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Ruqqus, an open source Reddit clone, is shutting down their main instance

65 points by Joseph-Stalin 5y ago

optimalsolver 5y ago
While these "free speech" Reddit alternatives end up taking a far-right tone, what's funny is how all discussions they host have to be approached from that angle. So you can't just talk about your favorite TV show. You have to first make a nod to how it features a Jewish conspiracy to push black-white interracial relationships. Only then can you go on to discuss the actual episode.
- deleted 5y ago
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- hunterb123 5y ago
  While these "moderated speech" Reddit alternatives end up taking a far-left tone, what's funny is how all discussions they host have to be approached from that angle. So you can't just talk about your favorite article. You have to first make a nod to how it features a white supremacist conspiracy to push anti-Jewish sentiments. Only then can you go on to discuss the actual submission.
  - dymk 5y ago
    Perhaps in certain subreddits that's true, but on Reddit, it's easy to find both far right and far left echo chambers. And it's easy to find centrist communities. It's also easy to find communities where people don't talk about politics at all, and just discuss their favorite TV show or 3D printing filament without bringing anything else up. That's not the case on these other "free-speech" reddit clones - they're exclusivly far-right extremist content.
    - hunterb123 5y ago
      My post was exactly what GP was doing here. He couldn't talk about the article posted without bringing in some neo nazi fantasy he had. I simply changed the words he spouted and it fit perfectly with what he is doing. Reddit bans anything "far right" (whatever that means) that gets popular. Extremist used to mean terrorist, now it's used for people you don't align with politically. No one on [Patriots . win] is an extremist, but I'm sure you'd say they were.
      - dymk 5y ago
        That seems fair game to bring up though, because this is a thread discussing the site as a whole, and not about a TV show. And the pattern of reddit clones hosting exclusively far-right ~~~extremist~~~ (edit: I'll replace this with "leaning") content while reddit itself is far more diverse is an interesting observation.
        hunterb123 5y ago
        I dunno, go look through any popular subreddit and it's all about "extreme" leftist politics, even /r/funny, etc. But sure, some fantasy about neo nazis discussing tv shows that I'm sure GP totally saw and didn't just make up is relevant. I guess my point is, yes, it can happen but it happens on both sides. Mostly, people just want a nice place to hang out amongst their like minded peers, and no that doesn't mean discussing Jews 24/7 believe it or not. GP talks like someone who has never talked with someone on the other "side". We're all people, stop dehumanizing the other political spectrum because you don't understand them. tldr: the most extreme people on the right probably discuss Soros/Jews as much as the most extreme people on the left discuss Trump/MAGA. That doesn't represent anyone else.
        dtjb 5y ago
        wait, patriots.win isn't extremist but r/funny is?
        hunterb123 5y ago
        extremist != extreme extreme is used to denote it's a far swing in the spectrum, extremist alludes to terrorism.
        shkkmo 5y ago
        While "extremist" might have connatations of violence/terrorism, those connotations are not inherent in the meaning of the word. I would argue that it behooves us to push back against such a connotation because it really only serves to delegitimize people who don't have mainstream beliefs by implying that they intend violence without having to justify an actually disprovable statement.
    - xtracto 5y ago
      > it's easy to find both far right and far left echo chambers Could you point to 3 "far right echo chamber" active-ish (more than 50,000 subscribers) non-banned subreddits? For "far-left" I'd say: r/politics r/LateStageCapitalism and r/socialism EDIT: I knew this post was going to get heat. I consider myself a "leftist" (and by US standards I would be maybe consider a communist) but my point was that there is active censorship of right/far-right discourse in Reddit. Even in my pro-socialist/anti-capitalist view I like reading and seeing the other side's point of view. Main reason being that I think we should be open to other views to see the things to improve in our ideas. I would invite people to engage in the conversation instead of having a knee-jerk reaction.
      - dymk 5y ago
        r/the_doland (banned) r/CringeAnarchy (banned) r/Greatawakening (banned) The myriad of r/incel communities and their clones that Reddit plays whack-a-mole with
        dtjb 5y ago
        r/antifa and r/chapotraphouse were also large communities that were banned. Reddit policy definitely appears to be based on behavior, not ideology.
        hunterb123 5y ago
        yeah real great "behavior" they got over there https://www.reddit.com/r/HermanCainAward/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HermanCainAward/
        dtjb 5y ago
        I could see some people finding it in bad taste, but since all names are obscured, what specifically is bannable about that community?
        hunterb123 5y ago
    - uabstraction 5y ago
      It's a mistake to think echo chambers are a phenomenon which only take place on the political extremes. Reddit itself is an echo chamber of tepid liberal orthodoxy and American exceptionalism, moderated by a former member of the Atlantic Council. A fish doesn't recognize the water it swims in. Redditors might call a place like Hexbear an echo chamber for instance, but it wasn't the members of Hexbear who chose to isolate themselves. Reddit made that decision by banning them.
      - noobermin 5y ago
        While this is true, I feel like there really is a difference between modern online communities and the ones that existed in the older era, before the so-called web 2.0 era. You can't escape bias at all, that should be any person's educated perspective, but there is a difference in degree that is sharper both on reddit and facebook groups and the like. Ironically, twitter (which does skew left wing at least in some places), while having its host of issues, has a much lower degree of echo chamber-ness because there are no groups, everyone is thrown in a pot together. It does have the cancel mobs and all that but an echo chamber it is not, which at least proves "echo chamber" isn't the default final state of any social media platform.
- Igelau 5y ago
  The comment that got flagged for trying to reverse this missed its point, but I thought it had one. My reply-too-late: While that is a little hyperbolic, there's definitely a "kid gloves" approach you have to take in a lot of online discussions. E.g. there was an article on burnout that popped up on HN[0] recently where the author made sure to apologize for being a "privileged white chick" early on. You can't just talk about your problem with burnout and how you handled it, you have to virtue signal about issues that might not even be related first. I've seen discussions on Twitter get swamped with "what are you doing in our conversation?" replies that drew the line on racial boundaries, when the issues at hand weren't even exclusive to race. 0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28665065 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28665065
  - jszymborski 5y ago
    > you have to virtue signal about issues Acknowledging your privilege is not categorically virtue signalling. One can think there's not value is acknowledging privilege (or that it might not exist), but let's not pretend it's impossible (or unlikely) that another does.
    - finfinfin 5y ago
      Are you saying that it’s not categorically virtue signaling because someone can find value in that? Doesn’t sound logical to me. If the detail doesn’t contribute to the discussion but is meant to appease a specific group - that’s definitely closer to virtue signaling than to a genuine expression.
      - jszymborski 5y ago
        Again, I think the problem here is that you might not find that privilege acknowledgement contributes to the discussion, but there are plenty of people who acknowledge their privilege in the belief that it is contributing to the discussion. I think it's very telling that folk think that writing "I'm saying this from a position of privilege" invariably is done with a proverbial gun to their head, hoping to evade a public flogging if they fail to do so. People, myself included, genuinely see disclosing your position of privilege in the same way someone from Company X might say "Disclosure: I work at Company X" when commenting on a post about Company X. Now, it might seem that acknowledging ones privilege is shoe-horned into every conversation, but I challenge you to think about how privilege touches so much of our lives. Anyways, all I'm saying is you don't have to "find value" in folks acknowledging privilege. You just need to be able to imagine a world in which they do.
- MisterBastahrd 5y ago
  They're akin to when you're a kid with friends and one of you starts cussing, the rest don't react negatively, and then you just f-bombing all the things. Some people don't want to be adults or approach life that way, they just want the veneer of adulthood.
- devmunchies 5y ago
  you had to do that on reddit every time you discussed trump. "I loathe that racist, I didn't vote for him, but I thought it was funny that he said... blah blah" conforming to groupthink and avoiding judgement by the ingroup is a major problem across the "free world". regardless of political leanings.
  - noobermin 5y ago
    Again, why are people equating weak virtue signaling about milquetoast democratic leanings with singaling about *Anti-semitic conspiracy* mongering? I think the issue isn't about signaling or "when in rome" sort of fitting in, it's that to signal you are part of a the community you have to appear super fringe.
    - somethingor 5y ago
      Comparing is not equating. The only thing being compared is the “when in Rome” aspect.
      - noobermin 5y ago
        My point is people are missing the point...again, clearly stating it again, the issue isn't the signaling, it's what must be signaled.
        syshum 5y ago
        You don't believe, that perhaps people are not missing the point at all, but instead your political bias' are showing? That you agree with political bent of one type of signalling...
        noobermin 5y ago
        I don't agree that Jews are trying to make black people marry white people. Is that what you're referring to? I'm certainly not for white people "checking their privilege" either because as I said it's annoying. Why are you attacking me?
16Sinker 5y ago
Well, pretty much to be expected. Saw that lots of subs that got banned attempted to move to Ruqqus, but they never gain any traction. Reddit as a platform is just far too convenient - lots of people won't visit an entirely new website for just one sub in their feed.
- bad_username 5y ago
  The downfall of ruqqus began when they (ruqqus) banned mgtow, who had migrated from reddit after a ban there, and a bunch of other guilds, and failed to provide a good reason for that or evidence of broken rules. This contrasted sharply with the free speech forum promise that ruqqus had been promoting before. Then the ruqqus admins said that they "pivoted" to be more an open source project and less a free speech community. And then of course everyone just left and ruqqus became a wasteland.
jikbd 5y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 5y ago
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- uselesscynicism 5y ago
  Why is this downvoted? It's absolutely right. Why not Pol-Pot? Everything is "far right" according to Joseph Stalin. Maybe Reddit is far left, and this headline is bullshit. Did Joseph-Stalin consider that, or was he too busy whitewashing Soviet history into something less than the absolute horror show it is?
- Adolf-Hitler 5y ago
  Why not?
sergiotapia 5y ago
Anyone have a mirror?
ro_bit 5y ago
https://archive.is/q8cgy https://archive.is/q8cgy
0des 5y ago
Folks, please use your words. Some of us are just trying to make it through Friday without having to login and use show-dead to see both sides of a discussion.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  I've sometimes thought that downvotes shouldn't count for much when given by someone who doesn't reply. Count them, just not with nearly as much weight as someone who is willing to explain their disagreement. We already have flagging for marking something is inappropriate.
  - noobermin 5y ago
    Visually though, it's not comparable. A reply (often long) is visible but requires reading to garner the sentiment. A grayed out comment is immediately recognizable as being "bad" and "disliked," hence why it's more powerful, and why people do it. It also requires much less effort than typing out why you disagree.
betwixthewires 5y ago
I tried using the site and used it for a while, for what little non political and non flame war content it had. It got boring. I don't particularly like some of the UX decisions and features, but overall it is a pretty well built piece of software. I don't believe ruqqus federates, so "instance" would be the wrong word. It's a standalone server.
- Joseph-Stalin 5y ago
  The use of the term "instance" to describe a deployed instance of software predates federated software like mastodon.
- cabalamat 5y ago
  If you're interested in a federated Reddit clone, check out Lemmy: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy
  - betwixthewires 5y ago
    I'm very familiar with Lemmy, I had contributed to it a bit in it's early development. I like it, but in particular I think some UX design that apply to reddit and any other centralized link aggregator don't make sense in a federated system, multi communities on one server are fine but the way they're implemented in Lemmy is too Reddit like to be fully useful in a federated network.
1270018080 5y ago
Is it possible to create a free speech reddit alternative that doesn't immediately turn into a right wing extremist site? My mind immediately turns to the Paradox of Tolerance, and I think the answer is no.
- sfotm 5y ago
  I think the key is to avoid going full free speech. What you want to create is a more permissive community that's still under someone's thumb to a degree. It's difficult to start a community under just a slight change in priniples like that, though, because the lion's share of the people in the old community are fine with the status quo. ...So in addition to being more permissive, it seems that you have to have a better product, generally. From SSC: > ..if you try to create a libertarian paradise, you will attract three deeply virtuous people with a strong committment to the principle of universal freedom, plus millions of scoundrels. Declare that you’re going to stop holding witch hunts, and your coalition is certain to include more than its share of witches. https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-centralized-web/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-central...
- dqx 5y ago
  What do you mean by "free speech?" "Unmoderated?" "Uncensored?" "Speech not limited by the government?" In the US "hate speech" is legally protected as free speech (although hate speech has no concrete definition).
- uabstraction 5y ago
  You either approach it from the social perspective, or the utilitarian perspective. From the social perspective, the goal is building a community. To build a community, people need to be held accountable for antisocial behavior. The technology is secondary. Most of the times leftist communities split off from mainstream platforms, it is because the platforms either enable rampant antisocial behavior, limit the community's autonomy in deciding how to deal with it, or its just plain censorship. The libertarians see it as a utilitarian problem. Banning any content or behavior is beyond the pale, and they try to build out their technology to ensure this "marketplace of ideas" prevails. They consider themselves rugged individualists, so the goal of building a community is an afterthought.
BitwiseFool 5y ago
I think this is a good place to mention O'Sullivan's First Law: "All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_O'Sullivan_(columnist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_O'Sullivan_(columnist) Any platform that establishes itself as a result of a purge from a left-wing dominated platform like Reddit will start out as explicitly right-wing and will struggle to gain non-partisan membership. That new platform will get its reputation tainted for being a place for extremism - even if it permits both left-wing and right-wing views. The left-wing folks won't see a need to join the new platform because they already have the existing one to feel comfortable in. They are content to let the new platform be seen as a hotbed for right-wing radicalism, continue to smear its reputation, and then wait for it to whither and die. On the flip side, any platform that starts out as non-partisan eventually gets dominated by left-wing / left-leaning folks. I personally have seen this happen countless times on subreddits individually, then reddit as a whole. I sense that this is because activists on the left tend to naturally gravitate towards becoming moderators and establishing new forum rules whenever they take over. Most of the new rules are unobjectionable but questionably appropriate. "No Racism / Homophobia / Transphobia" is a fine rule, but is it really necessary in a woodworking subreddit? The other kind of rules are more subtle and easy for moderators to abuse, like "be friendly", which can be applied against right leaning folks and ignored when left leaning folks get confrontational. Eventually the conservative/right folks get drowned out by agenda-posting and getting downvoted en-masse. They either self-censor, just accept the downvotes and keep posting, get banned, or try to leave for a new forum.
- nemothekid 5y ago
  There is a more general law that has nothing to do political leaning that was coined by someone who's community generally disproves your point. moot, creator of 4chan, has a talk or blog post (can't find it now) detailing this exact dynamic. There are plenty of times moot banned discussion of a certain topic (not even politically relevant), those users would get mad and start their own chan. That chan would eventually be a community of people who just post about how they hate 4chan and continue to be contrarian until they died. Community building is hard and you can't build a platform around being anti-the-other-platform. I think it's fashionable to call these "new platforms" right wing, but this is not a new trend and its something common you would see in the phpBB days of the forum, except instead of the new platform being "right wing", it was that the old platform was fascist because the moderator was an asshole. That said, 4chan is a platform you can clearly point that started out non-partisan. Before Trump 4chan was pro-occupy Wall Street. The community, on its own, became more right wing without overtly advertising itself as such. Over time however it's clear that /pol/ is a far right platform and there was no need for it to splinter off from everything. The lack of robust right wing communities online has more to do with community building rather than self-censorship. A rightwing community has to be exclusionary from the start, and it's hard to bootstrap a community that must ostracize a portion early members. It's my view, that globally in the western world, that conservatism is actually just a very loud minority position. The loudest conservative folks tend to act the most anti-social and ultimately tend to get ostracized. This ostracism as a result of their anti-social behavior leads to some persecution complex that they are being pushed out when in reality they just hold a minority position. The "no racism" rules are required because when said person gets banned for calling someone a n*gger who was just posting an image of a birdhouse, they tend to be the most pedantic about rules. Most normal people just don't want to deal with that.

65 points by Joseph-Stalin 5y ago

While these "free speech" Reddit alternatives end up taking a far-right tone, what's funny is how all discussions they host have to be approached from that angle. So you can't just talk about your favorite TV show. You have to first make a nod to how it features a Jewish conspiracy to push black-white interracial relationships. Only then can you go on to discuss the actual episode.

deleted 5y ago
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hunterb123 5y ago
While these "moderated speech" Reddit alternatives end up taking a far-left tone, what's funny is how all discussions they host have to be approached from that angle. So you can't just talk about your favorite article. You have to first make a nod to how it features a white supremacist conspiracy to push anti-Jewish sentiments. Only then can you go on to discuss the actual submission.
- dymk 5y ago
  Perhaps in certain subreddits that's true, but on Reddit, it's easy to find both far right and far left echo chambers. And it's easy to find centrist communities. It's also easy to find communities where people don't talk about politics at all, and just discuss their favorite TV show or 3D printing filament without bringing anything else up. That's not the case on these other "free-speech" reddit clones - they're exclusivly far-right extremist content.
  - hunterb123 5y ago
    My post was exactly what GP was doing here. He couldn't talk about the article posted without bringing in some neo nazi fantasy he had. I simply changed the words he spouted and it fit perfectly with what he is doing. Reddit bans anything "far right" (whatever that means) that gets popular. Extremist used to mean terrorist, now it's used for people you don't align with politically. No one on [Patriots . win] is an extremist, but I'm sure you'd say they were.
    - dymk 5y ago
      That seems fair game to bring up though, because this is a thread discussing the site as a whole, and not about a TV show. And the pattern of reddit clones hosting exclusively far-right ~~~extremist~~~ (edit: I'll replace this with "leaning") content while reddit itself is far more diverse is an interesting observation.
      - hunterb123 5y ago
        I dunno, go look through any popular subreddit and it's all about "extreme" leftist politics, even /r/funny, etc. But sure, some fantasy about neo nazis discussing tv shows that I'm sure GP totally saw and didn't just make up is relevant. I guess my point is, yes, it can happen but it happens on both sides. Mostly, people just want a nice place to hang out amongst their like minded peers, and no that doesn't mean discussing Jews 24/7 believe it or not. GP talks like someone who has never talked with someone on the other "side". We're all people, stop dehumanizing the other political spectrum because you don't understand them. tldr: the most extreme people on the right probably discuss Soros/Jews as much as the most extreme people on the left discuss Trump/MAGA. That doesn't represent anyone else.
        dtjb 5y ago
        wait, patriots.win isn't extremist but r/funny is?
        hunterb123 5y ago
        extremist != extreme extreme is used to denote it's a far swing in the spectrum, extremist alludes to terrorism.
        shkkmo 5y ago
        While "extremist" might have connatations of violence/terrorism, those connotations are not inherent in the meaning of the word. I would argue that it behooves us to push back against such a connotation because it really only serves to delegitimize people who don't have mainstream beliefs by implying that they intend violence without having to justify an actually disprovable statement.
  - xtracto 5y ago
    > it's easy to find both far right and far left echo chambers Could you point to 3 "far right echo chamber" active-ish (more than 50,000 subscribers) non-banned subreddits? For "far-left" I'd say: r/politics r/LateStageCapitalism and r/socialism EDIT: I knew this post was going to get heat. I consider myself a "leftist" (and by US standards I would be maybe consider a communist) but my point was that there is active censorship of right/far-right discourse in Reddit. Even in my pro-socialist/anti-capitalist view I like reading and seeing the other side's point of view. Main reason being that I think we should be open to other views to see the things to improve in our ideas. I would invite people to engage in the conversation instead of having a knee-jerk reaction.
    - dymk 5y ago
      r/the_doland (banned) r/CringeAnarchy (banned) r/Greatawakening (banned) The myriad of r/incel communities and their clones that Reddit plays whack-a-mole with
      - dtjb 5y ago
        r/antifa and r/chapotraphouse were also large communities that were banned. Reddit policy definitely appears to be based on behavior, not ideology.
        hunterb123 5y ago
        yeah real great "behavior" they got over there https://www.reddit.com/r/HermanCainAward/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HermanCainAward/
        dtjb 5y ago
        I could see some people finding it in bad taste, but since all names are obscured, what specifically is bannable about that community?
        hunterb123 5y ago
  - uabstraction 5y ago
    It's a mistake to think echo chambers are a phenomenon which only take place on the political extremes. Reddit itself is an echo chamber of tepid liberal orthodoxy and American exceptionalism, moderated by a former member of the Atlantic Council. A fish doesn't recognize the water it swims in. Redditors might call a place like Hexbear an echo chamber for instance, but it wasn't the members of Hexbear who chose to isolate themselves. Reddit made that decision by banning them.
    - noobermin 5y ago
      While this is true, I feel like there really is a difference between modern online communities and the ones that existed in the older era, before the so-called web 2.0 era. You can't escape bias at all, that should be any person's educated perspective, but there is a difference in degree that is sharper both on reddit and facebook groups and the like. Ironically, twitter (which does skew left wing at least in some places), while having its host of issues, has a much lower degree of echo chamber-ness because there are no groups, everyone is thrown in a pot together. It does have the cancel mobs and all that but an echo chamber it is not, which at least proves "echo chamber" isn't the default final state of any social media platform.
Igelau 5y ago
The comment that got flagged for trying to reverse this missed its point, but I thought it had one. My reply-too-late: While that is a little hyperbolic, there's definitely a "kid gloves" approach you have to take in a lot of online discussions. E.g. there was an article on burnout that popped up on HN[0] recently where the author made sure to apologize for being a "privileged white chick" early on. You can't just talk about your problem with burnout and how you handled it, you have to virtue signal about issues that might not even be related first. I've seen discussions on Twitter get swamped with "what are you doing in our conversation?" replies that drew the line on racial boundaries, when the issues at hand weren't even exclusive to race. 0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28665065 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28665065
- jszymborski 5y ago
  > you have to virtue signal about issues Acknowledging your privilege is not categorically virtue signalling. One can think there's not value is acknowledging privilege (or that it might not exist), but let's not pretend it's impossible (or unlikely) that another does.
  - finfinfin 5y ago
    Are you saying that it’s not categorically virtue signaling because someone can find value in that? Doesn’t sound logical to me. If the detail doesn’t contribute to the discussion but is meant to appease a specific group - that’s definitely closer to virtue signaling than to a genuine expression.
    - jszymborski 5y ago
      Again, I think the problem here is that you might not find that privilege acknowledgement contributes to the discussion, but there are plenty of people who acknowledge their privilege in the belief that it is contributing to the discussion. I think it's very telling that folk think that writing "I'm saying this from a position of privilege" invariably is done with a proverbial gun to their head, hoping to evade a public flogging if they fail to do so. People, myself included, genuinely see disclosing your position of privilege in the same way someone from Company X might say "Disclosure: I work at Company X" when commenting on a post about Company X. Now, it might seem that acknowledging ones privilege is shoe-horned into every conversation, but I challenge you to think about how privilege touches so much of our lives. Anyways, all I'm saying is you don't have to "find value" in folks acknowledging privilege. You just need to be able to imagine a world in which they do.
MisterBastahrd 5y ago
They're akin to when you're a kid with friends and one of you starts cussing, the rest don't react negatively, and then you just f-bombing all the things. Some people don't want to be adults or approach life that way, they just want the veneer of adulthood.
devmunchies 5y ago
you had to do that on reddit every time you discussed trump. "I loathe that racist, I didn't vote for him, but I thought it was funny that he said... blah blah" conforming to groupthink and avoiding judgement by the ingroup is a major problem across the "free world". regardless of political leanings.
- noobermin 5y ago
  Again, why are people equating weak virtue signaling about milquetoast democratic leanings with singaling about *Anti-semitic conspiracy* mongering? I think the issue isn't about signaling or "when in rome" sort of fitting in, it's that to signal you are part of a the community you have to appear super fringe.
  - somethingor 5y ago
    Comparing is not equating. The only thing being compared is the “when in Rome” aspect.
    - noobermin 5y ago
      My point is people are missing the point...again, clearly stating it again, the issue isn't the signaling, it's what must be signaled.
      - syshum 5y ago
        You don't believe, that perhaps people are not missing the point at all, but instead your political bias' are showing? That you agree with political bent of one type of signalling...
        noobermin 5y ago
        I don't agree that Jews are trying to make black people marry white people. Is that what you're referring to? I'm certainly not for white people "checking their privilege" either because as I said it's annoying. Why are you attacking me?

16Sinker 5y ago

Well, pretty much to be expected. Saw that lots of subs that got banned attempted to move to Ruqqus, but they never gain any traction. Reddit as a platform is just far too convenient - lots of people won't visit an entirely new website for just one sub in their feed.

bad_username 5y ago
The downfall of ruqqus began when they (ruqqus) banned mgtow, who had migrated from reddit after a ban there, and a bunch of other guilds, and failed to provide a good reason for that or evidence of broken rules. This contrasted sharply with the free speech forum promise that ruqqus had been promoting before. Then the ruqqus admins said that they "pivoted" to be more an open source project and less a free speech community. And then of course everyone just left and ruqqus became a wasteland.

jikbd 5y ago

[flagged]

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
uselesscynicism 5y ago
Why is this downvoted? It's absolutely right. Why not Pol-Pot? Everything is "far right" according to Joseph Stalin. Maybe Reddit is far left, and this headline is bullshit. Did Joseph-Stalin consider that, or was he too busy whitewashing Soviet history into something less than the absolute horror show it is?
Adolf-Hitler 5y ago
Why not?

sergiotapia 5y ago

Anyone have a mirror?

ro_bit 5y ago

https://archive.is/q8cgy https://archive.is/q8cgy

0des 5y ago

Folks, please use your words. Some of us are just trying to make it through Friday without having to login and use show-dead to see both sides of a discussion.

rootusrootus 5y ago
I've sometimes thought that downvotes shouldn't count for much when given by someone who doesn't reply. Count them, just not with nearly as much weight as someone who is willing to explain their disagreement. We already have flagging for marking something is inappropriate.
- noobermin 5y ago
  Visually though, it's not comparable. A reply (often long) is visible but requires reading to garner the sentiment. A grayed out comment is immediately recognizable as being "bad" and "disliked," hence why it's more powerful, and why people do it. It also requires much less effort than typing out why you disagree.

betwixthewires 5y ago

I tried using the site and used it for a while, for what little non political and non flame war content it had. It got boring. I don't particularly like some of the UX decisions and features, but overall it is a pretty well built piece of software. I don't believe ruqqus federates, so "instance" would be the wrong word. It's a standalone server.

Joseph-Stalin 5y ago
The use of the term "instance" to describe a deployed instance of software predates federated software like mastodon.
cabalamat 5y ago
If you're interested in a federated Reddit clone, check out Lemmy: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  I'm very familiar with Lemmy, I had contributed to it a bit in it's early development. I like it, but in particular I think some UX design that apply to reddit and any other centralized link aggregator don't make sense in a federated system, multi communities on one server are fine but the way they're implemented in Lemmy is too Reddit like to be fully useful in a federated network.

1270018080 5y ago

Is it possible to create a free speech reddit alternative that doesn't immediately turn into a right wing extremist site? My mind immediately turns to the Paradox of Tolerance, and I think the answer is no.

sfotm 5y ago
I think the key is to avoid going full free speech. What you want to create is a more permissive community that's still under someone's thumb to a degree. It's difficult to start a community under just a slight change in priniples like that, though, because the lion's share of the people in the old community are fine with the status quo. ...So in addition to being more permissive, it seems that you have to have a better product, generally. From SSC: > ..if you try to create a libertarian paradise, you will attract three deeply virtuous people with a strong committment to the principle of universal freedom, plus millions of scoundrels. Declare that you’re going to stop holding witch hunts, and your coalition is certain to include more than its share of witches. https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-centralized-web/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-central...
dqx 5y ago
What do you mean by "free speech?" "Unmoderated?" "Uncensored?" "Speech not limited by the government?" In the US "hate speech" is legally protected as free speech (although hate speech has no concrete definition).
uabstraction 5y ago
You either approach it from the social perspective, or the utilitarian perspective. From the social perspective, the goal is building a community. To build a community, people need to be held accountable for antisocial behavior. The technology is secondary. Most of the times leftist communities split off from mainstream platforms, it is because the platforms either enable rampant antisocial behavior, limit the community's autonomy in deciding how to deal with it, or its just plain censorship. The libertarians see it as a utilitarian problem. Banning any content or behavior is beyond the pale, and they try to build out their technology to ensure this "marketplace of ideas" prevails. They consider themselves rugged individualists, so the goal of building a community is an afterthought.

BitwiseFool 5y ago

I think this is a good place to mention O'Sullivan's First Law: "All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_O'Sullivan_(columnist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_O'Sullivan_(columnist) Any platform that establishes itself as a result of a purge from a left-wing dominated platform like Reddit will start out as explicitly right-wing and will struggle to gain non-partisan membership. That new platform will get its reputation tainted for being a place for extremism - even if it permits both left-wing and right-wing views. The left-wing folks won't see a need to join the new platform because they already have the existing one to feel comfortable in. They are content to let the new platform be seen as a hotbed for right-wing radicalism, continue to smear its reputation, and then wait for it to whither and die. On the flip side, any platform that starts out as non-partisan eventually gets dominated by left-wing / left-leaning folks. I personally have seen this happen countless times on subreddits individually, then reddit as a whole. I sense that this is because activists on the left tend to naturally gravitate towards becoming moderators and establishing new forum rules whenever they take over. Most of the new rules are unobjectionable but questionably appropriate. "No Racism / Homophobia / Transphobia" is a fine rule, but is it really necessary in a woodworking subreddit? The other kind of rules are more subtle and easy for moderators to abuse, like "be friendly", which can be applied against right leaning folks and ignored when left leaning folks get confrontational. Eventually the conservative/right folks get drowned out by agenda-posting and getting downvoted en-masse. They either self-censor, just accept the downvotes and keep posting, get banned, or try to leave for a new forum.

nemothekid 5y ago
There is a more general law that has nothing to do political leaning that was coined by someone who's community generally disproves your point. moot, creator of 4chan, has a talk or blog post (can't find it now) detailing this exact dynamic. There are plenty of times moot banned discussion of a certain topic (not even politically relevant), those users would get mad and start their own chan. That chan would eventually be a community of people who just post about how they hate 4chan and continue to be contrarian until they died. Community building is hard and you can't build a platform around being anti-the-other-platform. I think it's fashionable to call these "new platforms" right wing, but this is not a new trend and its something common you would see in the phpBB days of the forum, except instead of the new platform being "right wing", it was that the old platform was fascist because the moderator was an asshole. That said, 4chan is a platform you can clearly point that started out non-partisan. Before Trump 4chan was pro-occupy Wall Street. The community, on its own, became more right wing without overtly advertising itself as such. Over time however it's clear that /pol/ is a far right platform and there was no need for it to splinter off from everything. The lack of robust right wing communities online has more to do with community building rather than self-censorship. A rightwing community has to be exclusionary from the start, and it's hard to bootstrap a community that must ostracize a portion early members. It's my view, that globally in the western world, that conservatism is actually just a very loud minority position. The loudest conservative folks tend to act the most anti-social and ultimately tend to get ostracized. This ostracism as a result of their anti-social behavior leads to some persecution complex that they are being pushed out when in reality they just hold a minority position. The "no racism" rules are required because when said person gets banned for calling someone a n*gger who was just posting an image of a birdhouse, they tend to be the most pedantic about rules. Most normal people just don't want to deal with that.