Well, because I don't want to join communities where hate speech is common, much less the prevailing type of content. I don't think that speech should be outlawed, but that doesn't mean I want to be where it is. So if reddit helps remove hate speech and it funnels to these alternatives, that only makes reddit more attractive to me.

Plainly: I want reddit to censor hate speech on their site, but I don't want hosting companies to disallow those alernative sites to exist, nor do I want Chrome to disallow any user to visit any of those alternatives in their browser.

Ok. But when you start denying basic infrastructure to those with viewpoints you dislike --- domain names, DDOS protection, app store distribution --- you're no longer trying to just maintain some particular community's culture, but instead eradicate certain speech from public life.

It should be illegal to deny fundamental infrastructure to someone on the basis of his philosophy or point of view. That's what a free society means.

You're arguing a point that the parent poster never made.

The parent poster simply said that they want to join communities free of (or, mostly free of) hate speech and that being free/mostly free of hate speech is an attractive quality for them.

Not once did they advocate for denying infrastructure or any of the other things your entire comment is based on. In fact, they stated the opposite.

But is Reddit a community, or is it infrastructure to create communities (which would be the subreddits)?

Engage in whatever wordplay you want: reddit is a website built on community content and interaction. That there are user-created communities within the larger community does not turn it into some sort of "infrastructure" of internet expression. The infrastructure to build one's own site, and communities that go with it, are and should continue to be made available to all regardless of viewpoint. Given Voat's existence and the fact that people do use it, I do not see a problem.

They are welcome to buy their own servers or even rent them. We don't have to subsidize their free use of internet resources.

Isn't that exactly what these federated platforms (and the apps to access them) are doing?

And they're welcome to build their own anti-DDOS infrastructure.

And their own app stores.

And their own apps.

And their own domain name registrars.

And their own payment processors.

You say that, but it's a well trodden argument.

> We don't have to subsidize their free use of internet resources.

We subsidize the FAANG's use of internet resources; the Internet was largely originally created with public money (military, academia, etc).

> They are welcome to buy their own servers or even rent them.

Are they? What if they get banned from there? What if they can't collect money from their community, because all the donation sites ban them? What if their donation sites are killed because all the payment processors drop them?

Your argument leads to the logical end of "they're welcome to make their own internet".

What happens when something you like to discuss falls into the category of hate speech? You think it couldn't happen, but plenty of topics that were totally reasonable subjects of discussion, plenty of totally reasonable publicly-held opinions from 20 years ago are now in this basket. It's totally plausible to imagine some newer topic you feel strongly about eventually becoming so, and you ending up on the side of wanting to have honest discussion about it and being locked out.

Can't imagine it happening to you? Well, maybe you don't like pedophilia, or the huge push of incest porn that seems to be everywhere. Maybe you have legitimate, non-racially-oriented concerns about the riots around the country? Maybe you're worried about some particular changes coming to your children's education, or you're worried about the impact of ideas like UBI? Well, your opinions that are acceptable to post in polite places today might not be in 2030.

The only way anyone should be okay with this continual incursion into free speech is if they have truly tied themselves to the idea of being 100% on board with whatever restriction is coming down the pipe next. Such a person has no principles, and it's hard to imagine defending them.

> Are they? What if they get banned from there? What if they can't collect money from their community, because all the donation sites ban them? What if their donation sites are killed because all the payment processors drop them? Your argument leads to the logical end of "they're welcome to make their own internet".

This is slippery-slope nonsense, just where this conversation always ends up. You can "what if..." you're way to us banning these individuals from driving cars if you want, but it's not what's being discussed.

I am very, very, very in favor of reddit disallowing hate speech on their community as that is an active behavior on the site itself for a community they own. I am very, very, very against any organization barring access to things like domain name registration, hosting, etc. on the basis of their expressed ideas up to the point of them directly enabling clearly criminal behavior (e.g., directly organizing violent attacks, sharing revenge porn, etc.).

Private citizens kicking someone out of a restaurant for being rude is not the same thing as government actors barring them from ever owning a restaurant, or going somewhere else where their rudeness is welcome.

> The only way anyone should be okay with this continual incursion into free speech is if they have truly tied themselves to the idea of being 100% on board with whatever restriction is coming down the pipe next. Such a person has no principles, and it's hard to imagine defending them.

This is a false dichotomy built on the aforementioned slippery slope fallacy.

> slippery slope fallacy

You can't claim slippery slope if it already happened. Payment processors, domain name registrars, hosting providers, and anti-DDoS services already ban people they dislike. If we slide any further down this slope, the deplatformed will have to lay their own optic fibre.

You can also get banned from payment processors and Uber as well.

There are few if any platforms on the open web free of censorship, they just draw their line in the sand in a different arbitrary place than others.

Banning illegal content, spam, harassment, etc (which even the most hardcore "censorship free" platforms do) are also forms of censorship.

You never head of Freenet? There is no such thing as censorship there.

I'm sure they would censor messages used as a denial of service attack.

Its not possible to do that. Nodes cant know whats in a chunk of data that comes by and from whom it comes. But freenet is to host website like sites called freesites. You cant really spam anyone with sites you can create as many as you want but if no one visits them they will eventually just "fall out" of the de central storage.

Technically you could probably bring it down if you simulate a massive amount of users who only access spam sites but that would probably become rather expensive because you would attack your own nodes and your own nodes would try to help the network. It would also need to persist forever else everything would simply go back to normal shortly after the attack is stooped.

The danger here is viewpoint based discrimination. It should be illegal for a big platform to shut down certain points of view when these points of view are legal and expressed in a normal manner. You can shut down spam without harming the principle of free expression because you can express any idea in a way that isn't spam.

The law gives you a legitimate and stable line that you can draw between allowed and disallowed speech. It's fine for a platform to censor what's illegal, because in a sense, we all agree on the law and have a say in its content. But we have no say in big tech content policy, and that's what makes it illegitimate.

My basic point is that it's infuriating and wrong for big tech to impose its values on the public. A public space that's privately owned is still a public space. A free society is one where you don't get barred from public spaces because of your opinions.

> It should be illegal for a big platform to shut down certain points of view when these points of view are legal and expressed in a normal manner.

Platforms aren't public venues, they're private businesses offering access to a service under terms that serve their interests and business needs first and foremost... terms that everyone agreed to before being able to use the platform.

>The law gives you a legitimate and stable line that you can draw between allowed and disallowed speech. It's fine for a platform to censor what's illegal, because in a sense, we all agree on the law and have a say in its content. But we have no say in big tech content policy, and that's what makes it illegitimate.

The law also allows for private ownership of businesses, contracts and freedom of association. The law says Google's platform is Google's property and Google can do whatever it darn well likes with it.

>You can shut down spam without harming the principle of free expression because you can express any idea in a way that isn't spam.

Who gets to define what spam is? Free expression isn't free if someone has the ability to define any arbitrary speech they don't like as "spam" and censor it. All of the slippery slope arguments applied to censorship of any other form of speech also apply to spam.

Given that they are not operating as neutral public venues then they should also not be afforded protection under Section 230. If they actively moderate they should be fully liable.

The very point of section 230 was to protect companies even if they did moderate. What you are suggesting is that section 230 should be repealed, and let the courts sort it all out.

IANAL but I've seen enough controversy around this to mention that not everyone agrees with that interpretation of 230 or its ramifications.

It's a shame they don't bake cakes.

Why should e.g. hate speech be allowed but not spam? Spam is perfectly legal.

You’re not actually against lines being drawn through legal speech — you just don’t like where they fall.

> Spam is perfectly legal

That's a somewhat bold claim. At minimum, CAN-SPAM makes the worst of it illegal.

CAN-SPAM only covers email [1]:

> [An Act] To regulate interstate commerce by imposing limitations and penalties on the trans-mission of unsolicited commercial electronic mail via the Internet.

[1] https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/cases/2007...

Spam is made illegal in America via the CAN-SPAM act.

CAN-SPAM only covers email; see sibling comment.

Censorship not related to government always strikes me as just complaining. Private entities, whether they be individuals or businesses should be free to determine what is an acceptable uses of their services, and what is not.

Do you allow any form of speech in your house or is your house a platform that censors speech?

I think comparisons between trillion dollar companies, counties, and houses make for weak arguments.

Counties can imprison or kill you for speaking incorrectly.

Companies? Only have the power to cause me trouble when they are oligopolies, e.g. big tech right now. It can be quite severe trouble, even if it isn’t literal imprisonment.

A house? I am aware that poverty (and being a minor) forces some people to live with abusive persons who can give them a choice of silence or homelessness. That kind of evil doesn’t scale up to affect everyone (perhaps if it did we might try harder to fix it?)

I think this specific case is a bit different, as Google sold the house (i.e. phone) to me, yet they want to retain control as if they were the owner.

The Play Store is not really part of the phone. The phone just has a client that connects to it.

If they deleted the apps already installed on your phone, then I'd agree.

A home is not a platform at all, let alone a public one open to everyone, anonymously and without needing an invitation. It's a personal and intimate place.

Most service platforms are not public, either, requiring, at minimum, a way to identify the content creator, even if only to the admins. While consuming the content may be anonymous, production is not. The platform itself is only acting as a publisher. In this specific instance, Google is n the wrong.

4chan, being the obvious exception, since content can be created anonymously.

Irrelevant nitpicking. So it's pseudonymous, there is no practical difference.

There’s a huge difference. The government has to let you speak. The corresponding duty on your part is that you won’t do harm (eg., shouting Fire, etC.)

That right, and duty, does not exist on a private platform that you don’t own. You are limited by the TOS and license that you, like most, willfully skip over. A private, non-government platform can tell you to STFU and Get Out and they don’t even need a reason, because it’s their platform.

You can easily set up your own free speech platform, but nobody is required to listen. That’s the main attraction of social media, a more-or-less guaranteed audience. At least until someone tells you to GTFO if you’re not hosting.

You must have replied to the wrong comment.

There’s a difference between “has some of it” and “is full of it”.

As SSC says, even if witch hunts are genuinely bad, if you found a town with the founding principle of having no witch hunts, you will end up with a town with 5 genuine civil libertarians, and 100 witches.

I think an interesting strategy would be to found a site with an initially high level of censorship, but a public commitment to reduce the amount/degree of censorship on the site over time with a particular timetable.

Unless there's a limitless supply of witches somewhere, the more witch-hunt-free towns there are, the more the witches will be distributed among those towns, because witches aren't a homogeneous group either.

So in theory, voat & co should either shrink or get less radical the more reddit-alternatives there are. That is, unless reddit is turning normal people into witches that will then populate the new alternative platforms.

What do you think a normal person thinks when he sees a witch being burned?

Normal as in "average" or normal as in some kind of healthy & moral?

The average person puts their pitch fork back down and enjoys the bonding experience that a successful hunt brings to the community. The out-group isn't just persecuted because they are different, the whole process also helps confirm the unity of the in-group.

Historically speaking, "Good riddance."

This is an interesting point! However, I also note that there is a limited number of “genuine civil libertarians” (or, of people in general I guess), so I am not sure that having more of these would necessarily improve the ratios between the two within any particular town/site ?

Also if people are spread sufficiently thin, some of the sites will die from “no one is using this”, I think.

I don’t know how this all balances out, but what you brought up does seem like an important force/mechanism to take into account. So, I’ll say “Further work is needed in order to understand the behavior in this area.”, haha.

I'd guess that the need for genuine civil libertarians would go down with the witch density. The super majority of people is probably fine with seeing one witch per day, but they really don't want to live anywhere where they feel surrounded by witches.

The dynamics involved in city districts rising and falling and rising again might be similar. Online communities lack the rent-dynamic however. A "difficult" part of town gets more attractive because the rent is much cheaper. I don't know whether there's anything equivalent in online communities that would "gentrify" a toxic community.

I think you just described TikTok. There is an extreme level of censorship due to how many children use the app. They've achieved a level of family-friendlyness that YouTube is trying very hard to get. Regarding politics, TikTok has often said that they just aren't a place for politics, and now they are being pressured to let up on political censorship because of issues about China and the coming US presidential election.

Huh.

I was imagining an organization which from the outset planned to be very permissive in what they eventually allowed, with initial restrictions just being in order to cultivate a desirable community to start with, but now that you mention it, perhaps the motivation behind the policies don’t matter so much as the policies themselves. Good point.

That being said, I don’t imagine that TikTok will become quite as permissive in the end as I was imagining?

No, there's no difference between "has some of it" and "is full of it". Where could the line possibly be drawn between those two? Why should your values in particular control other people's speech? If you don't want to participate on a discussion because it's full of something you dislike, that's your call. But big tech companies have no business shutting down other people's legal conversations.

Quantitative differences are still differences. 1% is different from 1.01% and from 80% .

My preferences determine what communities I prefer to be a part of.

I prefer to not be part of a community where the majority says super racist garbage.

As such, I choose not to join such a community/website.

I think you guys agree. You are free to not participate. The point of contention is: are you free to deny others ability to participate if they want? (if you had that ability)

That's where idea of public platforms as infrastructure (and actual infrastructure like DNS and carriers) if coming from.

This reminds me of people wanting to ban or filter torrent protocol itself, instead of illegal content on it.