[ideonexus]

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.

[basch]

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

[jjawssd]

I think this is the most important comment in the whole thread.

[r_smart]

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.

[mozumder]

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.

[inimino]

The trouble with Twitter is there are no downvotes.

[qyv]

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.