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Ask HN: What is the next Reddit, for you?

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Re: Ask HN: What is the next Reddit, for you?

#11

Post by qppo »

one2know wrote: post #3

Reddit has become a heavily censored website that supports only one political viewpoint. For instance, I cannot say on reddit that BLM by definition checks off all boxes for a terrorist hate group because I will be banned. This goes for large swaths of society in general where people have gone from free speech advocates to raving lunatics ready to censor, ban, cancel, and fire anyone who does not support their views.…

Reddit has always leaned incredibly liberal, that's not new. But some of the most active subs sport borderline extremism for conservatives as well - and that viewpoint would be shared and upvoted plenty, just like ACAB or sympathizing with Chris Dorner will rise to the top of /r/politics.

Online communities without moderation exist, and they're usually cesspools. I don't think they'll catch on like reddit did.

Re: Ask HN: What is the next Reddit, for you?

#12

Post by IanDrake »

one2know wrote: post #3

Reddit has become a heavily censored website that supports only one political viewpoint. For instance, I cannot say on reddit that BLM by definition checks off all boxes for a terrorist hate group because I will be banned. This goes for large swaths of society in general where people have gone from free speech advocates to raving lunatics ready to censor, ban, cancel, and fire anyone who does not support their views.…

Agreed. The next reddit needs to state explicitly that only illegal content will be removed by site owners.

Re: Ask HN: What is the next Reddit, for you?

#13

Post by one2know »

president wrote: post #6
one2know wrote: post #3

Reddit has become a heavily censored website that supports only one political viewpoint. For instance, I cannot say on reddit that BLM by definition checks off all boxes for a terrorist hate group because I will be banned. This goes for large swaths of society in general where people have gone from free speech advocates to raving lunatics ready to censor, ban, cancel, and fire anyone who does not support their views.…

Same goes for HN. I'm actually surprised you weren't already heavily downvoted or flagged for hate speech.

It seemed to me that shill mods started to back off around August when some of the rioting and arson started getting old and having the opposite of the intended political results. And, now that we are a month from the elections they are no longer interested in censoring as it probably won't have an effect especially since people have already started voting.

Re: Ask HN: What is the next Reddit, for you?

#14

Post by one2know »

qppo wrote: post #11
one2know wrote: post #3

Reddit has become a heavily censored website that supports only one political viewpoint. For instance, I cannot say on reddit that BLM by definition checks off all boxes for a terrorist hate group because I will be banned. This goes for large swaths of society in general where people have gone from free speech advocates to raving lunatics ready to censor, ban, cancel, and fire anyone who does not support their views.…

Reddit has always leaned incredibly liberal, that's not new. But some of the most active subs sport borderline extremism for conservatives as well - and that viewpoint would be shared and upvoted plenty, just like ACAB or sympathizing with Chris Dorner will rise to the top of /r/politics. Online communities without moderation exist, and they're usually cesspools. I don't think they'll catch on like reddit did.

I think the left wing has adopted the view that they are good fighting evil and the ends justify the means in anything they do, which of course is not compatible with free speech and subject to political abuse. Online communities without moderation have always existed. Pre-internet BBS's were full of what people would call "cesspool" stuff although it would be considered tame today. Today cesspool means generic conspiracy theories. Obviously a big right wing one is politicians and pedophilia which congress just passed a resolution about WHILE there is this whole real thing going on with pedophile island, Epstein, and, yep, politicians. So it is hard to sort out which is 'cesspool' and what are attempts to censor reality and hide crimes coming from the political establishment.

Any board where they just remove flagrant porn, gore, and violent threats would be OK and would last until the general public learned about it.

Re: Ask HN: What is the next Reddit, for you?

#17

Post by forgotmypw17 »

m-p-3 wrote: post #16
forgotmypw17 wrote: post #15

I think the next reddit will be self-hosted subreddits, ones which can be easily forked, split, synced, archived, and with portable accounts.

Basically a federated system à la Mastodon?

I think federation is still a half-measure. Instead of one big AOL, you have several smaller AOLs who talk to each other.

The system I have in mind would allow you to use the same identity seamlessly across any instances you come across, port the content while retaining threading and identifiers, and clone an existing instance within minutes.

You could import the entire moderator action tree from the old instance or leave it behind.

And so on.

Re: Ask HN: What is the next Reddit, for you?

#19

Post by jones1618 »

one2know wrote: post #3

Reddit has become a heavily censored website that supports only one political viewpoint. For instance, I cannot say on reddit that BLM by definition checks off all boxes for a terrorist hate group because I will be banned. This goes for large swaths of society in general where people have gone from free speech advocates to raving lunatics ready to censor, ban, cancel, and fire anyone who does not support their views.…

I agree somewhat but the solution is tricky. You've described two problems, actually: 1) Community norms/culture and 2) censorship/banning. Ideally, the "next Reddit" would/should allow flagging content that is hateful/hurtful while providing a sensible (and formally regulated) means to appeal flagging, censorship and banning.

Ultimately, the Internet at large needs to grow past this adolescent stage that yields to mob rule and crudely divides people and ideas into "good" and "bad" without any discussion or nuance.

Re: Ask HN: What is the next Reddit, for you?

#20

Post by ManlyBread »

one2know wrote: post #3

Reddit has become a heavily censored website that supports only one political viewpoint. For instance, I cannot say on reddit that BLM by definition checks off all boxes for a terrorist hate group because I will be banned. This goes for large swaths of society in general where people have gone from free speech advocates to raving lunatics ready to censor, ban, cancel, and fire anyone who does not support their views.…

The problem with alternative sites like these is that these do not try to be their own thing and instead focus on being an "anti-reddit". Which - given how political reddit is - already resulted in creating a site that you describe. It's called Voat and it's dominated with right-wing politics and consipracy theories and it is pretty much unusable for anything else. There's not a single community on Voat that is worth suffering through pages of political nonsense. Gab has the exact same issue.

The problem is not that reddit doesn't allow free speech, the problem is that these sites became the front of war for people who live and breathe real-world politics. That type of content seems to dominate everything else on these websites and turns off people who just want a nice little community to discuss their niche hobby.

I believe the next reddit won't be a site that advertises itself for allowing free speech; I think it will be one that bans real-world politics and does it's best to keep it this way.

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