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> 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

• loudtieblahblah 5y ago
  Which is why breaking away from the centralized web sucks. Rumble, voat, parler, gab, even as I feel like the left has left me these days, these places still largely look like dumpster fires to me. The centralized web is awful. Getting away from it is awful. I don't know what's worse - the endless corporate censorship or the insanely explicit content, outright bigotry, and anti-science quacks who fill up spaces rebelling against it. My ethics says the Corp censorship is far more problematic (when taking in the big picture) , but as someone wanting to participate in a free and constructive community it leaves one with no where to go. Social media was a mistake. Allowing tech companies to become as big as they are were too.
  • toyg 5y ago
    > The centralized web is awful. Getting away from it is awful. That's just because a significant amount of people are awful. And now everyone is on the web, including the awful ones. It's not social media, it's us.
    • ectopod 5y ago
      It's both. Social media provides a positive feedback loop for awfulness.
      • stjohnswarts 5y ago
        It certainly polarizes people. The people in the middle who aren't that passionate about things tend to just scroll past, but the “passionate” ones just yell at each other and either keep doing that ad inifinitum or they form an echo chamber where they can call others snowflakes.
        • southerntofu 5y ago
          It's not just polarization. Polarization is a natural state of human societies and is a good thing as it enables things to move forward (in either direction). Silicon Valley corporations, whether for profit or by ideology, have pushed nazi/conspirationist propaganda to everyone in the form of recommendations for many years. To be fair, so have traditional media outlets, neither of which is excusable in my view.
    • mistermann 5y ago
      Maybe someone will eventually take this into consideration in their design.
      • robwwilliams 5y ago
        HN for example. I find this community conforms to my own notions of informative, open, and smoothly moderated.
        • mistermann 5y ago
          Provided one stays within the local Overton Window, I agree.
  • OrvalWintermute 5y ago
    I looked on Rumble to see the videos on the front page. Headline was: A Vivafrei video on Trudeau rescinding Emergency Orders Act Editors Picks were: Mudroom Remodel + Vacuum Charging Very old COFFE GRINDER restoration This Is Why They Did It, by Russell Brand Wife CHEATS, Wants CHILD SUPPORT For Illegitimate Daughter? In the News Section: Trudeau announces end of Emergencies Act Shaffer: Biden Telegraphing Ukraine Moves Trump: Biden's America is getting bum-rushed Ukrainians express support for state of emergency Viral Puppy gets super excited when it's time to open presents Mother cat adorably hugs & kisses her kitten Tired man & his puppies fall asleep together for nap time Woman hilariously struggles to fit balloons in her trunk Podcasts Freedom Fighters Forced Trudeau to Revoke The Emergency Powers Act Pfizer Withdraws Application for Covid-19 Vaccine in India Stand For Freedom: Why one gym owner pushed back against tyranny and now is running for Congress Saagar Enjeti CAUGHT LYING About Russia & Ukraine On Breaking Points The Dive With Jackson Hinkle So, apart from seeing a few folks that got cancelled like Dan Bongino, looks like Vimeo or Youtube. Where are the awful dumpter fires?
    • jimmygrapes 5y ago
      Similar here. I'm no fan of the weird right wing self parody copycats, but Rumble seems to be less inundated and more generally acceptable than the others it generally gets associated with. Not sure if it'll last, but I've heard some of the podcasts and such I follow mention their Rumble alongside Facebook and Twitter in the general spiel. Gives me a little hope that an upstart is still possible.
  • wvh 5y ago
    I think you summed it up quite well. At this moment, there does not seem to be a space between the corporate you-are-the-product mainstream and the weirdos with an agenda crowd at the edges for a person to just be, speak and think in a relatively free and neutral sense without ending up in some ulterior trap.
    • dools 5y ago
      Aren't you having a discussion on just such a platform? Also what can't you say on, say, Twitter that you want to say?
      • loudtieblahblah 5y ago
        https://m.slashdot.org/story/396689 https://m.slashdot.org/story/396689
    • krapp 5y ago
      There is no such space because there can be no such space. If you want a community without bad actors, bigots, cranks, etc, then it has to have rules and moderation, which means censorship. If you want free speech, you're going to get the bigots, cranks and bad actors. "Speak(ing) and think(ing) in a relatively free and neutral sense without ending up in some ulterior trap" requires curation and tone policing, which is censorship. Otherwise, the bigots and the cranks are also free to speak and think in the same way as everyone else, ruin the community and drive everyone else away. You can't have your cake and eat it too, you have to pick one.
      • loudtieblahblah 5y ago
        The problem is the censors are also prone to being bad actors, flexing their agenda by bending and stretching rules far beyond their intention and turning them into another tool of our tribalism battles. It's used to squash dissent and often not enacted in good faith. People are called bigots for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with bigotry. And it's done intentionally to weild power over wrong-thinkers. The bad actors are at all levels and of all persuasions
  • ipaddr 5y ago
    Reddit started out with that status and it became accepted by some of the masses.
    • stjohnswarts 5y ago
      Reddit has a outlet though, you can just make your own echo chamber there, and don't have to leave the platform unless you're a particularly ornery bunch like the gamergate stuff and subreddits where people start threatening and doxxing.
  • eulenteufel 5y ago
    I'm registered on a mastodon instance and I find it quite nice and not at all a dumpster fire. If you're a conservative or so you will probably have a hard time finding an instace you feel at home at, but the defederation of mastodon instances from instances that allow hate speech, racism, homophobia, etc. are precisely what prevents it from being a dumpster fire. The Fediverse is not without issues but I think it is an example of fuctioning decentralized social media.
  • pmoriarty 5y ago
    We have so many techniques for extracting signal from noise (from reputation, to curation, to tags, scores, bayesian filtering, etc) which could be used to form a metastructure on top of sites like PeerTube and provide viable alternatives to both censorship and free-for-all high noise cess pools.
    • southerntofu 5y ago
      I agree it's possible, but do you know people working on such participative federated feeds/indexes?
• weq 5y ago
  This is complete BS. Witches are a creation of a relgious zealots for a start. Its anti-science. The problem with society is the promotion of the rat race and attempting to fit everyone into little categories. You cant. I have been in many scenes including gaming, cars, mechanics, machining and i can find vibrant communites away from the big tech just as i can within it. Why do I have success yet you or others cant? I find that the main problem with the internet is that people want to be entertained in their downtime. They want to be amused, occupied and interested. Whether that be to stalk others in the privacy of there own zone, or to create a fantasy to fill in time. That personality trait is the problem and creates the situation for these viral communities to breath. Trolls gonna be trolls. It creates the awkward social dystopia we find ourselves in. Going to school, university, getting a job and becoming a contributing member of society is not equivalent to meaning and happiness. What happens when these people get home at night and realise their life is meaningless? This.
  • southerntofu 5y ago
    I think your comment is fair and relevant. Our society is so broken that it produces (and encourages) psychopaths at every level of power. Then some people wonder why Twitter/Facebook is a cesspit of evil. And if you ever had the chance to avoid how sociopathic capitalist mentality is, don't worry GAFAMs have plenty of recommended posts/videos full of neo-nazi conspirationists to redpill you.
• a_shovel 5y ago
  This is a bizarre article. If a society is terrible because seven zillion witches live there, then how are witch-hunts wrong in this metaphor? If these offshoot communities full of outcasts are as horrific as he admits, why shouldn't we ban the people that make it that way from our communities? Why is he so willing to trust these same people when they say they're fighting for "fairness"? How does he manage to identify some of the worst forces in conservatism, the ones that convinced me to become what many would call "far-left", and come to the conclusion that people are being too hard on them? This author has a very, very strange worldview.
  • brigandish 5y ago
    > If a society is terrible because seven zillion witches live there, then how are witch-hunts wrong in this metaphor? Isn't the insight we're to take regarding witch hunts, as moderns able to look back across history, that the people accused of being witches weren't witches, and what was really happening (among other things) was violent intolerance for those with a different way of life, and the indiscriminate use of power? That's what makes witch hunts wrong in any metaphor. > How does he manage to identify some of the worst forces in conservatism, the ones that convinced me to become what many would call "far-left", and come to the conclusion that people are being too hard on them? Because intolerance is wrong, certainly to the degree we see now. I'm sure you might feel like responding with "they started it" but not only has the author covered that, it's also no excuse.
    • a_shovel 5y ago
      In this metaphor, witches stand for openly racist trolls, flat-earthers, hardline anti-vaxxers, and self-confessed nazis. Terrible people that any decent community doesn't want. And the fact that there's a lot of them breaks the metaphor, since there weren't any witches in the actual witch hunts; it's not clear what the takeaway is supposed to be. The targeting of innocent people is what makes a metaphorical witch-hunt bad. "Intolerance" without specifying what one is being intolerant against is just a bare negative connotation unassociated with any meaning. Some things ought to be tolerated, and some things absolutely must not be tolerated.