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Comment by loudtieblahblah | Hacker News Reader

Which is why breaking away from the centralized web sucks.

Rumble, voat, parler, gab, even as I feel like the left has left me these days, these places still largely look like dumpster fires to me.

The centralized web is awful. Getting away from it is awful.

I don't know what's worse - the endless corporate censorship or the insanely explicit content, outright bigotry, and anti-science quacks who fill up spaces rebelling against it.

My ethics says the Corp censorship is far more problematic (when taking in the big picture) , but as someone wanting to participate in a free and constructive community it leaves one with no where to go.

Social media was a mistake. Allowing tech companies to become as big as they are were too.

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> The centralized web is awful. Getting away from it is awful.

That's just because a significant amount of people are awful. And now everyone is on the web, including the awful ones.

It's not social media, it's us.

It's both. Social media provides a positive feedback loop for awfulness.

It certainly polarizes people. The people in the middle who aren't that passionate about things tend to just scroll past, but the “passionate” ones just yell at each other and either keep doing that ad inifinitum or they form an echo chamber where they can call others snowflakes.

It's not just polarization. Polarization is a natural state of human societies and is a good thing as it enables things to move forward (in either direction).

Silicon Valley corporations, whether for profit or by ideology, have pushed nazi/conspirationist propaganda to everyone in the form of recommendations for many years. To be fair, so have traditional media outlets, neither of which is excusable in my view.

Maybe someone will eventually take this into consideration in their design.

HN for example. I find this community conforms to my own notions of informative, open, and smoothly moderated.

Provided one stays within the local Overton Window, I agree.

I think you summed it up quite well. At this moment, there does not seem to be a space between the corporate you-are-the-product mainstream and the weirdos with an agenda crowd at the edges for a person to just be, speak and think in a relatively free and neutral sense without ending up in some ulterior trap.

Aren't you having a discussion on just such a platform?

Also what can't you say on, say, Twitter that you want to say?

https://m.slashdot.org/story/396689

There is no such space because there can be no such space.

If you want a community without bad actors, bigots, cranks, etc, then it has to have rules and moderation, which means censorship. If you want free speech, you're going to get the bigots, cranks and bad actors. "Speak(ing) and think(ing) in a relatively free and neutral sense without ending up in some ulterior trap" requires curation and tone policing, which is censorship. Otherwise, the bigots and the cranks are also free to speak and think in the same way as everyone else, ruin the community and drive everyone else away.

You can't have your cake and eat it too, you have to pick one.

The problem is the censors are also prone to being bad actors, flexing their agenda by bending and stretching rules far beyond their intention and turning them into another tool of our tribalism battles. It's used to squash dissent and often not enacted in good faith.

People are called bigots for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with bigotry. And it's done intentionally to weild power over wrong-thinkers.

The bad actors are at all levels and of all persuasions

The advantage of Federation is that this is largely solved by the nature of federation. You just join a server with not to much drama and a culture you agree with.

There are a number of problems with the model (including finding such a server). But censors flexing their agenda isn't a real problem in my experience.

Can't we adjust for 3-sigma conversations? :)

"If you want a community without bad actors, bigots, cranks, etc, then it has to have rules and moderation, which means censorship."

There are alternatives to rules, moderation and censorship that are still effective at filtering out undesirables.

As far back as more than 25 years ago, usenet news readers had kill files, scoring and filtering at the client level.

For various reasons, the mainstream social media platforms chose not to give their users these tools, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.

USENET more or less burned down in flames because killfiling the lunatics didn't actually stop them from taking over the asylum. Both Facebook and Twitter (especially Twitter) give users copious abilities to block users and filter content... and guess what? It's still considered censorship, and it doesn't work at scale.

I'm registered on a mastodon instance and I find it quite nice and not at all a dumpster fire.

If you're a conservative or so you will probably have a hard time finding an instace you feel at home at, but the defederation of mastodon instances from instances that allow hate speech, racism, homophobia, etc. are precisely what prevents it from being a dumpster fire.

The Fediverse is not without issues but I think it is an example of fuctioning decentralized social media.

We have so many techniques for extracting signal from noise (from reputation, to curation, to tags, scores, bayesian filtering, etc) which could be used to form a metastructure on top of sites like PeerTube and provide viable alternatives to both censorship and free-for-all high noise cess pools.

I agree it's possible, but do you know people working on such participative federated feeds/indexes?

I looked on Rumble to see the videos on the front page.

Headline was:

A Vivafrei video on Trudeau rescinding Emergency Orders Act

Editors Picks were:

Mudroom Remodel + Vacuum Charging

Very old COFFE GRINDER restoration

This Is Why They Did It, by Russell Brand

Wife CHEATS, Wants CHILD SUPPORT For Illegitimate Daughter?

In the News Section:

    Trudeau announces end of Emergencies Act

    Shaffer: Biden Telegraphing Ukraine Moves

    Trump: Biden's America is getting bum-rushed

    Ukrainians express support for state of emergency

Viral

    Puppy gets super excited when it's time to open presents

    Mother cat adorably hugs & kisses her kitten

    Tired man & his puppies fall asleep together for nap time

    Woman hilariously struggles to fit balloons in her trunk

Podcasts

    Freedom Fighters Forced Trudeau to Revoke The Emergency Powers Act

    Pfizer Withdraws Application for Covid-19 Vaccine in India

    Stand For Freedom: Why one gym owner pushed back against tyranny and now is running for Congress

    Saagar Enjeti CAUGHT LYING About Russia & Ukraine On Breaking Points

    The Dive With Jackson Hinkle

So, apart from seeing a few folks that got cancelled like Dan Bongino, looks like Vimeo or Youtube. Where are the awful dumpter fires?

Similar here. I'm no fan of the weird right wing self parody copycats, but Rumble seems to be less inundated and more generally acceptable than the others it generally gets associated with. Not sure if it'll last, but I've heard some of the podcasts and such I follow mention their Rumble alongside Facebook and Twitter in the general spiel. Gives me a little hope that an upstart is still possible.

Reddit started out with that status and it became accepted by some of the masses.

Reddit has a outlet though, you can just make your own echo chamber there, and don't have to leave the platform unless you're a particularly ornery bunch like the gamergate stuff and subreddits where people start threatening and doxxing.

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