[oehpr]

I'm not deeply versed in Gab's history... But lets hypothetically say that Gab was not created for that purpose, but for precisely the purpose it claims it was created for:

To be an open platform for free speech, no censorship.

Wouldn't it have ended up in the exact same state it is now? Any service that guarantees no censorship is going to have the majority of its userbase be the runoff from other major websites. When voat was created, I 100% believed that they were not attempting to create extremist havens, but their userbase was all the people expelled from reddit for targeted harassment campaigns.

I hate this dynamic. We need a way to break this cycle, because right now it's actively killing competitors to existing social networks.

[sipos]

Wikipedia cites a articles that show a number of examples of the company Twitter acocunt saying anti-semetic things, for example https://web.archive.org/web/20181031162843/https://www.cnn.c....

I agree with your point - it is hard to tell the difference generally, and it is an important point to remember, but the behaviour of the company itself shows that it is not an issue this time.

[KirinDave]

Gab bans people openly and credulously discussing marxism. I have experimented with and experienced this directly. So, it fails my litmus test for "an uncensored platform."

And it's a bit comical, because Gab as a community experience is much smaller (in my perspective) from even weird sites like minds or funky social blockchain plays. Why they felt the need to ban discusions of marxism or a general strike is beyond me.

[oehpr]

Fair. By my own admission, I don't know much about gab.

I think the first time I ever heard about it was when Firefox banned Dissenter from their addons. Dissenter to me was a genius idea that has an ugly userbase. I'd love to have a version of Dissenter that isn't populated entirely by bigots.

I think the idea of Dissenter really has some value, you walk along the web for all sorts of reasons, and then up in the corner in your toolbar you see "oh, someone from my community has said something about this". Rather than the social network taking you to a site, the site takes you to the network.

[input_sh]

That by itself implies that every URL you visit has to be looked up to see if there's a related discussion.

No way I'd trust any add-on/startup/mega corp to do that. I barely trust Mozilla to keep my history on their servers, and that's only because they only keep the last few months and purge older data.

[commoner]

Firefox Sync is end-to-end encrypted, so Mozilla is not able to access your Firefox history.

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/11/firefox-sync-privacy/

[oehpr]

nope, you'd simply distribute a bloom filter to everyone, and then you could transmit hashed urls.

you could easily make this privacy safe.

[KirinDave]

This wouldn't address a lot of metadata-related privacy concerns.

[musingsole]

How would it not?

[bjl]

> Why they felt the need to ban discusions of marxism or a general strike is beyond me.

Because it was built to be a fascist recruitment channel, and the talk of 'free speech' is just a smoke screen that they don't care about at all.

[KirinDave]

Sure, but anyone who talks about that there is a punching bag. It's all awful people. They don't need to do that work, the users do it for them.

[salawat]

Likely because the intended audience is not people who see it as a viable alternative or something worth even entertaining. The irony of the situation being someone took the time to make their own platform for like minded individuals, and people in other spaces who've been known to tow the "you're free to make your own platform" line get extraordinarily bent out of sort when people actusally go and do just that.

The hilarious part being that by having the censorship in the first place and not just letting folks work it out amongst themselves, you just increase the echo chamber factor, which at some point, you have to come to terms with in real life on the basis these people exist in the real world. The very act of technically enforced societal marginalization in and of itself is an "extremism" amplifier/polarization catalyst. What confuses me is why I feel like I'm the only one who regularly brings it up. It's not that hard of a realization to reach From first principles. Especially if you spent any time in your life as a social misfit.

[KirinDave]

Well, you don't see me make fun of Parler as much because they're honest about their intentions. Gab originally claimed they were about "freedom" so it seems pretty fair to me to call them out on moderation that is clearly political.

[gre]

You can discuss marxism and general strikes on the lemmy instance https://chapo.chat

[KirinDave]

Haha, as a certified fan of the Wrecker call-out of Chapo I doubt I'll last long there.

[betterunix2]

"Any service that guarantees no censorship is going to have the majority of its userbase be the runoff from other major websites"

Exactly, which is why you are wrong here:

"When voat was created, I 100% believed that they were not attempting to create extremist havens"

It is not as if the major websites are quick to censor their users. If anything they are too cautious and have only banned terrorists after widespread pressure and threats of advertiser boycotts. If you set up a platform that is open to the few people who were so extreme that even Reddit or Twitter banned them, then you are creating an extremist haven, no matter what language you use to describe your intentions.

[ryandrake]

One could argue that intentions don't really matter, ether. "The Purpose Of A System Is What It Does" [1]. If your system ends up being a forum for a certain type of posts, then that's kind of what it is, regardless of what you originally wanted it to be.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

[dependenttypes]

> If anything they are too cautious and have only banned terrorists after widespread pressure and threats of advertiser boycotts

This is nowhere close to what reddit/twitter have been doing however.

> then you are creating an extremist haven

...of people interested in anime porn after reddit banned them.

[kevingadd]

This is a useless hypothetical. We know what Gab was and why it was taken down.

If you want to know how a healthy alternative would have turned out, go looking for one. It almost certainly exists, there have been at least a dozen twitter competitors in the past and I know a few people who tried them out. (I can't remember their names, though.)

[ascorbic]

If they didn't intend it, they were being incredibly naive. If your defining characteristic is that you don't censor things that are banned on Reddit, then your site is only attractive to people who want to do things banned on Reddit.

[sipos]

It wasn't just Reddit they were fleeing. I think it was Twitter too...

[FalconSensei]

yes.

So again... Reddit and Twitter are already a cesspool of hate. If you are bad enough to be banned there...

[damnyou]

Yes, any large no-censorship platform for humans will be swamped by Nazis.

You could avoid being large — small, high-trust groups work perfectly fine without censorship.

You could add more moderation (aka censorship), both platform-wide and within communities. Reddit seems to be heading in that direction.

You could avoid being a platform. Some sites are inherently platforms, but does every site need comments?

Or you could genetically engineer humanity into a kinder, better species. This would also be the way to make anarcho-communism work — the economic system with the greatest freedoms, but also the most susceptible to bad actors. The Culture series shows you a glimpse of what this future could be.

[oehpr]

I've got to finish going through The Culture series. I thought it was bold stroke to write a book series about a future where humans are domesticated by their own AI.

[damnyou]

I think the "fully automated gay space luxury communism" depicted in the Culture series is the best future we can hope for. I wouldn't mind welcoming new robot overlords if it makes that possible.

[d2v]

>To be an open platform for free speech, no censorship.

Unfortunately this kind of rhetoric is frequently coded language meaning "Hey Nazis, we won't kick you off of our platform for threatening to shoot up a synagogue". I think people should still legally be able to create unmoderated platforms, but the majority of people won't participate in them because they quickly become cesspools of hatred and harassment. Gab is the newer, shinier tech startup version of this, but it's existed before in the forms of 4chan, 8chan, and probably other platforms that I'm not familiar with.

[stusmall]

>I'm not deeply versed in Gab's history...

Maybe that's a sign you should pause. Sometimes it is okay to admit you don't know about a subject. It is okay to sit and listen instead of voicing an opinion.

[outoftheabyss]

His point stands... and actually contributes to the conversation

[oehpr]

Well... I mean really I was not trying to say Gab was innocent. I really didn't know until others provided some helpful context. I was speaking more to the original topic of this HN submission.

I never know how to handle topic shifts in the conversation trees in Reddit, Hacker News, and others.

Do you speak only to the comment you're responding to? Do you speak as if that comment is in the context of the submission? Do you keep the context as on topic as possible? Do you indicate which one of the three you're doing when you start your comment off? I feel like this is an internet rule I have not sussed out on my own. And I can see its caused some trouble for others. Sorry.

[hajimemash]

I found interesting your comment and subsequent replies to your comment.