7 ms·

Reddit alternative Ruqqus shutting down

47 points by decibe1 5y ago

dang 5y ago
Recent and related: Ruqqus, an open source Reddit clone, is shutting down their main instance - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28799199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28799199 - Oct 2021 (107 comments)
Computeiful 5y ago
These free-speech reddit clones always seem to descend to far-right Nazism. Maybe you have to ban all political discussion to survive as a reddit clone on the modern internet.
- exogeny 5y ago
  That's the catch, though. For their extremely broken brains, everything is political discussion. 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.
  - LudwigNagasena 5y ago
    “The personal is political” attitude is not something that was invented on the right. I doubt it is comparatively more popular there. It is strange to accuse them of that…
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    >For their extremely broken brains, everything is political discussion. 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.
- Legion 5y ago
  It's weird how these "free speech" social media sites always seem to have just as much moderation (if not more) than mainstream platforms, just with a big exception carved out for far-right fascist topics.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  There are many left and far-left forums out there too, though yeah they aren't billed as "free speech" clones. Lemmy [1] is an explicitly leftist friendly type of forum and Tildes [2] while not explicitly leftist is in practice very leftist. There are as many communities out there as there are strands to human thought I imagine. [1]: https://lemmy.ml/ https://lemmy.ml/ [2]: https://tildes.net/ https://tildes.net/
  - webmaven 5y ago
    > There are many left and far-left forums out there too, though yeah they aren't billed as "free speech" clones. 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.
    - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
      > you won't get a lot of "Stalin was Right" memes, or admiration for the Khmer Rouge. 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. [1]: https://lemmygrad.ml/c/fullcommunism https://lemmygrad.ml/c/fullcommunism
hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
I got a slight chuckle out of this because it reminded me of one of my favorite quotes from Slate Star Codex (in this case the blog post was talking about Voat): > 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-conservative-the-eternal-struggle/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservativ...
- jseliger 5y ago
  I was going to offer a garbled paraphrase of that: thanks for finding the real thing.
- ekianjo 5y ago
  > 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. 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.
- winternett 5y ago
  Well if you ask me, Reddit is now mostly a small community of chosen people posting lead content, whilst everyone else watches and works for free in hope of earning a few imaginary points and reaching the now unobtainable (without paying in some form or fashion for it) front page anyway... 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.
  - detaro 5y ago
    I kind of doubt the majority of reddit posters cares about reaching the frontpage.
exogeny 5y ago
It's hard for me to imagine a less surprising result. And yet it's going to happen again, and again, and again. Voat, Parler, whatever.
- SkyPuncher 5y ago
  It's amazing how many "founders" think "having a better product" will win out against network effects.
  - brodouevencode 5y ago
    In my admittedly naive way I always hope that they will win out by having the better product. But to your point, I think the network effects are much, much, much stronger than anyone (including Theil, from which I first heard this concept) had ever anticipated. So maybe the question is how does one beat the network effects that are so prevalent?
    - webmaven 5y ago
      > But to your point, I think the network effects are much, much, much stronger than anyone (including Theil, from which I first heard this concept) had ever anticipated. > 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.
progforlyfe 5y ago
And not a thing of value was lost.
jorgesborges 5y ago
I'm not familiar with these alternatives, or if it's true they descend into abhorrent extremism. But the problem with mainstream social media platforms prohibiting content is that it fuels the extremism it's trying to combat. I understand it's their right as private companies yada yada yada. But there's an increasingly narrow space within which to have meaningful conversations. And things are getting bad. 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.
- mahogany 5y ago
  > But the problem with mainstream social media platforms prohibiting content is that it fuels the extremism it's trying to combat. 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.
  - tomjen3 5y ago
    When the donald was on reddit there was some limits on what they could do. When they got banned they moved to their own domain and there was no limit whatever.
    - consumer451 5y ago
      > there was no limit whatever. 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.
      - 5y ago
ditonal 5y ago
It’s too bad that nobody can find a middle ground between the increasing amount of heavy handed censorship on Reddit and literally all Nazis. 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.
- bmarquez 5y ago
  I was a frequent lurker at /r/nonewnormal and I agree with your analysis - dissent from the mainstream opinion that lockdowns and mandates are good, but more of an opinionated criticism than anything banworthy. The moderators put a great deal of work to keep it civil and non-partisan, and their efforts were completely destroyed when they were kicked off Reddit. 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.
  - exogeny 5y ago
    >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.
toss1 5y ago
Nice demonstration of the Paradox of Tolerance [1]: "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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
- chuckee 5y ago
  How does that paradox square with the transition of intolerant societies into tolerant ones? Where intolerant attitudes were not only tolerated, but the norm? 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.
  - toss1 5y ago
    Humans have created a rather extensive historical record of seeking freedom from oppression in all forms, all of which involves intolerance. I.e., a large majority of humans want a tolerant environment 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.
kumarvvr 5y ago
I am an avid Reddit user and this is the first time i have come across this name. And I browse tech and other news sites a lot.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

47 points by decibe1 5y ago

dang 5y ago

Recent and related: Ruqqus, an open source Reddit clone, is shutting down their main instance - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28799199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28799199 - Oct 2021 (107 comments)

Computeiful 5y ago

These free-speech reddit clones always seem to descend to far-right Nazism. Maybe you have to ban all political discussion to survive as a reddit clone on the modern internet.

exogeny 5y ago
That's the catch, though. For their extremely broken brains, everything is political discussion. 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.
- LudwigNagasena 5y ago
  “The personal is political” attitude is not something that was invented on the right. I doubt it is comparatively more popular there. It is strange to accuse them of that…
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  >For their extremely broken brains, everything is political discussion. 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.
Legion 5y ago
It's weird how these "free speech" social media sites always seem to have just as much moderation (if not more) than mainstream platforms, just with a big exception carved out for far-right fascist topics.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Karrot_Kream 5y ago
There are many left and far-left forums out there too, though yeah they aren't billed as "free speech" clones. Lemmy [1] is an explicitly leftist friendly type of forum and Tildes [2] while not explicitly leftist is in practice very leftist. There are as many communities out there as there are strands to human thought I imagine. [1]: https://lemmy.ml/ https://lemmy.ml/ [2]: https://tildes.net/ https://tildes.net/
- webmaven 5y ago
  > There are many left and far-left forums out there too, though yeah they aren't billed as "free speech" clones. 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.
  - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
    > you won't get a lot of "Stalin was Right" memes, or admiration for the Khmer Rouge. 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. [1]: https://lemmygrad.ml/c/fullcommunism https://lemmygrad.ml/c/fullcommunism

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago

I got a slight chuckle out of this because it reminded me of one of my favorite quotes from Slate Star Codex (in this case the blog post was talking about Voat): > 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-conservative-the-eternal-struggle/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservativ...

jseliger 5y ago
I was going to offer a garbled paraphrase of that: thanks for finding the real thing.
ekianjo 5y ago
> 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. 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.
winternett 5y ago
Well if you ask me, Reddit is now mostly a small community of chosen people posting lead content, whilst everyone else watches and works for free in hope of earning a few imaginary points and reaching the now unobtainable (without paying in some form or fashion for it) front page anyway... 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.
- detaro 5y ago
  I kind of doubt the majority of reddit posters cares about reaching the frontpage.

exogeny 5y ago

It's hard for me to imagine a less surprising result. And yet it's going to happen again, and again, and again. Voat, Parler, whatever.

SkyPuncher 5y ago
It's amazing how many "founders" think "having a better product" will win out against network effects.
- brodouevencode 5y ago
  In my admittedly naive way I always hope that they will win out by having the better product. But to your point, I think the network effects are much, much, much stronger than anyone (including Theil, from which I first heard this concept) had ever anticipated. So maybe the question is how does one beat the network effects that are so prevalent?
  - webmaven 5y ago
    > But to your point, I think the network effects are much, much, much stronger than anyone (including Theil, from which I first heard this concept) had ever anticipated. > 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.

progforlyfe 5y ago

And not a thing of value was lost.

jorgesborges 5y ago

I'm not familiar with these alternatives, or if it's true they descend into abhorrent extremism. But the problem with mainstream social media platforms prohibiting content is that it fuels the extremism it's trying to combat. I understand it's their right as private companies yada yada yada. But there's an increasingly narrow space within which to have meaningful conversations. And things are getting bad. 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.

mahogany 5y ago
> But the problem with mainstream social media platforms prohibiting content is that it fuels the extremism it's trying to combat. 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.
- tomjen3 5y ago
  When the donald was on reddit there was some limits on what they could do. When they got banned they moved to their own domain and there was no limit whatever.
  - consumer451 5y ago
    > there was no limit whatever. 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.
    - 5y ago

ditonal 5y ago

It’s too bad that nobody can find a middle ground between the increasing amount of heavy handed censorship on Reddit and literally all Nazis. 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.

bmarquez 5y ago
I was a frequent lurker at /r/nonewnormal and I agree with your analysis - dissent from the mainstream opinion that lockdowns and mandates are good, but more of an opinionated criticism than anything banworthy. The moderators put a great deal of work to keep it civil and non-partisan, and their efforts were completely destroyed when they were kicked off Reddit. 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.
- exogeny 5y ago
  >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.

toss1 5y ago

Nice demonstration of the Paradox of Tolerance [1]: "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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

chuckee 5y ago
How does that paradox square with the transition of intolerant societies into tolerant ones? Where intolerant attitudes were not only tolerated, but the norm? 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.
- toss1 5y ago
  Humans have created a rather extensive historical record of seeking freedom from oppression in all forms, all of which involves intolerance. I.e., a large majority of humans want a tolerant environment 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.

kumarvvr 5y ago

I am an avid Reddit user and this is the first time i have come across this name. And I browse tech and other news sites a lot.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]