this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2023
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From the outset (2008 account, lurking a few months before that) they had a policy of "so long as it's not illegal." I found this admirable at the time. After T_D, yeah, not so much.
I would still find it admirable, but it isn't possible to do something like that anymore.
If you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches.
I am one of those three principled civil libertarians. I joined Voat in mid-2015, then left some months later because frankly I didn't actually like reading the things they tended to post there. I liked (out of a principled commitment to free speech) that they were allowed to post them, that doesn't mean I wanted to read that stuff.
It's entirely possible to do something like that - the same way it was in 2008. Keep that shit separate.
You have to let users say "fuck off, Nazi."
You have to find moderators who'll see that and say "yeah, fuck off, Nazi."
The site itself doesn't need to do much of anything. Reddit's smartest feature was the separation of communities, so people could largely ignore shit they didn't want to deal with, and all the admins forbade was starting shit across communities. That way tiny subforums of decent people could be reasonably protected from interference by bastards, and tiny subforums of bastards could be kept irrelevant.
For example, the /r/Holocaust subreddit was run by and for Holocaust deniers, for years. Obviously that's awful. But it affected approximately nobody, beyond the initial unpleasant surprise. There wasn't some "trending" feature that fed unwitting users to Engagemagog, whenever people spoke negatively of the fuckers responsible. Early reddit was a site with Nazis, but very plainly not a site by or for Nazis. Decent people outnumber them by a huge margin. So long as they can safely spot, exclude, and tell off those bastards, the co-existence of bastards is tolerable.
Where deliberate neo-Nazi forums like Voat differ from that is in explicitly protecting the worst among them. They screech about freedom of expression but only ever mean the unquestioned ability to yell at the outgroup. That's why none of them really like deliberate neo-Nazi forums. They can't stand each other, either. They demand a captive audience of victims.
If people lack the freedom of association to stay the hell away from Nazis, your site exists to supply bigots with victims.
If people lack the freedom of expression to even tell Nazis to fuck off, your site exists to deliver those victims on a silver plate.
It is possible to hit a balance where intolerant bastards are tolerated, but treated in accordance with their beliefs by everyone sensible and kind. But it's much simpler and easier to recognize that some beliefs aren't worth protecting.
Also that article is predictably a mix of good insight and total crap. SSC has the worst double-reverse-zero-awareness both-sides-ism on the internet. 'Fox lies and projects, but I dunno, maybe they were okay at some point. And as the right lost touch with reality, The Media™ really did develop a liberal bias, proving them right somehow.' Nah. Identifying bullshit is not a bias. People getting more disgusted as assholes embraced fascism is not somehow to blame for people embracing fascism. If consistent human decency looks like "ghettoization" against Nazis, your perspective is fucked beyond all reason.
I am, unlike you, generally a fan of Scott Alexander, and I think he also got it right (more recently) that moderation is different from censorship. I am opposed to most censorship. I am not ever opposed to moderation.
A pleasant surprise from both of oh he means never actually removing content, just letting bastards operate sotto voce.
And still both-sides-ing "people you consider bad," as if the reasons for censoring fascists, leftists, and anyone who criticizes the CCP are equally valid. I despise that "just because you disagree" framing of genocided fantasists versus... their victims.
And concluding that we should just do his thing, by default, and maybe he'll listen if anyone wants to do something else. As if the concepts and their dangers are brand new.
Letting people organize on your platform has consequences. Getting together a labor union is fundamentally not the same thing as getting together a lynch mob.