this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2023
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Reddit has been in decline for over 10 years. It has been slowly getting worse and worse. I have been seeking a replacement for a long time.
About three and a half years ago I heard about Lemmy and made an account to check it out. Promptly forgot about it for a few years until reddit pissed me off again.
Wasn’t Reddit openly okay with racism, homophobia and sexism until like 3 years ago?
They're still okay with all of those things. They just got better are pretending they are not. For example, if you say something obviously sexist, you will be called out and downvoted. But if you say something sexist against someone that the hivemind already decided they don't like, then it's A-OK to be sexist.
See: Amber Heard v. Johnny Depp.
Because his PR team was aces, it's apparently totally okay to say derogatory, sexist shit about her.
She's not a good person but Jesus Christ neither is he. Celebrity culture is the worst.
Pretty sure they're still openly okay with them. Not the reason I was looking to leave, though. Unlike a lot of people, I wasn't scared of the Lemmy developers politics.
Racism, sexism and homophobia is not “politics”, but okay 😂
What do you mean by “being going downhill for 10 years” then?
I think you're misreading me. Racism, sexism, and homophobia weren't the "politics" I was referring to, because you're right, those aren't politics, those are people being trash. I mean the Lemmy developers being socialists/communists didn't deter me from making an account here, because I'm not some capitalism worshipping pigboy. Their hard-left politics (the kind that led them to banning transphobic EMPRESS) are not scary to me, because I'm not a racist, sexist, homophobic douchebag.
As for Reddit and its decline. Reddit has been managed by State actors for a long time. At least since 2013ish.
Example:
https://old.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/z6unyl/in_2013_reddit_admins_did_an_oopsywhoopsy_and/
https://arxiv.org/abs/1402.5644
This is far from the only research paper around controlling discussions online produced by Eglin Air Force Base. They were the "most reddit addicted city" because they're trying to massage the message into what they want it to be. They flood the site with persona management software and bots to influence the perception of what "people's opinions are."
If you're in any way a leftist, this alone should have been enough reason to pack up and bail on it, because they are openly going out of their way to try minimize and hide voices like yours.
EDIT: Here's another paper on the subject from EAFB, this is the one I 'member from long ago: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.5644.pdf
Are you a communist?
Sort of, I'd say I'm way more of a socialist than communist, but I also think that both capitalism and communism suffer from being very old ideas that actually don't address issues of the modern world as much as they could. I think about the LGBT community, and remember that communism didn't just forget they existed, they ran on the same macho bullshit that vilified them for existing as capitalism. Castro admitting he made a mistake in regards to LGBT people near his death bed is far too little, far too late for the lives they destroyed.
There are valid critiques of both communism and capitalism, but we've basically got worldwide capitalism, so the critiques of capitalism simply matter more since it represents the status quo. I'll worry about critiquing more of socialism/communism when communists actually have real power worldwide beyond China, which is having it's own struggles right now as well. (Also, most of the critiques of China I have seen fall under propaganda messages from the US/Europe, and fewer of them have real meat of critiquing the actual functions of Chinese politics and how they work.)
Also, when it comes to theory, I fell in line a little more with people who weren't strictly communist, like the Situationists. Guy Debord is my pfp for a reason, and that's because he was fucking brilliant, in my opinion. I have a dog-eared copy of Society of the Spectacle that has more notes in it than any other book I've ever read.
Anyway, yeah. I'd say socialism is as good of a "fit" for me as I can find in existing political ideologies, and even that is more a close fit than a perfect fit. I'm definitely a fan of Critical Theory and the idea that we should always critique the status quo, whatever the status quo may be, because there is no such thing as a perfect world, we can always pursue improvement. If we had worldwide communism, I'd promote critiquing that as well.
What do you mean by socialism? Do you mean the abolishment of private property? Or just higher taxes for the rich?
Neither of those is "socialism." Socialism has a strict definition.
From Wikipedia:
Socialism doesn't necessarily say we should remove all forms of private ownership, as much as it says we should remove private ownership of the means of production. Also, that doesn't mean that nobody owns it, it means all the workers own it, collectively. It doesn't necessarily mean that you can't have your own house or your own refrigerator, rather that the companies that build those will just be collectively owned. Imagine every company being unionized by default, something like that.
We have a similar structure of owning things in the US when it comes to stocks and public companies, but the thing is in that case anyone can buy a part of the company. In socialism, only workers who are invested in the company through their labor get part in ownership and choice of the direction of the company.
I do agree on higher taxes for the rich, but that's just a band-aid on the existing capitalist system, it's not really a "socialist" idea at all. Higher taxes on the rich is about trying to keep capitalism from spinning out of control into outright feudalism. The rich only become that rich to begin with because of how our system of ownership works where they take all the excess profit generated by their workers and keep it for themselves. Socialism would remove their ability to do that because they would own as much of the company as any worker. They would no longer hold dictatorial control on the finances and where they go.
From the outset (2008 account, lurking a few months before that) they had a policy of "so long as it's not illegal." I found this admirable at the time. After T_D, yeah, not so much.
I would still find it admirable, but it isn't possible to do something like that anymore.
If you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches.
I am one of those three principled civil libertarians. I joined Voat in mid-2015, then left some months later because frankly I didn't actually like reading the things they tended to post there. I liked (out of a principled commitment to free speech) that they were allowed to post them, that doesn't mean I wanted to read that stuff.
It's entirely possible to do something like that - the same way it was in 2008. Keep that shit separate.
You have to let users say "fuck off, Nazi."
You have to find moderators who'll see that and say "yeah, fuck off, Nazi."
The site itself doesn't need to do much of anything. Reddit's smartest feature was the separation of communities, so people could largely ignore shit they didn't want to deal with, and all the admins forbade was starting shit across communities. That way tiny subforums of decent people could be reasonably protected from interference by bastards, and tiny subforums of bastards could be kept irrelevant.
For example, the /r/Holocaust subreddit was run by and for Holocaust deniers, for years. Obviously that's awful. But it affected approximately nobody, beyond the initial unpleasant surprise. There wasn't some "trending" feature that fed unwitting users to Engagemagog, whenever people spoke negatively of the fuckers responsible. Early reddit was a site with Nazis, but very plainly not a site by or for Nazis. Decent people outnumber them by a huge margin. So long as they can safely spot, exclude, and tell off those bastards, the co-existence of bastards is tolerable.
Where deliberate neo-Nazi forums like Voat differ from that is in explicitly protecting the worst among them. They screech about freedom of expression but only ever mean the unquestioned ability to yell at the outgroup. That's why none of them really like deliberate neo-Nazi forums. They can't stand each other, either. They demand a captive audience of victims.
If people lack the freedom of association to stay the hell away from Nazis, your site exists to supply bigots with victims.
If people lack the freedom of expression to even tell Nazis to fuck off, your site exists to deliver those victims on a silver plate.
It is possible to hit a balance where intolerant bastards are tolerated, but treated in accordance with their beliefs by everyone sensible and kind. But it's much simpler and easier to recognize that some beliefs aren't worth protecting.
Also that article is predictably a mix of good insight and total crap. SSC has the worst double-reverse-zero-awareness both-sides-ism on the internet. 'Fox lies and projects, but I dunno, maybe they were okay at some point. And as the right lost touch with reality, The Media™ really did develop a liberal bias, proving them right somehow.' Nah. Identifying bullshit is not a bias. People getting more disgusted as assholes embraced fascism is not somehow to blame for people embracing fascism. If consistent human decency looks like "ghettoization" against Nazis, your perspective is fucked beyond all reason.
I am, unlike you, generally a fan of Scott Alexander, and I think he also got it right (more recently) that moderation is different from censorship. I am opposed to most censorship. I am not ever opposed to moderation.
A pleasant surprise from both of oh he means never actually removing content, just letting bastards operate sotto voce.
And still both-sides-ing "people you consider bad," as if the reasons for censoring fascists, leftists, and anyone who criticizes the CCP are equally valid. I despise that "just because you disagree" framing of genocided fantasists versus... their victims.
And concluding that we should just do his thing, by default, and maybe he'll listen if anyone wants to do something else. As if the concepts and their dangers are brand new.
Letting people organize on your platform has consequences. Getting together a labor union is fundamentally not the same thing as getting together a lynch mob.