Tell HN: I'm scared of sharing my opinion online

Unless you deliberately want to engage in advocacy to change society's view on a topic or persuade other people keep controversial opinions to yourself. If you aren't sure test the waters only in appropriate contexts without committing to the opinion which can let you safely gauge reactions.

I'm assuming these are mostly theoretical concerns not things you want to do yourself but without being judged.

FWIW I'm not the main character nor is anyone else.

FWIW #2: The sibling effect naturally causes partner aversion to any other children you spend a certain amount of time with growing up. Normally functioning brains exclude these people as romantic partners, though there are "exceptions" like siblings or cousins raised apart from each other. That's the source of the cultural taboo so you're gonna have a tough time getting anyone to sign on to that opinion. We evolved this way to prevent inbreeding so it's a fairly strongly preserved trait.

I definitely get how you feel about becoming a 'bad guy' if you say anything at all that falls out of line witht the (particularly leftist) hiveminds. One 'wrong' move and you're done.

I feel like there need to be somewhere online that is free speech oriented but not as uncontrolled and downright awful as 4chan is. Some middle ground. I want a place where any opinion whatsoever is permitted, but not any action e.g. still no inciting violence or doxxing people.

Basically we need old reddit back, reddit before it became ridiculously overmoderated. But as long as we are at the behest of advertisers and profits, it's very difficult to make happen on a large scale.

Not to mention network effects that make competition in the social media space incredibly hard. Reddit is open source and you can spin up clone in no time, but very few people are going to use it when the real reddit is still there. What's the point of tweeting to an empty room?

It also helps to have separate online identities for different things (hey, this was even the case back in the 90s and before).

Are we seriously questioning why someone wants to share their opinions on a topic? Are we actually clueless as to what they get out of it?

Is telling them they should instead spend a great deal of time following a completely unrelated pursuit our solution?

"Hey, I'm having a hard time expressing myself while feeling safe from (as I see it) arbitrary harassment, and managing vectors for imagined retributions"

"Go decompile donkey kong"

...right