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Reddit matters, unfortunately.
When reddit came out in 2006, I was instantly enthralled. I loved the branched conversation style over single-threaded forums like PHPBB that dominated the web before. It was a new architecture for conversation, a better one. Plus, it had a smart, techie community that was fun to discuss things with.
Fast forward to today, and the world loves reddit. It's ranked as a top-10 website by traffic. Reddit is the default place to find an intelligent discussion on any niche topic. Whenever I have a medical issue, or I want to explore a new piece of technology, I go to Reddit. When I want product reviews for a pair of leather boots, I go to Google search and type "Best men's leather boots reddit". The cutting edge LLMs are being trained on reddit content. It's an important piece of the foundation of web content.
Which is unfortunate that it's moderated so poorly, and that policy comes from the top down. You know what I mean. themotte.org is one of several diaspora communities that fled reddit due to its heavy-handed, leftist moderation.
It's incredibly frustrating to use. My politics are somewhat esoteric but definitely of the right. On an occasion I'm baited into a conversation with political valence and I'll state a right-wing argument, and more often than not my account gets banned. On X, I saw screenshots of an /r/askReddit post "Republicans, why are you voting for Kamala this time?" and it had had thousands of upvotes and comments. The equivalent self-post "Democrats, why are you voting for Trump?" was banned with zero comments. If a thread is allowed to live for a few hours that draws popular heterodox views, it results in the inevitable thread lock and thousands of deleted comments to prevent "hate"
From my memory, the leftward drift of reddit seems to have occurred over the last 10 years. It hit an inflection point with the election of Trump and the ban of /r/TheDonald. It accelerated again since 2020 with BLM. That was the year that the TERFs were banned en masse (a community that mattered to me, as it helped me get over my own trans-dreaming and be happy with my gender).
Reddit's politics reflect the fact that the company is based in San Francisco. But it is left of center for San Francisco, which puts it far, far to the left of the nation.
And it's a shame! I'd love a higher-quality general purpose discussion forum. The world needs it. When Elon liberated X, that provided an important venue for free speech. But X optimizes for a high-addiction feed of quick information bites. It doesn't allow for as in-depth discussion and community building.
What would such a forum look like? I have some ideas:
It would maintain the threaded format beloved by so many
It would be seeded by a high quality community, such as that found here or on LessWrong
It would have some sort of governance body that would maintain high quality of moderation for the main subs
The easiest, but not cheapest way to liberate Reddit would be to find a billionaire backer to buy it. It's a public company and its marketcap is a hair under $10 billion. The other alternative would be to try to get an alternative off the ground, perhaps building on active and healthy diaspora communities. It would be possible, for example, to give new users credit for karma they have earned on themotte or LessWrong. Selfishly, I would love a forum where I could ask questions to the high-functioning on-the-spectrum folks that populate these places. Reddit without the bottom half of its IQ spectrum would be a superior place for discussing nootropics, health, AI, and similar topics.
I'm a computer programmer. I care about providing community discussion forums. I've spent a good chunk of my life on them. I'm kinda bored at my day job and looking for a new adventure. What do you think?
The only solution is congress to declare that all kind of communities above in which above x% of US citizens participates are public foras with some congress mandated minimum and maximum user rights in relation to 1A. Internet gravitates to winner takes all - it is so far impossible to prevent it, so we should to protect the ability of the people to participate.
I think the better approach is to give platforms the option. If you want to moderate based on content (meaning that you don’t allow perfectly legal things to be posted because you don’t agree with the content) then you’re liable for any copyright and trademark, or libel violation that occurs just like a magazine would be. If you’re a neutral carrier, then muc( like the telephone providers you are not responsible for the content of speech used by users. Let them choose.
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Unless you chose a pretty small X, this is gonna cover at least the Catholic Church :-/
Catholic church online presence in the form of social network is pretty modest.
Who said anything about a social network, you just said any community with a large percentage of members.
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Not easily. If the new site becomes popular or well-known in any way, the woke mob will go after it and try to get it shut down by the advertisers, payment processors, or Cloudflare. (Or the ultimately the government, which doesn't work in the US yet, but they're trying hard to change that.)
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Have you come up with an argument for why this should not be done to you instead, since freedom of speech is "worthless at best"?
Why shouldn't anyone who finds you "harmful" or simply irritating get everyone like you kicked off the Internet or arrested? What principle do you have against it?
Btw, can you link the community you moderate, so we can see what your policies look like in practice?
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