> Welcome to Voat 2.0.

Or Reddit 1.0? That's what reddit used to be, and reddit got quite popular when it was like that.

Not even close. Reddit 1.0 was an era where the trolls didn't know what was possible. It was a pleasant era where extreme events that necessitated the subsequent rules/bans didn't yet occur.

Then Reddit slowly had its commitment to free speech chipped away, starting innocently with banning things like /r/jailbait and then abhorrent stuff like /r/coontown and then some time passed and they banned /r/chapotraphouse for being edgy and to prove they were cool because they banned left wingers.

I don't see how twitter changing ownership will change anything structurally at Twitter. Jack Dorsey started out as a free speech champion many years ago. The things people say cause real problems for real people and at some point the rubber meets the road. A large site like Twitter is at the mercy of the politics of the world.

Even stuff like "Twitter will comply with local laws" is a subtle concession to local censorship laws. Cracks in the facade are already appearing before Musk even owns twitter.

And yet stuff like /r/BlackPeopleTwitter exists where if you don't "prove" you're black you're not allowed to post. There's a fundamental difference between being required to comply with a legal order to take something down and taking down content because you decided someone _might_ not like it.

> if you don't "prove" you're black you're not allowed to post.

They do not.

They lock down specific, controversial threads in this manner when outsiders start making confrontational comments. AFAIK this was done because the racist vitriol proved impossible to moderate.

It's still censorship, yet I'm not convinced censorship is a bad thing. Rather censorship is inevitable because the amount of peoples who want to speak is greater than peoples collective capacity to listen, so some sort of filtering process will and must take place.

Reddit has huge "tyranny of the majority" problems and many communities spring up to essentially censor the speech of people outside of that community so people in that community can speak their mind without getting downvoted (I.E. censored) by the masses of Reddit. BlackPeopleTwitter has a system where all users that are not verified black users will be censored if the moderators deem it appropriate, which is perfectly reasonable. Is this racist censorship? Absolutely and yet it turns out that's not always a bad thing.

I find much of the discourse on free speech to be an oversimplification to the point of self-parody. I support the intentions of free speech but not a literal interpretation of what it means, which is just never censor anybody ever. That literally doesn't work and can't work, it's not a thing that's possible outside of a thought experiment, you'll end up getting DDOSed by speech.

Maybe so! There were big followings for /r/CreepShots and /r/rapingwomen. And lots of free-reachers who were apoplectic when Reddit at least tried to do something about it.

If Musk can dial up the abuse on Twitter, Reddit 1.0 can live again.

No? The entire purpose of reddit was to scale bans and site moderation by offloading that responsibility to the users rather than the site administrators.

For years, they tolerated the existence of subreddits with names to heinous for me too even dare mention. Numerous r/[racial slur]s. Numerous subreddits dedicated to sexual violence and harassment. You know what I'm talking about, don't try to gaslight me.

I think many people have made assumptions about what Musk means when he talks about free speech. I don’t think (and greatly hope) it’s going to be an uncensored free for all, which typically leads to a toxic nightmare. Fingers crossed!

I think he means it for his friends like Trump and Bannon.

>> Trolls, disinformation spreaders, and "free reach absolutists" are going to be thrilled with the megaphone Musk will provide them to drown out their enemies.

Just remember, twitter does not give those people a megaphone. It's the media that report on their stupid shit that gives them an audience. Otherwise nobody would know what they're saying - especially the people who don't like them - and yet everyone knows who some of those people are.

Impeding unlimited harassment is anti-free-reach. Trolls won't get banned under Musk — they're his soul mates. They will have free rein to brigade the posts of their enemies and will use massive replying at scale as a megaphone to scream others down.

You can block them right?

I foresee measures coming to prevent coordinated attacks too large for simple blocking, but that will take some time.

Truth is only some of the "trolls" historically have been banned on Twitter. The ones the board agreed with were allowed to keep at it.

Twitter is full of trolls, disinformation and calls to violence against people at this very moment.