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Reddit bans anti-vaccine subreddit r/NoNewNormal after site-wide protest

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Re: Reddit bans anti-vaccine subreddit r/NoNewNormal after site-wide protest

#61
post #46

Reddit's procedure for communities that go against any mainstream progressive narrative is to quarantine them and then ban them under the accusation of "brigading". They have essentially trimmed all alternative thought or discussion from the website and turned places like /r/news, which used to be a moderate and balanced place of discussion, into a completely one-sided echo chamber of modern progressive politics. The…

There's no rational discussion to be had between homeopathy doctor and an oncologist, for example. It's just a waste of bandwidth and source of misinformation which is killing innocents.

One could just as easily say that there's no point in trying to have a rational discussion with people who want to compare anyone who disagrees with the worst thing they can come up with.

If you wonder what kind of content is actually on subs like NoNewNormal, you could just go on and see for yourself. Well actually, now you can't anymore, because they're gone. Which leaves their enemies free to smear them as the worst thing anyone could come up with, when they have no chance to respond and nobody has any way to see for themselves what it's really about.

I used to check in on them every now and then. I didn't see much of the supposed extreme stuff about the vaccines being poison or being involved with 5G somehow. I do see things about how they aren't as effective as we would have liked, don't last as long as we would have liked, have more side effects than people are willing to admit, and there's decent evidence that natural immunity from having caught Covid is more effective. It is pretty arguable that blindly mandating everyone take it without accounting for people who have already had the disease or have genuine allergies or other negative reactions to things in the vaccines is not a very good idea.

Re: Reddit bans anti-vaccine subreddit r/NoNewNormal after site-wide protest

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN?

HN is nice but historically the topics had to be very specific to tech, startups, etc. Recently it seems to have been a little easier on the political and social commentary stuff which i think is pretty nice and refreshing. Though I understand why some aren’t as much of a fan. It does attract more drama and flame baiting.

I agree with the historical part because recently there has been more meme posts, one liner edgy comments, giant political rants, etc.

And since people can't delete your post after 2 hours, you can see a lot of fluff nowadays even in a relatively old thread.

Re: Reddit bans anti-vaccine subreddit r/NoNewNormal after site-wide protest

#63
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no rational discussion to be had between homeopathy doctor and an oncologist, for example. It's just a waste of bandwidth and source of misinformation which is killing innocents.

Assuming your position on any subject, especially novel viruses and novel vaccines, is 100% correct and immune to debate or criticism is irrational. When your position is "I'm right, they're wrong, they shouldn't be allowed to talk about it" you are the censor. If the facts support your position, why silence debate or criticism? The scientific method requires hypothesis tested by experimentation. Have we fully proven…

> Assuming your position on any subject, especially novel viruses and novel vaccines, is 100% correct and immune to debate or criticism is irrational.

The "debate" and "criticism" is always in the form of uncited or poorly cited conspiracies, along with links to extremely unreputable sites. It some cases, the only evidence is a highly shared Facebook meme. The credentials of the "research" authors are frequently lies, too. For example, there's a big one going around from the "inventor of RNA vaccines." However, if you look into it, it's just one of thousands of people who worked on RNA vaccines at some point in its lifecycle. It's like claiming some new grad software engineer who works for Facebook is "the inventor of Facebook."

Mercola, Natural News, Fox, Breitbart, *.win, Zerohedge, Infowars: These sources aren't dismissed because "there's a bias against conservative values" or whatever; they're dismissed because they regularly churn out completely debunked garbage. The times they're right about something is, at best, a fluke.

Re: Reddit bans anti-vaccine subreddit r/NoNewNormal after site-wide protest

#64
post #36

I thought this post by a former mod of another forum that went through this was interesting. https://patriots.win/p/12kFPq7oFY/recap-on-how-rnonewnormal-...

How do you feel about some of the other posts and comments from that same community? For example: https://imgur.com/a/wIFDa8G

Re: Reddit bans anti-vaccine subreddit r/NoNewNormal after site-wide protest

#65

Remember when it was a slippery slope fallacy to suggest that this sort of thing would go beyond banning fatpeoplehate? I haven't used reddit in 2 years. I'm not a vaccine denier or anything like that, but why would I want to use a public discussion tool that disallows public discussion? I think though this points to an architectural problem with the multi community link aggregator/forum concept. Fact is, when you ha…

Did you find a replacement for reddit you like?

I like something called littr.me, single community link aggregator (like HN) but federates, so you get the interaction between communities but each community is sovereign, free to isolate itself as it pleases.

https://github.com/mariusor/go-littr

But it isn't about "a replacement for reddit." It is about finding communities online you want to engage in and engaging. Forums, non-federated aggregators (like HN), chatrooms all suffice. The trick is to avoid a one stop shop for communities.

Re: Reddit bans anti-vaccine subreddit r/NoNewNormal after site-wide protest

#66
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no rational discussion to be had between homeopathy doctor and an oncologist, for example. It's just a waste of bandwidth and source of misinformation which is killing innocents.

Assuming your position on any subject, especially novel viruses and novel vaccines, is 100% correct and immune to debate or criticism is irrational. When your position is "I'm right, they're wrong, they shouldn't be allowed to talk about it" you are the censor. If the facts support your position, why silence debate or criticism? The scientific method requires hypothesis tested by experimentation. Have we fully proven…

It is disingenuous to conflate antivax cultural meme production with the scientific method.

Re: Reddit bans anti-vaccine subreddit r/NoNewNormal after site-wide protest

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit hardly cares about improving the world as much as it's own bottom line. The boycotts by several popular subreddits were hurting them, and that is all. — r/legaladvice is a known hotbed of misinformation of potentially drastic consequences that is allowed to stay, as that misinformation does not run enough across political tribalist lines to make people care.

> The boycotts by several popular subreddits were hurting them, and that is all. you mean boycotts by a bunch of petulant power mods. I sincerely doubt that rank and file reddit users really cared that much. Whether you agree with the outcome or not this is not the situation reddit admins should want to be in. They've just shown those mods that if they're loud enough that reddit will roll right over. Seems like a bol…

> you mean boycotts by a bunch of petulant power mods. I sincerely doubt that rank and file reddit users really cared that much.

I think you're right. It's important to realize that the normy web is cable news, not the agora. There is nothing organic about the apparent consensus expressed there. The top 500 communities being moderated by the same few people is a well-known statistic. The Elgin Air Force Base connection is another fun thing to look into.

Every couple of weeks there's another story about some fringe community getting burned by big platforms, Glen Greenwald fills in some template to write an article about it, somebody links to the XKCD comic about censorship, and the dance continues. However sympathetic I am to free expression, I'm a bit tired of the discourse at this point. Nobody expects major broadcasters or newspapers to present unorthodox viewpoints, given how thoroughly compromised they are by intelligence agencies and corporate interests. I don't see why major web publishers should be viewed differently. Engaging with these platforms is not a winning battle.

The only solution is to set up alternative institutions, but I haven't been impressed by what's popped up so far. Most decentralized Mastodon etc stuff is in practice even more ideologically rigid, and full of truly psychotic nerds.

I like to imagine that there's still some active PHPbb board out there full of dudes just chilling. I'd like to find it one day.

Re: Reddit bans anti-vaccine subreddit r/NoNewNormal after site-wide protest

#68

Reddit continues to insist that its sitewide administrative policies are based on behaviour rather than content , though it appears that this is a somewhat narrow distinction, and that behaviours which draw attention … tend to be associated with questionable content. I’m not criticising the action. I support it. (The reasons are complex and difficult to articulate, though what I had to say ... on Reddit ... about lim…

> ...the principles of “free speech” are not synonymous with the US first amendment (which concerns only government limitations)... I think this is the nub of the problem. There are common carriers like the phone company, and there are publishers. A publisher will be responsible for what they publish, whereas a carrier really just gives access to their infrastructure. We have a situation now that seems like social me…

It's a nub of the problem.

The problem has numerous nubs.

But to the extent that socially harmful discriminatory practices of common carriers have profound influences, then yes, I agree with you. And yes, the problem is inherently political, as what it concerns is social power.

Money-as-political-speech is profoundly problematic. The US has much very bad case law here.

Re: Reddit bans anti-vaccine subreddit r/NoNewNormal after site-wide protest

#69

Reddit's procedure for communities that go against any mainstream progressive narrative is to quarantine them and then ban them under the accusation of "brigading". They have essentially trimmed all alternative thought or discussion from the website and turned places like /r/news, which used to be a moderate and balanced place of discussion, into a completely one-sided echo chamber of modern progressive politics. The…

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