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by BitwiseFool
1717 days ago
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I think this is a good place to mention O'Sullivan's First Law: "All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_O'Sullivan_(columnist) Any platform that establishes itself as a result of a purge from a left-wing dominated platform like Reddit will start out as explicitly right-wing and will struggle to gain non-partisan membership. That new platform will get its reputation tainted for being a place for extremism - even if it permits both left-wing and right-wing views. The left-wing folks won't see a need to join the new platform because they already have the existing one to feel comfortable in. They are content to let the new platform be seen as a hotbed for right-wing radicalism, continue to smear its reputation, and then wait for it to whither and die. On the flip side, any platform that starts out as non-partisan eventually gets dominated by left-wing / left-leaning folks. I personally have seen this happen countless times on subreddits individually, then reddit as a whole. I sense that this is because activists on the left tend to naturally gravitate towards becoming moderators and establishing new forum rules whenever they take over. Most of the new rules are unobjectionable but questionably appropriate. "No Racism / Homophobia / Transphobia" is a fine rule, but is it really necessary in a woodworking subreddit? The other kind of rules are more subtle and easy for moderators to abuse, like "be friendly", which can be applied against right leaning folks and ignored when left leaning folks get confrontational. Eventually the conservative/right folks get drowned out by agenda-posting and getting downvoted en-masse. They either self-censor, just accept the downvotes and keep posting, get banned, or try to leave for a new forum. |
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moot, creator of 4chan, has a talk or blog post (can't find it now) detailing this exact dynamic. There are plenty of times moot banned discussion of a certain topic (not even politically relevant), those users would get mad and start their own chan. That chan would eventually be a community of people who just post about how they hate 4chan and continue to be contrarian until they died. Community building is hard and you can't build a platform around being anti-the-other-platform. I think it's fashionable to call these "new platforms" right wing, but this is not a new trend and its something common you would see in the phpBB days of the forum, except instead of the new platform being "right wing", it was that the old platform was fascist because the moderator was an asshole. That said, 4chan is a platform you can clearly point that started out non-partisan. Before Trump 4chan was pro-occupy Wall Street. The community, on its own, became more right wing without overtly advertising itself as such. Over time however it's clear that /pol/ is a far right platform and there was no need for it to splinter off from everything. The lack of robust right wing communities online has more to do with community building rather than self-censorship. A rightwing community has to be exclusionary from the start, and it's hard to bootstrap a community that must ostracize a portion early members.
It's my view, that globally in the western world, that conservatism is actually just a very loud minority position. The loudest conservative folks tend to act the most anti-social and ultimately tend to get ostracized. This ostracism as a result of their anti-social behavior leads to some persecution complex that they are being pushed out when in reality they just hold a minority position. The "no racism" rules are required because when said person gets banned for calling someone a n*gger who was just posting an image of a birdhouse, they tend to be the most pedantic about rules. Most normal people just don't want to deal with that.