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Comment by tgsovlerkhgsel | Hacker News Reader

A lot of really good points being made. What the thread didn't explain - how do platforms get destroyed if they don't moderate enough?

For example, what stopped reddit from letting the more extreme subs stand, letting the people screaming about it scream until enough people got tired of hearing it? Reddit in particular has the advantage of having separate subreddits, which can have different tolerances for different behaviors.

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I mean... remember Voat? That was literally the whole point was they would take the refugees from banned subreddits into their Reddit clone. The place got unbearably racist and then the site died. I remember because I checked Voat out periodically for a while, I was on the fence about this whole "free speech" debate until I saw the end result.

I think that was a one-man operation and he ran out of money. My guess: Since he couldn't also spin up his own advertising network, he was out of luck.

Continuing to allow fringe views is entirely different from a forum made for those whose views were deemed too extreme elsewhere.

If you want to get theoretical, look up paradox of tolerance. If you want a practical example, look up 'how to deal with nazis at your bar' [1]. Basically you get stuck with the assholes as the good people get silenced or leave. It's a pattern as old as time itself.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TalesFromYourServer/comments/hsiisw...

Popper that formulated the paradox of tolerance was a marxist and invented the paradox of tolerance as an argument based upon victimology (pathos) for why Marxists need to pre-censor people that disagree with them. It’s a dangerous path, especially as Marxists are pathos driven not logos so you don’t need a logical argument before censoring. You just need a pathos statement by a Marxist that they felt victimized by your words, and voila … gulags.

The reason why this is so important for Marxists is that it’s a gnostic end times theology that believe the human collective will manifest Marxist utopia if all alive have gnostic Marxist knowledge, as they believe the Marxists as Gods would create utopia. This is why you hear communists say “communism has not been tried”, as some people alive did not have communist gnostic knowledge

ok but what about bar nazis

The goal of popper was to create asymmetry, where Marxists are allowed to call speech of opponents violence with no reasoned argument and with that justify real violence by Marxists. Stopping volk-Marxism, nazism, is not where this ends.

As always it ends it gulags filled with academics, Trotskyites, any competing faith (Christianity, Islam etc), anyone that has a rich person somewhere in the family tree, whomever annoyed the commissar etc

> What the thread didn't explain - how do platforms get destroyed if they don't moderate enough?

You get brigading or other ever-escalating, internecine battles, and lose a huge chunk of users who get put off by the toxicity and dysfunction, and it becomes a downward spiral as the concentration of radicals in the userbase increases.

A sibling comment mentions Voat (which died in the cradle), but I think Digg is a different example of how platform can implode when most users - who are not ideologically invested either way - get tired of drama.

The thread actually touches on that roughly around here:

https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1514956233005928449

Digg and Voat aside, I think the whole T_D example on reddit is a good example. Like you said, subreddits aren't fully self-contained. They leak, fight against others, and it can very quickly get out of control.

They get destroyed because people stop visiting due to the vile content, and advertisers leave because they don't want to be associated with the vile content.

They make their money from advertisers that don't want their brands associated with particular content.

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