I gave Gettr a try and came to the same conclusion. I can count on one half of one hand the number of people on there I'd be interested in seeing updates from.

But I'm glad it exists as a place people can safely be wrong on the internet.

> I'm glad it exists as a place people can safely be wrong on the internet

Have you considered that written words that remain uncontested (or unpunished if against the law) can lead to actions outside of the Internet where people are killed?

Free speech just for the sake of it is not good for societies. I don’t know Gettr but Telegram is also a place where people can be safely wrong on the Internet. And it leads to calls for politicians to be murdered. Groups radicalize themselves in their thought bubbles, take the protest (in their eyes justified) to the streets, and even murder people (in their eyes justified) all because they can be safely wrong on the Internet.

You can join Gettr and contest written words if you'd like. I don't see the benefit myself, but there's nothing about the platform preventing you from doing that.

They ban you for not being in the same ideology as them, so you can't really contest their words.

You are right, and that is why I want Twitter to cancel the account of the Taliban spokesman for terrorism, Saudi Arabia, whose king is a known killer, Iran leaders, for promoting homophobia, Egyptian government accounts for being a dictatorship, Chinese embassies Twitter accounts for defending the genocide in Xinjiang and a dozen other countries accounts should be cancelled too, as well as violence promoted by antifa twitter accounts, everybody should be boycotting Twitter until they stop promoting terrorism, violence and genocide, , it is disgraceful they are allowing the radicalisation of people that will end up in people being killed.

Here we are talking on HN. Is it okay for HN to ban people who don't follow the rules? I have heard this is something that can happen here. Does this mean HN is preventing people from talking?

Every "free speech" website has lots of moderation. But the moderation is hard to spot when users are anonymous or admin actions are hidden.

People shouldn't confuse an ideological stance with an operational strategy.

I may be confused by what you are saying. What is the point of a company having an ideological stance if "free speech", if they are violating that all the time by censoring? How is that different from paying lip service to free speech like many companies?

> "Does this mean HN is preventing people from talking?"

I see this not particularly clever argument against the "free speech absolutist" strawman frequently enough that it's getting stale. Can people really not distinguish between the free speech issues involved in suppressing legal but controversial speech (e.g. "We support $DEPLORABLE_CANDIDATE and their $BAD_POLICY.") versus the entirely separate issues of suppressing illegal or unwanted speech (e.g. threats, spam)? This simplistic binary "all or nothing" thinking cannot capture the nuances involved in the complex philosophical and legal quagmire that is the principle of freedom of speech.

Beyond that, it's particularly ironic to attempt to use HN as the example given that the HN moderation team has tried very hard to be evenhanded on controversial threads while enforcing the rules to the extent that they routinely get accused of favoritism by all sides.

> Preventing people from talking is not the way to fix our problems

So you think platforms should allow for radicalisation?

> "So you think platforms should allow for radicalisation?"

Radicalization like the civil rights movement or the LGBTQ rights movement, both considered extremist back in their day? Everyone should; allowing radicalization is very, very important. Platforms that aim to prevent radicalization sustain the status quo which is exactly what a conservative would want.

To quote Doug Gwyn "UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things." and perhaps something similar could be said about the principle of freedom of speech.

Today's radicalization is tomorrow's mainstream.

Oh no! I don't want to be associated with radicalization! I repent!

No. Try that act on someone else.

Frame it however you want. If you frame free speech as the potential for radicalization than I'm 100% fine with the potential for radicalization. That's part of what living in a free society entails, the right for people to believe in things that you find radical.