Ironic that you've made this comment on HackerNews, a site, it can be argued, whose appeal comes from its pretty substantial moderation. I can't tell you how many links I've seen flagged and banished from HN that I thought were important, but... once I cooled down my outrage, I realized the conversations occurring on them were pretty toxic. I come to HN because of the focus and constructive dialogue. I stay away from Reddit (and long ago abandoned /.) because of the toxicity.
Yes. The alt-right and the_donald reddit community members can move to a less-popular platform, but that doesn't necessarily mean that platform has just become more popular. It means the loudest, most-obnoxious people have just lost their Reddit audience. When 1% of commenters are making 90% of the posts, that's no longer a dialogue and that drives away readers. Encouraging polite dialogue and policing abusive behaviors are smart business moves for Reddit and Twitter.
I frequent hackernews and /r/askhistorians because of strong moderation. I support free speech. Communities being moderated are different than platforms being exclusive to certain communities. (I consider hackernews to be a community not a platform due to its strict focus.)
I can choose which communities to ignore, lurk in and participate with. I dont support extinguishing communities I choose to ignore.
You get what you get when you choose to congregate at the firehose nozzles of twitter and /r/all
I think for me the issue is that HN brands itself as being a particular kind of site, for a particular community. Reddit is basically a tool for communities to form and organize themselves. There's a pretty big difference between what the two platforms bill themselves as.
Twitter's become absolutely toxic as well. It's gone insane. They really need to get rid of the Trumpian right-wingers from that platform or it'll end up being harmful to their business.
No advertiser is interested in putting out their message right where a random guy can immediately reply with "LIAR!" for everyone to see.
Without the draw of getting the big audience of r/all I would not be surprised if communities like the_donald will start to stagnate if they had to move to voat.
Just because you disagree with their opinion does not mean you should want to kick them out. They are not acting upon their views in any way that affects you. Totally free expression is crucial and in no way will it affect you physically. I disagree with almost everything they stand for, but their presence is crucial for an open discussion of issues in our global societies.
Reddit is under no obligation to support, nurture, or pay for the resources required to keep this up. They are under no obligation to implicitly condone this content, as they have taken on an editorial role in the past and now anything they don't ban is in contrast to those things they have. As you pointed out, it's the web. There are many web hosts that will refuse you service for hosting pornography. That doesn't prevent anyone from finding one that will allow it.
Technically you are 100% correct. They are definitely within their rights, as are twitter and facebook. The problem is that we've got a de facto (as opposed to de jure) "censorship" system going on where people with undesired opinions are being forced (whether they wanted it or not) into echo chambers.
"Censorship" just forces people underground to talk amongst other people with the same opinions. While it has some kind of measurable effect on preventing impressionable people from being exposed to their opinions, it also prevents people from discussing alternative views with the ones who were "censored". This is a large part of the reason why everyone was blindsided by Trump, the trump supporters were largely either not speaking up due to social penalties for doing so or only talking on-line in forums where other people agreed with them.
If the goal is to "defeat" the alt-right movement, then I don't think it is necessarily obvious that banning them is the right move. As I said though, maybe it is since it does limit exposure to their views which in theory limits their membership.
Note: Scare quoted censorship due to it not being government run which is what people usually mean when they say censorship.
One of the big problems here though is thing like twitter's recent behavior(I'm using twitter as an example but other sites do it too).
You can say something hateful, disrespectful, and even threatening to/about a white person(or people) and twitter doesn't care even if you are reported.
However if you say the same thing about/to a black person (or people) [literally the same sentence with only those words switched out] then when reported you will be banned.
If twitter(and others) would actually apply their rules fairly, a lot of people would be a lot less upset.
are mockery and satire respectful? what does that make Stewart, Colbert, Bee, Meyers, and Oliver? how about SRD and SRS? they are assholes too but they deserve their space to mock people they disagree with. should /r/atheism be banned for its disrespect towards religion? /r/atheism has the same fervent hate towards people of belief.
you dont have to listen to those subreddits. dont subscribe to them. dont hang out in /r/all if you cant handle seeing things you disagree with.
you just called other peoples views a cesspool of garbage, and youre advocating respect.
> the trump supporters were largely either not speaking up due to social penalties for doing so or only talking on-line in forums where other people agreed with them.
You have a good point about driving people underground, instead of giving them an outlet - but as the article points out,
> Like the mod said in his own words, they are not interested in public policy, they are focused on white nationalist racial discussion. To continue on that course without steering into hate speech is impossible.
Unless they are literally calling for people to take action and kill/harass/otherwise harm people I see no reason to "censor" them. From what I've seen, most of that subreddit is hating on other races(which definitely is hate speech) but not calling any real action. I also don't consider calling for legitimate political action to be worthy of "censorship" either, only going outside the political system to directly harm.
Why isn't Spez able to arbitrarily delete subreddits? Why isn't Twitter starting mass deportations? I don't see any reason for them to wait. They can get started right away. It's easy to write a regex that identifies Trump supporters and eliminates their accounts quickly. Why haven't we started yet?
And reddit has on multiple occasions refused people the right to "totally free expression". Freedom of speech is about the government not shutting you down for airing your views, not a company.
> Totally free expression is crucial and in no way will it affect you physically.
Until it elects the sort of people who want to see me deported into positions of power. At which point am I obligated to hand them a free platform again?
It's not really a free speech issue to be honest. As far as I can tell some of these sub-reddits, like the_donald in particular, are well organised and know how to push their posts to the front page (the rare time I open /r/all, their posts are almost always among the top ones, despite being very low quality content).
So it's no about censoring free speech, it's about making the idiot shouting his opinions with a megaphone on the street to do it somewhere else, or at the very least to drop the megaphone.
/r/all is not the front page. t_d is not a front page default subreddit. people should not visit /r/all if they dislike seeing the firehose. or get gold and use filters and strengthen your filter bubble walls.
People want /r/all to be a community of stuff they like, without stuff they disagree with. Those people seem to disagree with the idea of a content agnostic platform. How would those people feel if gmail stopped delivering ultra left liberal emails.
Voat won't get taken over by the enemies of free expression. That's not how it'll fail. Voat will fail because there's a lack of people to harass on voat, and you're not allowed to use voat to brigade other services.
Yes, everyone leaves for Voat, Voat crashes, and then everyone goes back to Reddit. Most people go to Reddit for their cat memes, not to hate on people.
HN's DNA is civil, professional discussion of the Silicon Valley based, VC-backed, millionaire-minting Ruby on Rails landing page creation industry. Users know what they're here for.
Reddit became popular as an irreverent place for free discussion of whatever. There's a big difference in expectation.
Yes. The alt-right and the_donald reddit community members can move to a less-popular platform, but that doesn't necessarily mean that platform has just become more popular. It means the loudest, most-obnoxious people have just lost their Reddit audience. When 1% of commenters are making 90% of the posts, that's no longer a dialogue and that drives away readers. Encouraging polite dialogue and policing abusive behaviors are smart business moves for Reddit and Twitter.