| I've been meaning to write down an extensive description of a Swedish forum which describes itself as "Real freedom of expression". Obviously, the forum is only in Swedish but with English allowed, but I think it's the best and worst forum in the world, especially for discussions around sensitive topics you cannot really discuss without a lot of feelings in the real world. You literally have far-leftists discussing with nazis, among computer nerds, among gardeners, among pedophiles, among drug users, among economists, among car fanatics and everyone in-between. Literally any walks of life is present on the forum. It puts a huge weight on anonymity, and really strict moderation about the rules and puts quality above quantity when it comes to what gets to stay on the forum. It's text only (with allowed URLs) which presumably covers the forum a lot better when it comes to people trying to take it down. Of course it's not without its problems, which it has been in Swedish media a lot for, but it also has a ton of benefits in that it allows all these different people to communicate and discuss with each other. I think one big cornerstone to the success of this forum is it's really strict moderation of the messages. I'm sure 99% of all the Swedish people already know what forum I'm talking about, as it is the most popular forum in the Nordics, but for the rest of you, the forum is called Flashback Forum and started as a kind of revolutionary fanzine back in the 80s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashback_Media_Group It is a really radical place (compared to how discussions are usually held in Sweden) so worth highlighting. Yours truly also used to moderate some of the categories in the forum so happy to answer any questions. Seeing the current atmosphere on the internet where discussing topics with people you disagree with is really difficult, I've been thinking about maybe trying to replicate something like Flashback but for a world-wide audience. Ultimately, like most problems, this is not a technological problem but a people problem. The moderation has to be 99% right for this to even work, and the moderation team needs to have proper tools available to do their job, and everyone on that team has to be 100% aligned. I think this is probably why Flashback ended up so successful. > This is because even if you do it right, no search engine will index your content. Flashback is pretty much a "anything goes text-only forum" but even with that, Google ranks Flashback really high in Sweden. It's unlikely you search for anything on Swedish Google and there are no hits from Flashback on the first page or two. |