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by ditonal 1697 days ago
It’s too bad that nobody can find a middle ground between the increasing amount of heavy handed censorship on Reddit and literally all Nazis.

I thought /r/gendercritical and /r/nonewnormal both fit into the bucket of “I can see why this is controversial, but it’s more dissent from mainstream opinion than clearly ban worthy.” Again I’m not espousing views in those subreddits I just didn’t view them as ban worthy.

All sorts of “misinformation” is totally fine as long as it goes with the group think such as the Rolling Stone story on Oklahoma covid units being overrun that turned out to be false.

Reddit has unpaid moderators who wield way too much power and blackmail the company into getting their way. Now Reddit has raised money so we can expect even more purges to become as advertiser friendly as possible.

Some sort of app that would connect federated backends would be ideal, Lemmy was on the right path but yet another dead on arrival project due to ideology.

I know we seem to be on a path for increasing centralization but I predict the pendulum swings the opposite way as the user experience on centralized sites keep deteriorating due to pressure to monetize and people get fed up of a few power mods on these sites dictating permissible opinions.

1 comments

I was a frequent lurker at /r/nonewnormal and I agree with your analysis - dissent from the mainstream opinion that lockdowns and mandates are good, but more of an opinionated criticism than anything banworthy. The moderators put a great deal of work to keep it civil and non-partisan, and their efforts were completely destroyed when they were kicked off Reddit.

Some /r/nonewnormal participants went to Ruqqus, some went to communities.win, but the racist and anti-semitic posters on those sites kept trying to subvert the existing positive culture and it wasn't fun browsing there.

Anyone who can solve the the "less echo chamber than Reddit but less racist than Ruqqus" hosting dilemma stands to gain a large audience.

>Anyone who can solve the the "less echo chamber than Reddit but less racist than Ruqqus" hosting dilemma stands to gain a large audience.

Do you believe that is possible? Ruqqus would lead me to believe that it's not. The moderation needed to make it less racist is anathema and unpalatable to the audience that would need to support it in the first place. And that's not even mentioning the lack of a viable business model if it's not brand-safe.

Not OP, but I think it can be done. You will have to seed the place with some of the best commenters and very slowly let in new folks to avoid the problem Slate Star Codex mentioned. You will also have to moderate heavily, more so than you did before.

I think moderation, by a human being, is key. HN wouldn't be HN if it didn't have Dang.