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Comment by kart23 | Hacker News Reader

I agree that you have to be essentially anonymous to take part in counterculture these days. But the author claims that Discord and Reddit are examples of counterculture. I wholeheartedly disagree, these platforms are overly sanitized, moderated by the company, not the community. On Discord, people get banned for empty mass reports, and they can delete servers as they please. Reddit is valuable for driving communities to self-hosted, private forums, where I believe that counterculture has and will be born from.

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Further, reddit is built from the ground up to force consensus. Counterculture cannot exist on the site by definition, as anything prevalent on the site is there by consensus.

So is HN and any other platform with where upvote/downvote is the primary factor in the algorithm.

Agree - and People should also be aware who funds these sites. Especially reddit.

I'd argue that the way reddit is currently designed is to hold on to it's user base without them having consensus. The way that subreddits allow separation of their user base (but they're all still users and seeing ads, buying gold, etc) allows communities to exist in a way other social media sites don't really allow (except maybe facebook groups).

>Counterculture cannot exist on the site by definition, as anything prevalent on the site is there by consensus.

That makes no sense - consensus must exist within a counterculture for it to be definable, therefore counterculture and consensus can coexist.

Being "prevalent" has no bearing whatsoever on being a counterculture. It's entirely possible for a counterculture to have a subreddit and not be prevalent. The vast majority of content on Reddit never even touches the frontpage.

You could say that a counterculture can't exist on Reddit that runs counter to the platform's terms of service, and that might be true, but it's also conditional.

Reddit is the least countercultural site I can imagine. It's still Top 10 in sites visited, is it not? It's the very zeitgeist of the times.

Those examples weaken an otherwise good article.

Maybe Reddit as a whole, but what are your thoughts on WallStreetBets? It seems that WSB has all of the elements of a counterculture, although maybe diluted after the wide spread GME interest.

WSB is a shade of its former self now due to the onslaught of new members

Has a "what was WSB before the eternal September" escape hatch subreddit popped up yet?

Yes, /r/wallstreetbetsogs.

Check out /r/wallstreetbetsogs. It's an attempt to bring back the old school WSB.

I tried it out for a few days. It's also nowhere near the old WSB.

WSB seems like the definition of a smart hedge fund that managed to manipulate the market transparently. Everything there reeks of fake, manufactured and engineered "counter" culture

Yeah because WSB uses another language that many do not know, or care to know.

I’m really not sure “diamond hands” and “retard” count so much as another language. I think the big gap between there and other places on the same subject is on “gambling logic”, not right or wrong, I’ve seen more people there admit that than “Wallstreet Types” who would be trillionaires if they actually knew how to win.

Fair. But there is also some assumed knowledge of what futures and puts are, no?

I think the thing that is/was countercultural were the actions taken by WallStreetBets, not the site itself.

It used to be fairly "counter-culture"ish back in the day before it was run like a corporation.

Reddit is a meta site. The default subs are of course the default consensus, but you can find subs of nearly every other position under the sun.

No. Most "radical" subs will be suppressed or otherwise banned by selectively enforcing the rules. For every rule broken in r/thedonald or r/chapotraphouse you could find dozens of similar examples in r/news and r/politics.

You can absolutely find subreddits dedicated to pretty much every extremist position to this day.

Wait for them to grow up to even a modest number of subscribers. First they will be brigaded (with no action from the admins), then they will be quarantined and lastly they will be outright banned.

I'll add that Discord does not support right-to-read. They will occasionally remove a server and ban everyone who had access to that server, regardless of whether or not they had posted or participated in that server or contacted any members of that server. They view the act of reading the server posts as a bannable offense.

What incident are you referring to? Having trouble searching for it.

There are multiple occurances of that. They do that when they fail to identify the actual offender or they ban for a non-existent reason ("just to ban it"). If they find the actual offender, things differ and actual offender gets banned.

That makes sense. I’m just looking to read some forum drama, or something, about one of these moments. Doesn’t have to be a news article.

Yep, or self hosted sites

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