and the DPRK/China are heroes, Fidel Castro was a benevolent dictator and that everyone who escaped his regime was a slave owner.
      - coolgod 6y ago
        Where is the lie?
      - pii 6y ago
        ? 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.
        anshumankmr 6y ago
        Yeah. People do. They get a lot of RTs (not in the millions) but I have seen tweets with several thousand likes and shares. There are more psychos like anarchists and some other buzzwords that are popular nowadays etc... one of them even wrote a book saying rioting is good because all businesses are inherently promoting white supremacy. I am not even joking. This article on The Atlantic covered the sheer lunacy of the person. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/09/there-no-defense-looting/615925/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/09/there-no-d...
        pii 6y ago
        We can certainly agree that this is too much. You have inspired me to keep an eye out for such nonsense.
      - UncleMeat 6y ago
        Here is the secret: most leftists don't like tankies. Ban them as well I say! I people want to defend Stalin's murderous regime then I don't want them there either. Appealing to some hypocrisy here isn't super useful since the large bulk of people who don't want fascists on their webforums also don't want tankies.
  - tolbish 6y ago
    That's... pretty mainstream actually.
- reducesuffering 6y ago
  “Me-first capitalists who think you can separate society from business are going to be the first people lined up against the wall and shot in the revolution,” he tweeted. “I'll happily provide video commentary.”[0] - Dick Costolo, former Twitter CEO [0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2020/10/01/some-business-leader-should-face-a-firing-squad-former-twitter-ceo-dick-costolo-suggests-in-angry-tweet/?sh=5ad059907b94 https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2020/10/01/some-busi...
  - pii 6y ago
    Context: he's not saying he'll start a revolution, he's saying one is coming regardless. And he doesn't want to be shot as a rich person. Maybe he also doesn't like how tech tends to ignore the consequences of the decisions they make. Bad example of leftism run amok and off target
    - reducesuffering 6y ago
      > people will be shot > “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.”
      - pii 6y ago
        No my knee reaction is not to have a knee jerk reaction. 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.

Barrin92 6y ago

not really sure why you were downvoted for it. You let nazis openly rant in your bar I'd bet you won't have any normal guests there pretty quickly, it's just a broken window dynamic. Unmoderated, a few bad users will scare most of the civil people off.

hombre_fatal 6y ago

What almost every comment about Voat here misses though is that when you start a competitor clone to an incumbent like Voat did, there’s literally zero reason for most people to join. The only people who have an incentive are people banned from the incumbent. 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?

andrewflnr 6y ago
There's no "solution", just like there's no "solution" to "politics". Everyone just has to keep trying really hard all the time so we don't drown in shit. That's it, until the lights go out for good. 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.
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  Yeah, it's hard for me to envision what the next iteration on Reddit could be. Maybe there isn't one and instead we're seeing a resurgence of forum silos again that's winning back the mainstream. 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."
  - corobo 6y ago
    > hard for me to envision what the next iteration on Reddit could be You mention it in your post. It's Discord. We're looping back to IRC. Give forums another 5 years or so

konjin 6y ago

>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. One only need to look at /r/news and /r/politics to see this happening on the original site.