The best way to stop an alternative becoming filled with extremists is to start it off as a community for a specific audience, then expand to a more general one later on.

Twitch and Discord did well there for instance. Started out as gaming focused, then became more mainstream.

By doing this, you bring in non extremists early on, and tilt the audience pecentages in such a way that most regulars aren't such extremists.

The problem is most 'alternative' platforms market themselves as 'Reddit/Facebook/Twitter/YouTube except with free speech and no rules' rather than 'an art/gaming/music/sports themed alternative to Reddit/Facebook/Twitter/YouTube with free speech'.

Former means you draw in the outcasts and extremists, latter means you draw in another audience that can then be made more mainstream by opening up support for more and more fields of interest.

This is a seriously good observation. To add to it: moderation is _the_ hard problem of discussion forums. A nine year old can write a discussion board in python, any five decent developers can write one that scales reasonably. Or, you know, copy an open source codebase. Way harder is getting any actual users, but even that’s nothing compared to community maintenance.

Saying you have no moderation is attractive to one crowd in particular (there are other people who theoretically favour it, but practically they’ll use a moderated forum anyway). So you get a quick numbers boost but you’ve now fundamentally limited your audience to people prepared to share head-space with that crowd.

Reddit, Facebook and Twitter got in early and got to spend a lot of time learning on the job. Unless you start small, you’re not going to get that luxury now.

(Please don’t take this as an endorsement of any particular moderation policy, in theory or practice. Most of them are kind of awful at times. But the problem is hard.)

Moderation is extremely difficult. I can't say HN is done well because there is a heavy subjective hand.

The only thing good are the vast majority of users here have good intention. If only HN had multiple boards with various mods.

I see what you're saying, but I have to say as someone who was there, this was not the problem with Reddit. Early Reddit (as in first year) was extremely tech/programming/"netizen" focused, and it was really a lot like HN has been for years.

But when you start to gain popularity, the way you treat "free speech" becomes an issue. Discord is not a great example in that niche communities are not scraped for web search (that I know of).

But if you're just copying reddit, why would someone want to go to "a reddit for art" if reddit already has a section for art? You have to offer something substantially better, otherwise it's easier to just stay where the traffic is.

The interface on Reddit is garbage, a huge chunk of the existing users are garbage, people brigade into subreddits, the admins have the final word over you; and, finally, Reddit has no features for specific communities (e.g. image tools for art).

> I would love to switch to a better alternative

I would love to switch to Reddit from 2008.

I would love to switch to the World from 2008...

I'll take the 90s please... we all wanna go back to some period of time where the memories evoke the strongest feeling...

funny how people used to say that 90s were the worse decade.. Yesterday I was hearing the acoustic from Pearl Jam.. aaah the 90s, best decade <3

I was just the right age to enjoy the 90s to full effect. So much happened (to me) musically and culturally in that decade, that it has to be the best.

It's such a large site now with so many different communities and types of users. My opinion is it has transitioned from a forum to a social media platform. I think it caters to people who like the content side of social media, but do not wish to see people they know in real life (which can evoke jealousy and other negative emotions).

the developers of Lemmy are very clear about their stance regarding nazis at least, and that's more than I can say for Reddit https://dev.lemmy.ml/post/34286

Their developer code of conduct also looks good in that regard

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/master/CODE_OF_CONDUC...

Seeing how the flagship instance is run by people who are socially conscious I don't see this being a problem. Pretty much same thing happened with Mastodon Social, and with millions of users the community is still great. It's far friendlier and more civilized than Twitter.

What do you mean by "it," in "what it has become?" Also, what value(s) you're looking for in "better alternative," because none of anything in your comment is specific besides "neo-nazi." I'm aware of the site's problems with them of course, but they don't encroach on my daily usage, so I'm curious what might be pushing you away if it's something other than a constant barrage of neonazis in every subreddit you subscribe.

What are you thoughts on tildes? In my experience the community there is reasonable and definitely not filled with nazis.

I really liked the idea originally. Unfortunately it turned into a pretty hard left leaning echo chamber. This was partially driven by mods from extreme left subreddits being very active on the site.

Had potential, but it's extreme far left now. Just as bad IMO.

Please. I understand that extreme left people can be super annoying but they never threatened me to kill my family and my friends.

>Please. I understand that extreme left people can be super annoying but they never threatened me to kill my family and my friends.

Simply write "All lives matter" on Twitter (because all lives DO matter, right?) and watch what happens.

The fact is that extreme right people did threaten me, my family, my friends. Today and in the past.

Yes if I go trigger the worst kind of people on the worst social network, I will get mean messages. But I don't do that.

Try tildes.net

there’s extremists on every platform

There is poo on every surface. The key question is the amount of poo relative to the other stuff.

Here’s another question: Would any of our lives be any worse — or would they be better? — if we simply chose to walk away and not be a part of any of these platforms, HN included? How much of our lives is made up of karma whoring, level grinding, and falling into the <https://xkcd.com/386/> trap?

I dislike this framing because I think the important thing here -- the need to resist false equivalences between different platfroms -- gets papered over, when it's a really practical and important question with real implications. I don't think 'all platforms are bad' represents forward motion in a conversation about what platforms are able to do differently to make them better than others.

I learn stuff on HN every time I visit. Reddit is (somewhat) entertaining, but I don’t usually learn anything important there.

Doesn't this depend on the subreddit? Some are "chatty" or full of memes, but others are very informative for some niches.

If you want a subreddit for enthusiasts of $NICHE, you're likely to find it, and it's likely to be useful.

> Would any of our lives be any worse — or would they be better? — if we simply chose to walk away and not be a part of any of these platforms

Monks walk away from pretty much everything, and have been doing so for a long time now. They continue living. Does the result of that qualify as either better or worse than what you have now?

I made 40 dollars last weekend by falling into the https://xkcd.com/386 "trap". Thursday before last weekend someone released a starlink coverage map that was wrong, specifically it made arbitrary circles on a globe and pretended they were coverage. In order to fix this mistake I made https://droid.cafe/starlink.

A reddit user was kind enough to spontaneously donate 40 dollar (in btc) to me despite the fact that I didn't solicit donations. It's also been a pretty productive endeavor for learning about front end development, listening to feedback and giving users what they're asking for, learning to use cloudflare/gcp, and now learning to optimize glsl shaders to enable a fancier renderer while still getting reasonable performance on cheap hardware.

I feel like I often learn a lot about one random topic or another when I research so I can accurately correct someone who is being wrong on the internet. The above is an interesting example because there was a concrete deliverable at the end of the process, but I don't feel the fact that I learned from the process is particularly unique.

I do it as I would otherwise be playing video games. If I have a big project going on, I’ll ignore Reddit and Hacker News for weeks.

I also learn a lot of new stuff.

I think you could credibly ask that question for nearly anything outside of human basic needs. But the answer is simple: people are entertained and enriched by different things.

I certainly spend some amount of time on HN replying to things I shouldn't bother with, but the majority of my time on HN is filled with learning new things and hearing interesting perspectives on those things. I consider it a net positive in my life, and over the years I've gotten better at avoiding the negative parts.

I think the problem is that because reddit banned a lot of extremist communities there is pent up demand within those groups for a new host platform. If you start a new reddit competitor, users with those extemist views are looking for a home and will be the first to find and adopt it.

A large well formed community can survive a portion of its users with negative comments and posts, but I doubt you can build a community on the back of those users. Instead that negative group poisons the the platform for a more mainstream crowd. People won't join a plateform if the first thing they are exposed to supports extremist views.

Agreed, but at least reddit is unique in that it seems to get accused of being accused of both kinds of extremism, Tumble/Twitter/HN seem to think it's a right wing shithole, while the 4chan/Imageboard ilk thinks it's a leftie propaganda machine.

That's not the case with the alternatives, most tend to go really hard on one side of the extremism scale (right: voat, left: raddle).

I can't imagine thinking reddit is right-wing in any way whatsoever. Just looking at the front page (/r/all) I counted five explicitly left-leaning posts (on subreddits like /r/whitepeopletwitter), three that alluded to left-leaning subjects in a positive way (such as a post on /r/atheism), and 0 posts that even came close to kind of sounding like it might have been right-leaning. And this doesn't even consider the comments which is where the real hivemind exists.

Yes it hosts /r/the_donald or whatever but reddit as a whole is very left-leaning.

Edit: Hey ya'll instead of downvoting me how about providing some evidence of widespread right-leaning thoughts that aren't isolated to individual subreddits and shamed throughout the rest of reddit? Spoiler: You can't

> /r/the_donald

They shut it down. 0 new posts for past 3 months.

Reddit didn't shut them down, the mods of r/t_d set it to only approved posters and nobody is approved.

Yes, they moved to https://thedonald.win/

I've observed the same thing honestly, most default + biggest subs are pretty left leaning. Though reddit does tend to host some right wing subs for which you have you go out of your way to find. There's also some old hate subs they removed few years back, people tend to get the perception of reddit from that time.

This needs a larger comment, but the "intellectual right" has largely self-destructed, leaving the focus entirely on white supremacy, homophobia, anti-contraception, anti-abortion, global warming denial, and weird conspiracy theories in general.

It's pointless trying to be a "respectable" right wing intellectual because you have to spend all your time running around justifying the completely incoherent things that Trump is talking about.

Chicago school economics? You can have a discussion with that, and leave it civil. That doesn't work with the_donald.

This is just you choosing which part of right-wing ideas you like. I could make the exact same argument with the left.

"Yeah, saving trees and whales sounds fine, but they should stop it with all the LGBTQ, BLM, socialist stuff"

You can't have a civil discussion with those people either. In fact it's getting increasingly difficult to have civil discussions with anyone (HN is an exception because everyone is on their best behaviour, but to a large extent this results in self-censorship; you can see that the least politically correct comments are made with throw-away accounts).