Social media censorship

[Admin]

If they have to give you attention to de-platform you it may be counter productive, silent deplatforming is the most effective since then people will not even heard about it.

reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/eciu1j/rneovaginaresults_a_ban_evasion_subreddit_of/

In reality it was not a ban evasion sub (it had a different purpose and rules) but since it's gone people will not be able to see that it's ban was justified by a lie.

reddit.com/r/terfisaslur/comments/e4ez6h/tra_in_rneovaginaresults_jumps_quickly_from_were/

https://archive.is/wip/FeWTy

reddit.com/r/GenderCritical/comments/e14exu/peaked_again_neovagina_disasters_replacement/

It seems like the anti-ban-avasion subreddit rule is there only for them to be able to ban subreddits who do not break any rules

people are not going to stop using reddit becuase some obscure subs are unfairly banned, they are a bit afraid of going after the_donald but they still do it anyway.

 

[Leucosticte]

crush us

YouTube crushed that channel out of existence

 

[Admin]

A general strategy social media platform uses is to construct rules in a way that allow them to ban anything they dislike while still being able to point to some rule that was technically broken. They tend to also make the rules vague leaving a lot up to interpretation.

https://reclaimthenet.org/reddit-censorship-attract-advertisers/

On reddit they have a rule against ban evasion when it comes to subreddit, if your sub is viewed to have the same purpose as a previous banned sub your sub can be banned even if it didn't technically break any rules, thus the more subs they ban the easier it will be to find some sufficiently similar subreddit that already have been banned and use it as justification.

 

[Leucosticte]

A general strategy social media platform uses is to construct rules in a way that allow them to ban anything they dislike while still being able to point to some rule that was technically broken. They tend to also make the rules vague leaving a lot up to interpretation.

https://reclaimthenet.org/reddit-censorship-attract-advertisers/

On reddit they have a rule against ban evasion when it comes to subreddit, if your sub is viewed to have the same purpose as a previous banned sub your sub can be banned even if it didn't technically break any rules, thus the more subs they ban the easier it will be to find some sufficiently similar subreddit that already have been banned and use it as justification.

As soon as they quarantined r/TheDonald, we pretty much knew it was over for Reddit. That was kinda like when YouTube banned Alex Jones. They went from banning extremists to banning even guys who were relatively inoffensive.

The quarantine takes them out of the search results. Increasingly, stuff is being curated to regulate what gets indexed; e.g. Wikipedia doesn't by default let new articles appear in search results anymore; they have to be reviewed first by someone in a small group of reviewers.

 

[Oxblood]

YouTube can be used to aggregate a small collection of people. The conversation rate from YouTube usually is around 10-15%.

You then can move that 10% on another platform and start a focused debate with less censorship.

 

[Admin]

 

[Admin]

There really isn't any reasons for social media to be fair when enforcing rules.

So what will happen is that some groups will get far for protections than other with regard to 'hate speech'.

Standard practise is to have really expansive rules and then do selective enforcement so they can ban people they view as a liability for the platform.

 

[Admin]

Is reddit unfair to women?
Terfs have claimed reddit is being unfair by banning some of their subreddits while ignoring subs that post rape-porn.

It's unclear if there is any merit to this. The r/femaledatingstrategy subreddit is rather offensive but it's not banned.

Reddit in general is tolerant of porn where people are being harmed such as ballbusting subs or a picture of a guy driving a screwdriver through his penis. For some reason reddit does tolerate r/pain despite the fact that is in practise promotes self harm, they did however ban the r/proed sub.

Update: reddit has now banned several fetish subs too including r/misogynyfetish

Well, r/misogynyfetish (and r/rapekink similarly, which was quarantined) was actually a safe space for women with a degradation fetish (or rape kink, the case of r/rapekink), and it's banning apparently drove everyone over to the r/misogynykink subreddit, which is the sub formed by people who thought the first sub had too much moderation. So, that's actually not a win. It was probably reported by TERFs at r/BanFemaleHateSubs, which was apparently missed in the banwave.

 

[Admin]

Why reddit echochambers are bad for society
A lot of successful subreddits are set up in a such way that the beliefs of the visitors of the sub will go unchallanged, most successful subreddits rely on draconian moderation.

If you get banned once from a sub you will not in any way be prevented or even warned if you use another account for said sub, if you do end writing new posts there while you are banned from some other account (good luck keeping track of that) you will risk having both accounts permanently suspended.

Reddit also has strict rules against brigading so you are not allowed to organize your followers there into swarming a problematic subreddits pointing out to these people how they are horribly mistaken.

These things together is very harmful for society since we end up with cult-like sections of the population that only see that already agree with their false beliefs. For mass-voting to work free communication among the voters is very important such that people will have their views challenged and more correct views can spread.

The banning of subreddits is based on whether or not reddit views these subreddits as a liability and the political views of the moderators at reddit. Instead of having their views challanged they will just ban subreddits altogether which will result in valuable content being lost, unless archived somehow there will not actually be any way to see if the ban was justified since people cannot actually see what was posted there.

r/againsthatesubreddits doesn't even allow you to respond to allegations there, nor will moderators ask you any questions before banning your sub, it will typically happen out of the blue and often for a made-up reason. It's all about them trying to appease their advertisers.

 

[Admin]

Discord
Discord is for better or worse a very popular platform where you can have your own servers.

Many decisions you can make as server administrator are irriversible, if you delete a message it cannot be undeleted, if you delete an invite it cannot be undeleted. For that reason when setting up your server you need to be very careful with permission or one of you might wake up to your server being completely destroyed by a rogue admin

Here is a template for a good way to limit admin powers

https://discord.new/yA5fKmFckhw4

 

[Bee]

Good stuff man. I enjoyed reading it.

 

[Admin]

When you try to visit a reddit profile

 

[Admin]

Aspistasia wrote:

I've spent sometime around discord, I don't do much on it besides go on voice-chats.

plus discord as a way to archive things is terrible, some of the stuff I post are rather TOS and tend to get removed and it complicates my usage of discord even more.

lets not mention all the blacklisting I had to go trough and the endless amount of alt accounts I had to create.

discord feels cocked in terms of it's design you don't need to download the "app" but you still need an account to see what servers got to offer, lol.

 

[Claire_Lovely]

This may be a new place to go:
https://revolt.chat/

 

[Admin]

Is Elon Musk now running twitter into the ground?
When the purchase was finalized a lot of conservative grifters claimed "the left is now in panic" but i didn't actually see anyone on the left panicking. It does not seem like the left percieves musk as much of a threat and this is for several reasons.

0. Elon musk will be in a very weak position due to him wrecking his own finances overpaying for twitter.
1. Government authorities (EU, etc) will have significant power to regulate twitter.
2. Most of the left percieves Musk as a bit idiotic and not someone smart enough to actually do significant damage to them.
3. Trump being unbanned will if anything just wreck the republican party.
4. Tanks to 0 musk will feel heavy pressure to appease advertisers which will tie his hands.

Seeing musk fire a lot of people very quickly and then begging them to return is a great indication that he doesn't actually know what he is doing. Of course he can always just find other people to do these jobs but it still does seem like Musk is overly impulsive.

Looking at the platform it still works just fine in terms of the experience for the users so maybe most of the people fired weren't actually needed.

Musk alienated a lot of content produces by trying to charge 8$/months for verification while also allowing pranksters to impersonate corporations for cheap.

 

[Admin]

Why cancel-culture isn't the proper way to deal with transphobia/bigotry.
A general issue with cancel-culture and similar is that it's basically a form of mob-rule which is a terrible form of governance. We have courts for a reason.

Another issue is that cancel-culture will be ineffective if the bigot can get support elsewhere such as by catering to conservatives instead.
Trump got elected once and almost got re-elected while alienating a lot of people. Since the people Trump alienated largely wasn't potential voters it didn't affect him much.

In the case of public intellectuals they do not even need to reach a majority, they can reach a hateful minority and remain successful that way provided they do not get deplatformed.

The solution
What we need is better legislation and a functional court-system.

Denmark already has good legislation against hate-speech against trans/intersex people.

https://www.thelocal.dk/20201015/denmark-to-criminalise-hate-speech-against-trans-people-with-change-to-racism-law/

The issue with deplatforming
While deplatforming does seem to work relatively well it does have the issue of placing too much power in private corporations who do not have the best interests of society in mind. The interests of social media companies do not align with the interests of society.

It's better to have some good government control media (especially social media) than to let special interests control what type of information the citizens get.

https://vintologi.com/threads/the-overspecialization-problem.898

 

[Admin]

The discord server nuking problem
Most discord servers are probably destroyed by rouge admins. There are a lot of youtube videos were people record abusing admin perms to utterly destroy discord servers, they often gloat and are proud about the destruction they cased (since they hated the community).

I recently had by biggest server get semi-nuked because an admin that had done a good job in the past suddenly turned against us, this was of course partly our fault for not acting on red flags we saw before that but this was an individual who had had these perms for over a year without abusing them (lower-perms before that). It would have been even worse if it wasn't for the fact that i happened to wake up at 4am (when i would usually be sleeping) when the vandalism had just started.

https://vintologi.com/threads/elite-rule.24/page-2#post-5352

The first issue is not having a separate setting for being able to delete/create channels.

The second big issue is that you need to ban someone to prevent them from harrassing people via DMs but if you grant ban perms to any admin said admin can destroy your server by banning all members except the owner and higher admins. Another reason for banning users is preventing them from deleting their own messages from public channels.

Discord unlike reddit and other platform does not make bans reversible, if someone is banned from the server you will have to invite them back to get them back as server member.

Then there is the issue of you being unable to undelete a message (unlike reddit) but that's less serious of a risk since you can just back up important messages/info at other places.

 

[Admin]

Reddit admins protected about changes to the reddit API pricing
They protected by making a lot of subreddits private, this went about as well as you would expect.

Of course i didn't participate in that idiotic protest since we have decided that r/transmaxxing isn't going to be made private under any circumstances.

As expected reddit resorted to removing moderators from their positions for participating in that protest, see examples here

They are also talking about letting the users of a subreddit vote about mod positions which would obviously end in a disaster

reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/14b9rn3/concerns_regarding_users_voting_out_mods_feature/

People who control large subreddits were always replaceable, there are thousands of people in line willing to work for free in exchange for power. If you make your community private you stop upholding your end of the unofficial bargain (keeping the site clean and usable in exchange for having mod powers).

If you control a subreddit you should of course create alts from different IP adresses in the case reddit starts banning you (which is hard to avoid), that however might not work if you control any larger subreddit since then reddit might just steal it from you regardless of what you do to hand that power to someone else, you don't actually own anything.

Of course removing moderator without warning from subreddits will discourage people from putting effort into building communities but maybe that doesn't really matter anymore. They already have plenty of subreddits and thousands of people who want their hands on mod powers.

While wanting power is one reason for wanting to be a moderator it can also be about wanting to create and build something. People who have spent years building up a community will naturally be attached to that and not want it to just get destroyed (such as by someone else who took it over).

Most members of my community has already switched to discord.