Got to be honest, bro, I don't really care to sacrifice for "the good of society" or whatever. If you make a website where some dude is going to post anti-Semitic shit everywhere and someone else is going to have to politely explain that Jewish lizard people are not conspiring to elect a Black woman as President then sure, you can have it.

But that's not a sacrifice I want to make. I'll go to the website where I don't have to do that. And the website will come to me.

Like, I don't see you moving to the ghetto and putting your kids in shitty schools so that you can even things out. This ain't different. I don't like those people at the party, so I'm not gonna go if you invite them. So you pick: them or me?

Either choice is fine. Reddit picked me. Voat picked them. And we are where we are.

Can we discuss if overweight people should pay more for sits in a plane? Can we discuss if a trans male who identifies herself to be a woman should be allowed to take part in female sport competition (box, running)? I am afraid we no longer can discuss such "uncomfortable" topics because starting such discussion of Facebook or Twitter leads to being "flagged", shadow-banned, because this is hate speech or something-foby or hurts someone's feeling.

I see this as a problem as censorship is precisely what pushes people into bubbles that cannot communicate outside and that get more and more radical. You can't have liberal democracy in a bubble society, as there is no respect for opposite opinion, there is only pushing one's agenda as soon as a given bubble wins the election. Democracy becomes just a tirrany of those who managed to win election (which means those who has more money and who has better access to media).

You can debate those things on reddit without being censored on a lots of subreddits. However, the reason these are such contentious topics is that 99% of the time they are aired it's either people using them to complain about SJW culture, or people trying to stir up shit.

The last 1% is people who legitimately care about these people and want to discuss their wellbeing and rights. But I'm putting that in to be generous, I don't think I'm ever seen these topics discussed in good faith.

You did not bring them up in good faith, for example, you just used obese and trans people to make a point. I have no reason to think you actually care about them or would ever engage in a conversation about their rights within our society.

Or do your existing opinions mean you view all discussions on this topic as bad-faith, exactly as the parent comment describes?

> However, the reason these are such contentious topics is that 99% of the time they are aired it's either people using them to complain about SJW culture

Is that the cause of the alleged 'bubbelisation' of social media networks by "censorship", or is that actually caused by the supposed censorship?

PS: Not trying to imply anything, you still make a valid point.

Not likely. That in and of itself is a bad-faith claim frequently used by bigots to try and evade getting thrown out of a venue, by turning around the accusation onto those calling out bad behaviour. Unfortunately a lot of peope have taken this claim at face value, and have started repeating it.

The thing is, I have discussed these sorts of topics with people in good faith. The common factor is that those discussions were never in public venues, because someone who wants to discuss these topics in good faith realizes that they are sensitive and easily-abused.

On the other hand, every time I've seen someone "discuss" these topics in public, there were clearly identifiable signs of bad faith, independent from the topic itself. It usually doesn't take much prodding to make the mask come off, so to say.

Edit: For additional background, I'm mostly speaking with my "community moderator" hat on, here. I somewhat regularly get brought in to clean up mismoderated communities that have gotten completely out of hand, so over time I've learned how to identify bad-faith actors quickly, separately from opinions.

No, I'm quite clear about what would constitute a good faith argument. For example, regarding obese people on planes having to pay for extra seats, a good faith argument would involve genuine discussion about the impact on these people, whether it's prejudiced to do so, whether it's within the rights of the airlines to charge them extra, and so on.

A bad faith argument is where this topic is brought up as a strawman when the real topic of conversation is censorship or some such.

I'm fully aware that this entire comment thread, including my replies, constitutes a bad faith argument, BTW. We are not genuinely discussing the plight of obese people, we're just using their plight to further our own discussions.

> You did not bring them up in good faith

Nobody talks about the airplane ticket thing if they care about the "wellbeing and rights" of morbidly obese people. But that doesn't detract from the facts of the point. Whether someone does or doesn't care about the wellbeing of some unnamed morbidly obese person is irrelevant to whether or not they're making a good point or argument.

Seats in planes were designed for average people. It means that myself, as an average person, have the right to be relatively comfortable in that chair. If an obese person sits next to me, I have nothing against them on a human level - but the fact that they use my space. They are not comfortable either (certainly physically and probably psychologically) so if we accept obese people in our society (which is the case), they should have special chairs in planes, similar to the situation for disabled people. They should not, objectively, pay more for them even if I think that in the vast majority of cases obesity is a choice (I am somehow overweight and do not think that this is anybody's else fault than mine). This is akin (at least in France where I live) to the fact that they will be medically treated with my money (same as the ones that smoke cigarettes will be treated for heart issues or pulmonary cancer).

Now, should someone who horribly stinks be allowed on the seat next to mine? No, because we do not accept stinkiness, as a society. It is completely arbitrarily, but this is how life is.

The example in sports is a good one too. I think that we should not test anybody for anything because a sportman today is not a normal being anyway. They are bred to be excellent in what they do. A volleyball player will not be able to participate in a 100 m sprint and have the slightest chance. So any idea of "natural" in sports is long gone (except for purely amateur).

In that light I have no idea how to deal with the women/men separation we have today. There probably not be any because a top woman volleyball player will be eons better than the amateur man volleyball player I am now. On the other hand they have no chance against a men team.

Sports at pro level is such a commercial entity that I even wonder if we should care.

However, either obesity is a disability, in which case, perhaps the ADA or equivalent could be used to force airlines to provide accomodation, or it is not a protected class, in which case, airlines should force them to purchase two seats.

In sports, there are leagues and classes of competition that attempt to provide a "minimum platform" for teams to compete. That's why teams move up and down from the soccer premier leagues etc.

The problem/issue of trans-gendered individuals being on teams they don't "belong" to is going to be changed over the next decades given that genetic modifications and enhancements are likely to be available via CRISPR etc.

Drugs are banned in sport to avoid people using "artifical" enhancements to their innate trained abilities. If someone gets genetic modification to enhance, say, their muscles abilities to use energy, how are you going to police that?

Have everyone playing submit their genome for examination?

> Have everyone playing submit their genome for examination?

My point is is that it does not matter. What is current top competition sport is not natural anymore so I do not really care about whether they take drugs (illegal today, maybe legal tomorrow) or not. Or modify they genome.

Wasn't there a case of a (South African?) athlete who was asked for a sample of their DNA to check weather they were a man or a woman? (it was not that long time ago I think)

Two things:

This is a minority viewpoint. I believe most sports fans and participants want sports to remain free of exogenous performance enhancing drugs.

The second: the situation you describe would disadvantage everyone who does not engage in maximizing their use of such PEDs, and the sport in question would rapidly be transformed from what it is now into something vastly different, as the people willing to ingest these modifications would quickly displace the ones that aren't, or don't embrace the practice as fully.

That may be fine for you, but it is a big change, and many people like it the way it is now.

Personally, I agree with you. There should probably be a drugs league in various sports where people get as insanely artificially enhanced as human bodies can support, I might even watch that despite my general aversion to sports just to see the extreme tech involved. But it's absolutely silly to equate that to what is happening today because "today's athletes are not natural". It's not the same thing at all.

Drug league could have people dying mid competition, as they took too many drugs that they had a heart attack when trying to go all out, and that would create so much backlash and vicarious trauma that it gets shut down hard. I think it's the main reason why it doesn't exist.

I imagine that many of the people who would participate are already taking these things (these are not the people competing professionally today). Perhaps mainstreaming it would incentivize more research into safety and sustainability around artificially pushing humans beyond their current physical limits.

Given the extreme competitive and monetary pressure already involved in sports, as well as expectations of audience, I question how much we can talk about consent and lack of coercion. If a drug league would exist, players would be pressured to take part to the very limit of what's legal, health be damned - as they already are in regular leagues.

That's Caster Semenya.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caster_Semenya

Pertinent bit:

In April 2018, the IAAF announced new "differences of sex development" rules that required athletes with specific disorders of sex development, testosterone levels of 5 nmol/L and above, and certain androgen sensitivity to take medication to lower their testosterone levels, effective beginning 8 May 2019. Due to the narrow scope of the changes, which also apply to only those athletes competing in the 400m, 800m, and 1500m, many people thought the rule change was designed specifically to target Semenya.

On 19 June 2018, Semenya announced that she would legally challenge the IAAF rules. On 1 May 2019, the Court of Arbitration for Sport rejected her challenge, paving the way for the new rules to come into effect on 8 May 2019. During the legal challenge by Semenya, the IAAF amended the regulations to exclude hyperandrogenism associated with the 46,XX karyotype and clarified that the disorders of sex development affected by the regulations are specific to the 46,XY karyotype. The legal case divided commentators such as Doriane Coleman, who testified for the IAAF, arguing that women's sport requires certain biological traits, from commentators such as Eric Vilain, who testified for Semenya, arguing that "sex is not defined by one particular parameter ... for many human reasons, it's so difficult to exclude women who've always lived their entire lives as women — to suddenly tell them 'you just don't belong here.'"

Semenya has appealed the decision to the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland. On 3 June 2019, the Swiss Federal Supreme Court advised that they had "super-provisionally instructed the IAAF to suspend the application of the 'Eligibility Regulations for the Female Classification for athletes with differences of sex development' with respect to the claimant [Semenya]" until the court decides whether to issue an interlocutory injunction. On 30 July 2019, the Swiss Federal Supreme Court reversed its earlier ruling that had suspended the Court of Arbitration for Sport decision and the IAAF rules. For that reason, Semenya missed the 2019 World Athletics Championships in Doha in October 2019, while continuing her appeal.

In July 2019, Semenya said that the ongoing issue has "destroyed" her "mentally and physically".

we currently ban steroids and most performance-enhancing substances in elite sports

Trans is the same thing, but on a genetic level. It alters the state of competition to give advantage to the new entrant. It follows that it would be banned on the same grounds under current rules.

Either we accept all modification in sports, or we dont

We don’t need to engage in flame wars or virtue signaling or any of these asinine debates.

People got along with their lives just fine for thousands of years without feeling compelled to debate a stranger from hundreds of miles away for 10 minutes about theoreticals that scarcely affect their daily lives.

But the social media and advertising companies can’t have that. No, we as a society need to be juiced up on fear and hate 24/7 to keep the eyeballs moving and the profits flowing.

Fact is the world is full of shitty people and ya gotta pick your battles. In most cases, the winning move is not to play.

That’s debatable (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missionary). They even went out and tried to kill strangers hundreds of miles away (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_war)

Many of those were in times when it took a serious commitment to even travel that far, let alone to wage war. It probably helped that staying put didn’t guarantee a quiet life, either.

This would lead to a large number of injuries and overdoses because of the drug use. IIRC this was happening in soccer with heart attacks happening because of drugs.

The distinction between men and women teams is arbitrary but fairly sensible. If you didn't separate them then you'd have men at the top and women at the bottom, which does not fun make.

That said, I have no clue how to solve the transperson distinction in sports.

Yes, but this is a choice. We still like to imagine that sports must be "natural". There is nothing natural in how the top performers are bred (my wife was a national junior champion and in the very top of Europe and did not continue despite being invited to the national team - all the fun of sports is gone).

Since we accept that we breed people that do competitive sport I see no reason why not to give them all the opportunities. This includes taking risk with their health and life.

The only problem is that sport starts at 4 years old and there is a risk of parents who would be ready for anything for their children to be sport heroes.

My children did al lot of sports and they stopped after their black belt in karate because it was not fun anymore. They were not really interested by the competition so it did not matter. They love sport. I play volleyball in an amateur team that almost always loses. But the fun is incredible.

> The distinction between men and women teams is arbitrary but fairly sensible. If you didn't separate them then you'd have men at the top and women at the bottom, which does not fun make.

I know but since it looks like the gender is becoming a mater of choice, I do not know how this will be deal with.

I was thinking the same thing when I read somewhere that the "appartenance to a racial group" in the US is by choice as well. I wonder why some, say, white people do not assess themselves as "Afro-American" to make use of the positive discrimination for admission at universities (or whatever this is called in the US)

When _some_ make this choice to be at the top, _all_ must make this choice to be at the top. At that point it's a roulette of who will dare take the most drugs and live to win.

> I see no reason why not to give them all the opportunities.

Some are way more harmful than others, and we should take that into account.

EDIT:

> I know but since it looks like the gender is becoming a mater of choice, I do not know how this will be deal with.

Apart from some radical groups thinking so, gender is not really becoming a choice.

This is exactly what happens in sport today. Some made the choice to make it all of their life and train from dusk to dawn, eat some kind of protein powders that bring in the exact amount of nutriments etc.

The others must do the same to beat them.

I really see no difference between allowing to have a nutritionist, a personal coach, a bioengineer and access to all kind of legal substances that do not exist in nature and just let it go, grab some popcorn and see.

This is still a choice, a tough one, but a choice.

Then we will have these Roman-like competitions where some die and some survive (with the difference that they choose it knowingly) and the teams of people who instead of watching sport on TV will go to play an amateur match themselves.

I do not like competitive sport because it is made to look like something natural while it is not. The same way I do not care about boxers who get Parkinsons after repeated hits in their head or the ones who climb towers to make a selfie on the top and slip, I do not care about these who decided to modify their physiology to be the best at one specific precise action.

It ends with US universities "graduating" people who can barely write their name because they were good in basketball. The person who graduated in the same major as them and had to work (and get into the university in the first place) may not be happy. But there is money behind so who cares.

One of those has a high chance of directly killing you, the others don't, that's my point.

Transsexuality, non-binary etc. are facts. They are more or less legalized (it depends on the country) but I think that at some point it is not the genome that is going to decide but a personal choice.

I do not want to discuss whether this is good or bad, just the fact that quantitative biological data are not absolute measures anymore.

In sports, it isn't really relevant what a person thinks about themselves. Gender is used as a proxy for expected performance envelope - you don't want to mix people with radically different characteristics, because that would not make for fair competition. I'm guessing that eventually we'll stop talking about "men" and "women" teams, and figure out new terms that directly reference the relevant biological characteristics.

Yes, facts, but not choices.

It doesn’t seem that hard: just create explicit performance classes instead of using gender as a proxy for a performance class. There’s already precedent for this in at least combat sports where competitors are separated into weight classes.

You are one of the people the gp is mentioning. Those two are excellent points. There are a lot of people who are uncomfortable with those topics but are open to discussing them. Then people like you come out of the woodwork and accuse them of some nonsensical uptight bullshit and crap on their legitimate questions. Your open hostility then further cements their oppositional opinions. Instead of progress towards understanding and accepting, they dig their heels in and stay hateful because you pretty much told them to fuck off.

If we spent just a fraction of the effort making spaces safer for marginalized groups as we do debating bad faith actors the internet would be a much better place in my opinion.

I do actually agree that most people that most people making a fuss about these questions online are doing so in bad faith or “mostly bad faith”. But I still do think both questions are nuanced, and I think a lot of bystanders might benefit from intelligent responses to these questions from the progressive side, but maybe at some point it’s too exhausting.

> I don't think I'm ever seen these topics discussed in good faith.

So at least be honest about "LGBdroptheT" being transphobic, if you're going to cry homophobia.

Many trans men and women lead the movement vocally when many gay men and women who could survive in the closet sat and waited.

But that's the thing, the good faith discussion happened so many times, and it has been litigated many times. For many of us, trans and non-binary folks gave us many of our rights, and they did not out of a sense of solidarity, but literally because they were fighting for the same thing (really, a revolution against gender norms and expectations).

As the gp said, however, this good faith conversation happens a few times (and has been litigated to death over and over, and continues to). But the domination in the "drop the T" movement is really dehumanizing language about trans people, accusing them of an agenda, brainwashing children, etc. It's really harmful, and it is things that gay, lesbian, and bi folks have been accused of already.

But referring to transgender people as “frankensteins monster” is bigoted.

Nobody is doing this, that's where the allegations of bad faith come from.

Trans woman; trans men would be competing in the male competitions, and seem to be invisible in the whole trans debate anyway. The problem with this is that it's almost entirely based on prejudice and people saying things that turn out not to be true, along with vague biological determinism. Hence the Caster Semenya debacle (not trans, intersex AFAB, but high natural testosterone).

Caster Semenya has XY chromosomes and internal testes. Semenya has "high natural testosterone" as a result of having male anatomy and hormones. The specific regulation Semenya has been fighting is explicitly "limited to athletes with ’46 XY DSD’ – i.e. conditions where the affected individual has XY chromosomes."

The idea that testosterone confers physical advantages of strength/speed is not "vague biological determinism" it's one of the most basic facts of our existence. It the primary reason sex-segregated sports exist in the first place.

"To say that an XY human can’t compete in the women’s category of professional sports unless they lower their testosterone below 5 nmol/L — a figure that is still 7.5 times the value of the average woman competing at the 2011 and 2013 track and field World Championships and a figure that not a single healthy woman born with XX chromosomes, ovaries, and producing estrogen at puberty can reach — isn’t a huge human rights travesty. It’s a protection of women’s sports."

https://www.letsrun.com/news/2019/05/what-no-one-is-telling-...

Trans women don't tend to have testosterone levels that high anyway, and if they did their doctors would be worried about it. Obviously not a comprehensive study but, have the testosterone levels of a trans woman [0] (she's relatively normal, other than the fact she insists on debating strangers on the internet). That's ~.4 nmol/L (why sports and medicine use two different measures is also very confusing, unit conversion here [1]. Given the advantages testosterone gives in sports [3] I'd wager most women competing aren't hovering around the minimum levels (which is where most trans women are going to be by virtue of how anti-androgens work). Instead of unscientific blog spam, how about a study published by the National Collegiate Athletic Association [4].

Basically as the knowledge of the underlying science grows the idea of simple binary for fair sporting competition makes increasingly less sense, I wouldn't be surprised if elite institutions started to drift more toward "hormonal weight classes" (and so thinks these scientists [4])

[0] https://imgur.com/a/z9DR2cD

[1] http://unitslab.com/node/136

[2] https://sci-hub.tw/10.1210/er.2018-00020

[3] “[t]he available, albeit incomplete, evidence makes it highly likely that the sex difference in circulating testosterone of adults explains most, if not all, the sex differences in sporting performance.” https://sci-hub.tw/10.1210/er.2018-00020

[4]“[a]ny athletic advantages a transgender girl or woman arguably may have as a result of her prior testosterone levels dissipate after about one year of estrogen therapy.” https://www.ncaa.org/sites/default/files/NCLR_TransStudentAt...

I'd wager most women competing aren't hovering around the minimum levels (which is where most trans women are going to be by virtue of how anti-androgens work). Instead of unscientific blog spam

Again, Semenya is not transgender[1] and her T hormones are not hovering around the minimum levels, which is the entire reason for the ongoing debate. The "unscientific blog spam" was referencing the IAAF study of competing athletes[2]

not .6 as you're implying with the 7.5x figure ...

which indeed showed the average T level for 1332 female athletes was 0.67. 5 / 0.67 = 7.46

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2019/05/03...

[2] https://sci-hub.se/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28673896/

The performance advantages they measured, in the events inwhich there were any, are explicitly linked to fT not non free testosterone and even then aren't being presented as causative.

"Our study design cannot provide evidence for causality between androgen levels and athletic performance, but can indicate associations between androgen concentrations and athletic performance. Thus, we deliberately decided not to exclude performances achieved by females with biological hyperandrogenism and males with biological hypoandrogenism whatever the cause of their condition (oral contraceptives, polycystic ovaries syndrome, disorder of sex development, doping, overtraining). As a consequence, the calculated mean fT value in the present study is higher than the 8.06pmol/L median value previously reported in a similar female population."

They certainly don't appear to be arguing that hyperandrogenism in women should be a disqualifying condition. Especially in running events like the ones Semenya competed in since the performance gains appear most significantly in the throwing events.

"Our hypothesis is that ...androgens exert their ergogenic effects on some sportswomen through better visuospatial neural activation."

Something that was pointed out to me recently that I thought was quite insightful. The greater societal acceptance of trans men compared to trans women seems to parallel the greater societal acceptance of cis women presenting in a masculine way compared to cis men presenting in a feminine way.

Which leads to the interesting idea that the key to societal acceptance of trans women may be widening what is considered socially acceptable for cis men.

To me the truth of the matter is that this is a very complex issue with no simple answers. People altering their physiology through hormones obviously can give them advantages or disadvantages that others don't have. As can having different hormone mixes when growing or through puberty. As indeed can a myriad of other genetic factors.

I honestly can't think of a way to make this fair. Do you have any suggestions?

Those discussions routinely take place on reddit.

Google is your friend, buddy.

There's more threads than I can count, and people who say that they think trans people should be segregated have their posts gilded multiple times[2]. That last example was from 3 months ago.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/changemyview/search?q=transgender+s...

[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/itsq7t/cmv_tr...

https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/search?q=sports&restri...

Unless you just want to vent.

Hell, they aren't even claiming that they are in favor of the points mentioned. Just that it's a bad idea for democratic society to shut down such discussion.

Why is that? It's because this really is about people's feelings and sentiments on those topics. And those emotions range wildly from totally supportive to indifferent to deeply threatened.

While that's all completely valid, voicing your emotions unfiltered on the public Internet in front of an audience of anonymous millions comes with plenty of caveats. It's pretty much like standing up in a crowded, public town square and ranting unfiltered about how you feel personally in no uncertain terms. Or, more insidiously, taking on an appearance of reason and rationality, trying to hide an intention of eliciting an emotional response from others that validates your own feelings.

Many people don't take issue with the topic, they take issue with your behaviour. And they will show you their disapproval.

Free speech allows you to voice whatever is on your mind, but that doesn't force others to listen to you or give you a platform. Democracy doesn't imply that any and all behaviour is to be tolerated.

In real life, such behaviour is relegated to backroom clubs, shady bars and questionable small organizations. The Internet unavoidably hosts their digital equivalent. Moreover, as you can hide behind an anonymous handle on the Internet, move between different platforms fluidly, easily find a platform between thousands that will cater to you,... all of that from the comfort of your couch, really lowers the bar further.

The danger in all of this is when all of those digitally pent up negative emotions spill over in public life and starts affecting the very underpinnings that provide security and stability to each and every member society, regardless of who they are.

There's another dimension on top of even this. Nuance and shortcuts to commonly-held understanding, provided by body language and intonation, readily used in spoken discussion, are completely unavailable online. Typing out full, unspoken context for argument points takes far too long. So online discussions distill these deeply, deeply held feelings into a few sentences, which leads to oversimplification of one's own argument, and reductio ad absurdum of the other person's. So while "the internet" gives us this "wonderful" opportunity to discuss things that matter in an open and socialized way, it subtly channels such discussions into the most-hyperbolic form of "discussion" by nature of it being typed. Look no further than Twitter for the "best" example of this phenomenon. #SocialMediaIsDestroyingSociety

It's obvious to anyone who reads them that it doesn't even slightly relate to what anyone here has said (not letting someone participate in sporting events where they have a biological advantage is not exactly calling them pigs) but people post them anyway.

Is there some sort of costly signalling of membership of some social group (woke group?) going on?

https://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Ok-...

It's not a medical state, it is a social one.

So yeah, not a transmedicalist, just we have existing frameworks for how to balance inclusion and fairness; there's no open question that needs debate around how trans people can compete in sports (unless you get all your cues from South Park i suppose). The only real debate is around what the levels should be and how to avoid retroactively excluding cis women with hyperandrogenism or related conditions.

Also just as an aside, like a lot of hypotheticals that get forced onto trans people, there isn't any evidence of this being an issue. Trans people just want to live their lives, medicinally transition if necessary, and exist as regular people. The number of people who both chose not to hormonally transition, and are competing in some kind of sporting event where that matters is small enough to be humanly addressed case by case (if there are any at all).

[0]https://www.worldathletics.org/news/press-release/questions-...

[1] https://stillmed.olympic.org/Documents/Commissions_PDFfiles/...

Two examples of the hipocrasy: John Safran knocking on doors to tell people about atheism in utah: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=A1G8nJ2IFjA And here how Tucker Carlsson reacts to his interviewees challenging him and guess what he never aired it (/s censorship!) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6_nFI2Zb7qE

The balance is currently that sites like Reddit allow a broad range of content, and have so far not banned a wide enough range of topics to push a significant enough fraction of their userbase away. As Reddit becomes more and more censorious, it might move beyond just banning literal white supremacy, into banning discussion other socially transgressive things. These might include drugs, technology linked to piracy, gambling, pornography and sex work, and a lot of other vices that are both fascinating (from the outside) and enjoyable (from the inside).

Reddit did not make a single choice on what audience to go after. It has made, and will continue to make, such choices every day it operates, and chasing revenue will cause it to ban more and more topics. Eventually, newer and edgier platforms will be able to gain prominence with a userbase of less political and more entertaining transgressors.

The same is true if we want to moderate extremism. If you kick extremists off the mainstream platform, they become more extreme. It's a hard problem.

>Like, I don't see you moving to the ghetto and putting your kids in shitty schools so that you can even things out.

I don't know about your schools, but around here the "magnet" schools with the high level law/math/science/etc programs are ALL in the bad schools. They do this to attract high performing students to poor performing schools. So if you want the benefit of the best public school education specifically geared towards your interest, you pay for it by going to a "bad" school.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/steven-crowders-change-my-min...

You can just walk right past them. You are only subjected to them insofar as their existence is recognisable, but no more than you wish to engage. Personally, I'm happy to engage them more than you seem to be. We need look no further than the many accounts of ex klan members and other hate groups to see that exposure to the edges and outside of their bubbles are what causes the bubble to burst. Go and visit hyper left anarcho communist subreddits like breadtube and find endless first hand accounts of ex-redpillers in the comments saying the same. Minds are changed every day by debate on sites like reddit, as much as it's nice to play the cynic and claim otherwise.

I think it's all very noble and all that, but if someone invited me to a party and was all like "Oh yeah, man, and we're going to convert all these Klan dudes to be good people" I'm going to be like "Okay, you do that. I'm going to go to this other party where there are no Klan dudes and the most controversial topic is when we discuss whether we were better off under Wenger".

It turns out just discouraging them from having an SSO that lets them go to the other parties is enough to get them to leave you alone.

Don't you create polarization this way?

That sort of polarization is desired. I don't want those guys inside my community. I want them outside. And if you're like "Okay, I think the Jews have fangs but they don't suck baby blood at night" then that's not a degree of moderation I'm interested to have in my community. Out you go. Or out I go. Quite happy to self select out of this community of yours where people want to discuss that.

Remember, I'm here for cat pics, not all that other angry shit. I'm okay with the poles being "normal people" and "weird angry dudes". Seems reasonable.

In addition, putting all the rot in one place leads to the lizard people.

A win-win for everyone involved.

Your actual argument - yeah, sure. All for it. But it is a lot pretend people are anti-Semitic lizard conspiracy theorists if they aren't there to defend themselves. If Reddit wants a more ideologically aligned user-base good luck to them. But this exact scenario has played out many times through history - having a majority culture doesn't magically confer greater moral integrity, or intelligence.

The framework that fits the evidence and the ideals was

1) we want a market place of ideas to function

2) there is content that easily dominates and sidelines all other ideas.

3) there are Maliciously engineered arguments that need complex rebuttals to Massive emotional payloads, which will never be accepted.

4) cat videos, pictures and memes will out perform everything else

We let things be for a long time. Very light touch approaches. It doesn’t work. The good ideas will become irrelevant before theY are even read, and that is long after bad ideas redefine reality.

The underlying nexus is that our ideals on free speech do not take into account human wetware bandwidth.

If reality must be perceived, and the perception system is flooded, then it doesn’t matter how good our science or reason is. The system is still blind.

Or more precisely: Why is there a majority of people who upvote those theories but moderators can identify them as what they are and remove them? What has happened to moderators that they can handle the 'theories' that hasn't happened to regular forum members?

Whatever that is, can't this be handed out to new members before they are allowed to vote?

Part of that is very much ensuring that the front page is not wall to wall conspiracy theories, and members don't have every thread inundated with the same junk.

From the evidence of outsourced moderation, they started being influenced by conspiracy theories and suffering from PTSD

There is a serious logical hazard in believing that any of this is asymmetrical.

Take the recent US election for example. Very effortless to claim fraud and stolen election; just a couple of tweets in fact. Debunking them rather more difficult. Then there are the more specific claims, such as:

- China and Venezuela worked together to do this - Voting machines flipped votes - There were vote dumps at midnight - Dead people voted for Biden

All very easy claims to make, all rather more difficult to debunk sufficiently. Then, when one is debunked, another one easily pops up. Don't get me wrong, I think it's well worth the effort and we should fight disinformation, but effort it does take.

Bookmark links and have your list of links publicly accessible.

But separating the combatants doesn't just stop the algorithmically-promoted unintelligible flame wars. It stops the debate entirely. You lose the ability to even encounter the other tribe or have any idea what their views or concerns are.

I don't think so. This pattern has been observed, and has been a problem, since well before the modern eyeballs-and-engagement-obsessed era of the internet, and before ads were even present on forums at all. What you're describing makes it worse, but even in its absence there is a certain vocal subset of humanity for whom dominating a discussion is its own reward. As a forum grows eventually you will attract one of these people, and from that point on the discourse of the forum will be determined by Survival Of The Loudest.

And on that topic, do we really need to debate Nazis? Like, are we so committed to the idea of moral relativism that we can’t draw some lines? Because frankly, I have zero interest in debating with anyone whether or not my family and I should be gassed to death.

Every time people forget, the outcome is some horrible event like genocide.

This was a little gem in that article, seemingly highly relevant now:

> However, Rawls qualifies this with the assertion that under extraordinary circumstances in which constitutional safeguards do not suffice to ensure the security of the tolerant and the institutions of liberty, tolerant society has a reasonable right of self-preservation against acts of intolerance that would limit the liberty of others under a just constitution, and this supersedes the principle of tolerance. This should be done, however, only to preserve equal liberty – i.e., the liberties of the intolerant should be limited only insofar as they demonstrably limit the liberties of others: "While an intolerant sect does not itself have title to complain of intolerance, its freedom should be restricted only when the tolerant sincerely and with reason believe that their own security and that of the institutions of liberty are in danger."

Two examples: what im going to call the "im not touching you" type of harassment -- that is posting things clearly designed to hurt and wouldn't make sense in context unless designed for harassment. The platonic example here is the image macro that's the trans flag with the words "Your parents will burry you with the name they gave you". Cuel to the extreme, but doesn't technically call for violence against the given person, or the protected group at large so twitter and facebook, etc happily leave it up (and people wanting to be assholes hyper optimized pretty quick; ive seen the macro posted by multiple people in multiple places).

Second being the idea of stochastic terrorism. Painting a group as an unchecked evil means you don't have to tell anyone specifically they should commit violence, but, it's hard to be surprised if they come to that conclusion. See the shootings in Charleston or Christchurch.

Don't forget about Cesar Sayoc's mail bomb campaign[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAGA_Bomber

I think being scared of coming into contact with bad ideas (and tackling them) just stops people from understanding why they are bad ideas. E.g. if we create a cultural taboo long enough, I do believe people will stop caring if something is bad.

Just look at all the edgy teenagers who think Nazi stuff is funny -- because it's taboo and not talked about enough. Sure, teens will be teens.

But just enough people slip through the cracks and become radicalised in their little bubble, with nobody to deprogram them because of the taboo status. If everybody was still sharing the same space (i.e. popular platforms like reddit) then there's less polarization going on.

You can learn about these topics in scholarly environments taught by actual experts who can provide you with real analysis. Refusing to have conversations with klan members does not prevent me from understanding and analyzing racism in america. In fact, I'm going to get a much better understanding by speaking to historians than klan members, since klan members aren't exactly incentivized to provide a dispassionate analysis of their ideology.

People aren't scared of coming into contact with bad ideas. People are frustrated with having to come into contact with propagandizing bigots who want to murder them.

The main reason you think of your political opponents as nazis is because you haven't been interacting with them and talking to them.

"Nazi" as a label is pretty useless as there are dozens of beliefs that are associated with "Nazi" (normally used as a label for rejecting any of the core tenants of progressivism), most people called Nazis might agree with a watered down version of one of them and disagree with the rest (The amount of conflation going on is a bit ridiculous, someone who believes in using military power to acquire resources and someone who believes in a "traditional" gender roles and someone who thinks those with learning difficulties should be steralized and someone who thinks Jews have too much influence in media are all "Nazis" but will agree with eachother on nothing else).

Of course, because someone who voices one of the views will get ejected from their community and go to the community of rejects where other people who had a single "Nazi" belief are... they'll become radicalized and adopt some of the other "Nazi" views they would otherwise have opposed (though rarely all). :/

And in fact quite a few of your examples in fact are part of that ideology.

The biggest reason why holding one of these ideas makes it likely you'll hold the others are the effects oulined above (people being pushed into the wotch community). So, in essence, the modern censorship environment created the modern Nazi. :D

They were all pretty popular ideas though.

- Where else can I say “Kill yourself, you glowing n+gg+rf+gg+t landwhale k+ke” without being banned? Voat is the only place I know of where I can do that.

- The Holocaust is a lie. It didn’t happen, but it should have,

- Voat will go away but its deep disgust of jews will forever remain in my heart.

Slurs not censored in the actual posts, obviously. So, you’ll forgive me for thinking Voat is full of literal Nazis.

Edit, censored with plus signs because asterisks were italicizing the text.

EDIT: added a reference. Keep in mind for every anti-war journalist fired for standing up to the official lies there were easily 100 who kept their heads down. Im not scared of flat earth lies. I'm scared of Iraq war or even worse, World War I levels of deception.

* By being easily digestible and easy to state while the the refutation requires a long form explanation.

* By spreading faster and being repeated more often than the truth preying on our innate bias toward things we’ve heard before.

* By being tied to an unrelated political ideology or issue of intellectual or moral superiority.

* By gaslighting where the authority of truth tellers are undermined.

* As a form of the Streisand effect where any attempt to discredit or silence lie tellers is parlayed into more evidence for its truth.

* When the belief in the truth imparts a material, social, or image cost to the would-be believer.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1146

People need to become aware just how bad most social media content that reaches them is.

Are you under the impression that people weren't free to speak their minds "back then"? People did speak their minds, loudly and regularly. That didn't change the outcome.

What?

> Lies require censorship of truth to survive.

This is naive. People willfully believe lies if they support their worldview, even in the presence of truth.

No they don't. Lies spread faster than truth[1] and repetition legitimizes[2]. The marketplace of ideas is the just world fallacy for people who like to think a lot.

[1] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1114.8.full

[2] https://www.spring.org.uk/2010/12/the-illusion-of-truth.php

Really well said. I'll admit I lean on "wetware" in these convos too.

Free speech perhaps breaks down in net-centric reality. Social norms that worked in a 2D plane of existence are not guaranteed to continue working when physical space constraints start to break down -- when every human agent is networked to every other human agent, oh and also centers of massive compute resources (with operators who have their own agendas)

Even if we had unlimited bandwidth, it would be wasted in such a war of attrition.

Would having people pay for a user account in order to be able to post on a forum reduce the amount of hate speech and related?

Something Awful has charged $10 for account creation for as long as i can remember.

While I do think it has kept away most low-effort trolls, there have certainly been deeply toxic attitudes and arguments still happened. Doxxing, organized harassment, racism and similar nastiness have certainly been issues with some regularity in most of the subforums.

The only reason why it has been kept down is a relatively large team of admins and moderators, and they have been far from infallible, there has been tons of drama in that regard, including at least one mod who literally doxxed other forums users to white supremacists.

On the whole though, the discussions there are a lot more civilized than on sites like Reddit. I think the small entry fee is part of it, but also thanks to an active moderation team and the standard policy being to put people in timeout first, instead of insta-banning for any offence.

Obviously there are differing views on how well it actually works, leading to various spin-off forums, with different policies and philosophies.

It would necessarily be a less profitable site than the competition, but that might not be a problem as long as it wasn't venture-funded.

Here’s a thought experiment I’ve come up with to illustrate this: what happens tomorrow if we shut down all social media (to whatever level you define social media.)

This gets to the crux of the issue - the underlying reality of the speed of information broadcast/transmission and the social-informational structures that are constructed to absorb it.

Unfortunately, the forum moderation team became woke and started introducing rules ouutlawing types of speech they disagreed with. This ended up reinforcing a whole load of vicious cycles (conservatives self-censoring, conservatives being ejected, moderation drifting further left) and you ended up with a very nasty circle-jerk of endless posters trying to one-up eachother with the latest scandal about how Evil their enemies were. Surprisingly, it didn't just kill discussion of left vs right on social issues, it killed basically all discussion of non-culture war political topics as well, drowned out by the purity spiral circlejerk.

Damn, this is such a good metaphore, I had to think a lot about it.

For my browser [1] I wanted to introduce a fact gathering and linking system, and build it in a way that bias of authors (and publishers) can be guessed when they release a new article.

My theory is that Rationalism will never be anything that can exist, because it is the opposite of human nature (or say, the founding idea of our society).

The underlying issue is that emotions cause a lot of people to get irrational due to them not being able to differ a potentially dangerous situation with a potentially (equally) good one.

I think that most (if not all) of fake news websites were shared because of only a couple of reasons:

1) Humans like to get reinforced in their own perception more than they like to get disagreed with.

2) Articles in these type of publishing mediums appeal to emotions rather than to facts, hence the reason for why they use pictures, videos and other recordings as "evidence" even when they had totally nothing to do with it.

3) Humans are lazy. This is by far the most important point. If it is easy to comply with an emotional statement, and hard to gather evidence to disprove it; the emotional statement will always win.

4) Humans confuse disagreement with punishment. As a kid you get taught that there are negative effects when you disagree with society, or your mum/dad or other authoritarian figures. Rather than to punish kids when they are wrong we should encourage the gathering of evidence, and let them form an argument for both sides.

5) Humans are beings that forget. That is why media for the masses reuses pictures of a situation that happened years ago as "proof" for something clickbaity. Most people won't remember it if it was a situation that had a boring outcome, but they certainly will remember it when it had a negative emotional effect on themselves.

6) Depression is a huge hole where nobody without external support can come out, due to how our thinking nature works. Similar to 5) our brain is wired to remember negative punishments more than positive reinforcements, and that is why we tend to get depressive more likely than we tend to get optimistic...which in turn plays in the cards of fake news because the bad obvious enemy could do some serious bad thing to us.

But yeah, these are just my two cents. Due to my browser I thought a lot about this and came to the conclusion that irrational hate speech is worse an enemy than someone might think on first sight.

[1] https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth

This insight helps me understand why I am so frustrated with political forums. Thank you.

But being an analytic, how can this be improved? And are some societies/countries/governments better at doing so? Is it easier in a more homogeneous society?

This would allow high quality moderation that lets communities focus on topics without as much worry about free-speech issues. Essentially allowing the classic, 'Go build your own social media' be actually possible since the communities that may not like your content are sufficiently small.

Say you're something anodyne, like /r/RomanHistory or something (I don't know if that's real). For obvious reasons, that is a topic that Western fascists really like; they're gonna come by, even if their "fascist hat" isn't on right that second. But that train's never late, that fascist hat goes on eventually. And the first fascist might be polite. So might his friends. And maybe you see a few off-color jokes that maybe you, as a slightly-but-not-heavily-invested mod, slap down--but those jokes are the way that they start to find each other. And meanwhile, as things grow? What often happens is that one of their more buttoned-up types ends up on your moderation team, because hey, they're Respected By The Community (and this happens in person, too, when it comes to groups and political entities; this is a very common foot-in-the-door tactic). And then it just grows from there. Maybe you've got the spine to "ruin everything" by kicking them out at this point, by cutting out the rot, but that's going to hurt and hmm, maybe it's best to just go along and get along, especially because any time you try to act against it, you've got those folks who pipe up about how Nazis should have freedom of speech too, even if you don't like their ideas...

...and now you have a fascist community.

"Strong moderation"--the bartender in that story telling the first fascist to get the hell out--is not something that can be even remotely taken for granted. You must insulate your systems against fascism because it is a hack of the system. The instinctual emotional attack it employs on a liberal order requires so much more work to stop than it does to continue that anywhere it can take root, it can strangle everything else. This is real, and this is what those coded "free speech ideals" are being weaponized to protect while it grows.

That's the same thing.

I have several friends who are professors of medieval history. For various reasons, fascists are really interested in medieval european history and like to attend conferences as "independent scholars". They pass out propaganda and harass scholars who have the gall to do things like discuss women in medieval europe or any form of cultural transmission between europe and the islamic world. The solution has been to rip this stuff out. You can't have "order" in the conference where people are able to share actual scholarly work while free of harassment without "slapping down the fascists".

I disagree. You can enforce behavioral restrictions without reducing it to us vs them. It is about order and maintaining good relations. In the case of people disrupting your conference, you can have them removed for their behavior without resorting to name calling and framing it like you're "fighting fascists". It's like policing. If you reduce it to "catching bad guys", you won't get good police.

Some racist asking questions at a panel about wild shit they read online is a waste of conference time. 20 racists asking questions at a panel about wild shit they read online ruins entire conferences. You need to nip that in the bud.

Occasionally they have useful idiots carving out their elbow room, but the heartening thing about 2020--maybe the only thing--is that there are ever fewer useful idiots, and instead rhetorical positions like this have to be taken up by folks who just don't hide their "power levels" the way they would need to for adequate opsec.

Wow. You are so off the mark I don't even know what to say. It's this kind of thinking that divides the world. It is paranoid us vs them garbage.

I read your posts.

They speak for themselves.

You are on the forum so long you figure out who is a repeat offender and who are the coordinates groups

The actual work is very similar, only varying in quantity.

On both groups, there are regulars, regulars with known triggers, casuals who might become regulars, and flamers. The regulars with specific triggers can be progressively discouraged.

The flamers must be stopped hard, or else they dominate conversation for days or weeks, making everyone else unhappy. You can give them a second chance, but not a third.

But you can put a lot of harm down to the excesses of capitalism too. We could eject anyone expressing sympathies for that Adam Smith fellow as well.

Or maybe this is rapidly getting out of hand.

No political system presents an argument for white supremacy that is legitimate and in good faith.

I hope this elaboration of the obvious is helpful.

That's a Soviet idea? It seems national health insurance was first conceived in Imperial Germany[0] (which the Weimar Republic, then the Nazis continued), then adopted in Britain, then Imperial Russia (which presumably the Soviets continued). Get your facts straight.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_health_care#History

Is it? Says who? The Soviets did a great many things. It doesn't mean all of them are "Soviet things". Nationalized healthcare predates the Soviets, still exists in nearly all capitalist countries in one form or another, and is viewed largely positively in each of those countries.

The Soviets had a powerful military and infamous police force. When you say "Soviet Russia" the average person will think "Red Army" and "KGB" before nationalized healthcare. Going by your logic are the military and police "socialist ideas"? They use government money to provide an equal level of service to all inhabitants of the nation - namely protecting and safeguarding them. Police and military obviously predate socialism/communism but the Soviets were renowned for them, so that makes them socialist ideas, right?

Comparing racism in Nazism - a core central tenet, and one that's actively harmful, to nationalized healthcare in communism - an incidental feature, mostly positive, and also found in nearly every capitalist country, is a strawman.

Where? In most of the Western countries that have it, it post-dates WWII, and corresponds to the replacement of capitalism in the relatively pure sense with the modern mixed economy, which is arguably more Marxist than the USSR and other “Communist” regimes based on Leninism and it's descendants.

Or, put another way, saying its rapidly getting out of hand because you make assumptions about what else could be banned is the slippery slope fallacy. Saying what exactly constitutes unacceptable speech on a given platform just needs to be specifically defined.

And the point I'm making isn't that you would eject all communists and capitalists in practice, it's that you would have to do so in a consistent application of that principle. It's a reductio ad absurdum. You can take anything and find a tenuous connection from there to something terrible, so arguing that we have to ban the anything because allowing it would enable an influx of people connected to the something terrible is ridiculous. Applied as a consistent principle it would require you to ban everything.

Basically, you just make something up entirely. If you say that 100,000,000 Americans are killed every year in skiing accidents, that's easy to disprove. But if you post a clip of someone getting punched from an obscure 1970s sitcom that only aired in Hungary and then claim it happened at a restaurant in Denver, that's going to be a lot more difficult to disprove even if the claim is extremely dubious unless you're lucky enough to know the original context.

Some of the more common examples of this in recent times include faked tweet screenshots (mildly difficult to disprove as Twitter's search isn't very useful, and the liar can just say "oh they deleted it"), anecdotes about meeting a celebrity and them doing something unacceptable (basically impossible to disprove unless the meeting DID happen but the incident didn't and eyewitnesses can vouch - see also: the Gritty incident), and videos being used to smear a group despite none of the people involved actually being from that group (reverse video search is extremely difficult, and that relies on it being something previously published rather than recorded explicitly for misinformation campaigns).

Like, "Knowing that this will cost working class Americans jobs, why do you want X?"

Well... X doesn't cost jobs, X might even create jobs. But now I have to explain that. And if I slow down for even one second, you have an opening to fire off another question or paint me as somehow waffling.

A good politician would never answer that question. Instead they would answer a different question that they already had a good answer to. “I think the important thing to remember here is...”

This tactic works just as well online. Never directly answer a question you don’t like. Always stay on message.

By the time you finish your answer the listener should have already forgotten the question.

The weakness, and it is a weakness, of the generally liberal discussion participant is that they very often want to discuss what a thing is and what it means. Wonkishness is a positive trait in discussing policy, but it means that rhetoric, no matter how openly disingenuous, has to be addressed; the consequences (or the inanity) have to be dissected, that's part of why they are there.

Incidentally, this is what leads to the current state of affairs--the side that is unmoored from any pretense of reality can say whatever the hell they want and will put the other side into knots.

It isn't clever, and it is frustrating because your advice is good, but it is real.

These days, I'd probably just not respond to bad faith communication, but I've historically enjoyed being horrible. Unlike a politician, you don't have to preserve your own credibility in the eyes of onlookers, so you can just be awful if you want.

I find that there is usually a fairly small number of "gotcha" questions that come up over and over for a particular topic. the "trans people in competitive sports" question in this thread is a good example. what makes these types of questions rhetorically effective is that they're usually at least half-rooted in truth. in my experience it's more effective to recognize the likely gotchas and have a response ready, or better yet, preempt it entirely. at the very least, you should explain why you're not answering the question, lest it appear that you are the one arguing in bad faith. you have to keep in mind that you're not just trying to convince your interlocutor but also your audience.

Take a flat earther argument that's explanations within explanations within explanations to cover whatever "what about x?" type of questions you have.

Change "flat earther" to whatever conspiracy theory/controversial topic of the day, and there you go.

Having a 0 tolerance policy for these kinds of people makes your space safer for maginalized communities and ends up with better debates/discussions over all since, as i alluded to, these arguments aren't actually in good faith or rooted in any sort of data.

I have actually seen people banned from communities when coming armed with pretty detailed data and thorough argumentation. I wonder if there’s a principled way to separate low-effort trolls from those simply willing to argue the unpopular side of a controversial topic.

If I spend [not insignificant amount of time/mental energy] with you just to disprove something inane, and you do that to me n times, I won't argue with you anymore, even if the n+1th time happens to not be completely baseless. At that point it's either explicitly on purpose, or implicitly linked with a bias that makes them susceptible to bullshit that confirms said bias.

I don't know if there's any ab initio way of knowing if someone's spouting nonsense on purpose or not, so character patterns are hard to scale. But that's why moderation online is harder and faster than in real life, because you don't have a 1on1 interaction in the same way. It's up to netizens to behave and think before speaking.

Hell you can see the consequences of not holding a firm line on these sorts of things in this thread. There are people literally "just asking questions" about "men in women's sports" as an example of the "terrible reddit censorship"; as if it's not transparently obvious what they're doing.

So you have to ask yourself, even if you could reliably id anyone who wanted to argue in good faith (i'd argue this is considerably harder than you'd think though that's more of a gut feeling /shrug), if their goals are "convince the world that <race, gender, nationality, sexuality> is causing harm" what is the value of giving that a platform even if you're willing to expend the emotional energy to debunk it (over and over and over and over because even if you have some kind of metric, your users don't and if allowed someone always feeds the trolls).

Not only are these viewpoints, which you claim can only be argued in bad faith, supported by empirical evidence, but the people who dare to support them publicly are risking social and financial ruin. If "unsafe" and "marginalized" do not describe their situation, then the words have no meaning.

As a minority from one of the groups at the unflattering end of the crime rate distributions, it is my lived experience that the type of censorship you are advocating for is what makes me feel unsafe.

Inconvenient empirical truths about my community can not be discussed in the sort of polite and caring settings where the seeds of real solutions that don't ignore reality could germinate.

Instead, they can only be discussed in rude and hateful settings.

One of Reddit's most visited subreddits in the early days, between 2007 and 2011, was one dedicated to sharing suggestive pictures of minors[1]. It was chosen as "subreddit of the year" in 2008 and the subreddit was the second most searched term on Reddit[2].

There was definitely a core of users with questionable characters on Reddit for whom "free speech" meant sharing extremist, or at least perverse, content. The Reddit CEO even issued a "memo on free speech" to address the situation[1].

[1] https://venturebeat.com/2012/10/17/reddit-ceo-issues-interna...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...

It's basically a tradeoff between visibility to the public and density of toxic content.

Letting every sub have it’s own moderators with nearly free-reign is a big part of the problem.

Even 1 headline, as outlandish as it may be, if it is read it can influence a user.

Crucially there are some ideas/content that will just get through filters, no matter how thin it’s presence.

No, this always happens, any time you get more than two people in one room together. Eventually, intolerable assholes drive either everyone else away, or they get driven away.

Meanwhile, people who aren't bothered by that particular intolerable asshole shrug their shoulders, and ask 'What's the big deal?', and 'Can't we all just be rational robots who get along?', and 'This is purely an intellectual conversation, the outcome of which has absolutely no material bearing on my life, why are people getting so worked up over this?'

That has a huge impact on the quality of conversations.

It is an absolute disgrace how it's become normal. Or that mine is an unpopular opinion nowadays.

I was a teenager three decades ago.

1. No one would ever say “get a hobby, nerd” (“get a life...”, OTOH)

2. No one would say that about teens talking about politics, which non-nerd teenagers did commonly. They would say it about talking about computer code, though.

> It is an absolute disgrace how it's become normal

Why?

> Or that mine is an unpopular opinion nowadays.

The continuous political vigilance widely acknowledged to be necessary to prevent liberal democracy from devolving into tyranny is incompatible with the political disengagement you seem to prefer, so I think would be not at all a disgrace if your opinion were unpopular.

Though lamenting political engagement isn't particularly unpopular (but, amusingly enough since it often is overtly tied to complaints about partisanship, seems particularly popular among partisans of the right.)

That is if you believe that politics have infected all corners of the Internet because there's a "struggle to prevent democracy from devolving into tyranny", paraphrased from your quote.

In my opinion it is the other way around: politics are everywhere nowadays, and it's perfectly fine and encouraged that teenagers participate and radicalise further toward one side, people whose critical mind are still under development. Add a sprinkle of bipartisan politics, so it's often a matter of black and white, and the amplifying power of social media, and that's the perfect recipe towards tyranny, bigotry, entrenchment and moving further and further from the centre.

I said this on other threads and I'll repeat: until not very long ago at all, politics was a game for rich, old people. It still is, but these days you're shamed if you're not actively involved in it.

I'm from Europe, while this attitude has started to affect over here as well, it's come from the English-speaking world (two famous bipartisan democracies, which are very overrepresented on the Internet) yet people are always quick to point out "The internet/world has always been so politicised." No it wasn't, in my experience.

> > It is an absolute disgrace how it's become normal > Why?

I have seen where almost ALL discussions lead to judgement based on politics and that takes away from the core discussion point. What is the point of having separate subs then?

For example take this link (https://www.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/khlnyz/ronaldinho_o...), this was the top post on the subreddit when I saw it last night, the top-most comment is not about well wishes for his mother OR about how he thought about Covid OR whether or not he denied covid but rather the fact that he is "right-wing". Now I understand how bad it is but that is not the point of the sub. And that has become the norm , at least on reddit, which if not a disgrace, at least leaves a bad taste.

I've seen people take time to go through your profile and dig out one comment and then label you, just one. That feels like a disgrace.

Eh, depends on the comment. I recently saw a particularly erroneous comment about COVID-19, so I checked the poster's comment history to see whether it was worth trying to engage them in good faith, or just post a dry correction for others to see. I then saw this comment posted earlier that day:

> I don’t know if it’s blacks in general that are just retarded or if it’s balcks coupled with the history of slavery that makes them so useless and violent, either way I think this country would be VASTLY better off without them.

...I think it's pretty fair to label them based off of that one comment. For content that abhorrent, any number of occurrences above zero is enough to tell what kind of person a user is.

Whilst I agree that the comment you refer to is absolutely abhorrent and should be treated as such, I also strongly believe that people have the capacity to change and that we as a society should be pushing for that change.

If that comment was from a number of years ago, any number of things could have happened to change that persons view of the world and the people in it.

If you have someone who's so misinformed that they hold these horrendous views then casting them aside forever is, in my view, the opposite of what we should be doing.

In the physical world we tend to put people in to the 'correctional' system (whether it works as a correctional system is very much up for debate), but in the virtual world, we just censor them and let them go away and reinforce their views with each other in their own space.

We'll never get a better society if we don't challenge the nasty parts of it and work out why people go down that path and, critically, forgive them if they change.

Also, that comment is interesting because the actual things stated (higher violence, worse economic output, net burden on the state) are literally true and uncontroversial but the way they are phrased and the mere fact they are brought up at all tells an unpleasant story.

Unless of course the commentator is just ignorant or uncaring about such implications (e.g. an edgelord).

The comment in question was posted on /r/allmyopinions.

This is backwards. The tyranny is caused by the vigilance.

Not of those interested in liberty, but, sure of the vigilance of would by tyrants when met with the apathy of those who prefer liberty.

“It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt.” —John Philpot Curran

Most people who say we should discuss politics more seem to mean that we should affirm the local viewpoint.

Reddit absolutely doesn't care, they'd rather bombard you with ads and tracking garbage and pretend they're a viable platform through half-assed initiatives.

It has less to do with fReE sPeEcH and more to do with reddit being a niche platform for nerds in the early days (and as far as 2008).

>They were there, but they were far less extreme there than they were on Voat.

Until reddit became mainstream. Then the front page got taken over by /r/The_Donald crowd. There is a reason that subrredit is no more.

>And then whenever they would post rank inaccuracies, there were clearer-minded people to point out why they were wrong, in the same place where the same people could see it.

And there flowed rivers of milk and honey.... Wait, no, you'd get banned from /r/The_Donald faster than you can blink after you post something that didn't align. And it wasn't even the worst subreddit.

>Meanwhile in the 7% of cases when they actually had a legitimate point to make, they could make it, and the people who benefited from hearing it would actually hear it instead of continuing to be unawares and consequently continuing to be wrong about something.

Cry me a river about losing the educational value neo-nazis provide. You don't eat an apple that's 93% rotten, you throw it into the compost pile. This post shows that the compost pile couldn't even sustain itself.

>But it doesn't work to have one popular platform which allows nearly everyone except for Those Deplorables

To the contrary, the platform that works for these "deplorables" (your words) doesn't work for literally everyone else.

As a proof, we see this very post. Nobody is interested in having these people around.

Reddit wasn't a popular platform when it started out. It gained a huge amount of users because Digg messed up. If kicking the Voat contingent out were a mistake, Voat would bethe new reddit (it has the same features platform-wise, after all).

>Because witch hunts are bad...

Straw man argument. These people were kicked out for their hostile and toxic behavior, not for their ideas.

Kicking out people who poop in public places is not a "witch hunt", because it's not based on identity, but on bad behavior.

There are plenty of alt-right and neo-nazis on reddit still. They are just behaving a little better.

And again, I'm sorry, but I have little interest in attending venues where throwing poop around is OK. This post is an indication that I am in the majority.

No, the system is working as it should. If a platform is so full of fringe extremists that the vast majority of people want to have nothing to do with, then they have to bear the commercial and social consequences of that.

Your right to free speech doesn't take priority over my right to have nothing to do with it. Go find your own little patch of land to shout your opinions from.

Free speech doesn't mean you have to right to make me hear you. It just means that government is not allowed to restrict it (for the fear of political suppression). That's it.

The only reason reddit wasn't overrun by asshats even before more subreddits were banned were due to moderation. The same has been true for all forums and BBS:es since the beginning of time.

Truth and sensibility doesn't win out. The loudest voices with the least filtered speech does, because the least amount of filter produces the most amount of output.

With risk of making too broad of a generalization, everything dies without moderation.

I don't think this works on reddit either, since subreddit moderators can simply delete such comments.

There are organised subreddits (/r/AHS) that seek to get certain subreddits not in agreement with the latest SJW ideology banned. They do this by posting illegal / banned content themselves in the subreddit, then mass reporting it.

They also do this at a user level, including targeting mods of any subreddit they disagree with. If they get the mods of a subreddit banned, they can take it over with their own friendly mods - easily done as there are clearly Reddit employees with an activist agenda who will help them out.

Once they've done that they're free to stifle debate, ban any users who speak out against their point of view and generally create a culture of fear.

This is why all the womens issues, feminist & lesbian subreddits have trans (i.e. male) moderators. And why entire communities of women have left reddit forever.

Reddit bans posts and accounts, but cannot ban individuals. If you have something useful to say you can make a non troll account for it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

Well...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Davis

I've had interesting discussions about whether or not people like me should be allowed to vote or breed and whether people like me not existing would make the world a more peaceful place.

Reddit never had free speech as a key attracting point. People came to reddit not because it was free speech, but because there was good conversations and content there.

Reddit's early "free speech attitude" came about mostly because they had a staff of 4 people who spend all their time trying to keep the site from crashing as it scaled. It was a stance of convenience which they kept as long as possible.

Vote explictly advertised it as a "free speech alternative to reddit". Free speech was it's number one advertising point. It's really not surprising it instantly attracted the wrong type of users and drove away everyone else.

I believe there was a rough Reddit equivalent to Twitter executives' famous "the free speech wing of the free speech party" statement, but I can't cite one and I may be letting my memories of Aaron's views get projected onto his colleagues.