>I wish him the best and hope he truly makes twitter somewhere that you visit that isn't just rage bait again.
You think "Lord Edge" is going to make Twitter less of a cesspool? Everything he's said and done indicates he wants the limits Twitter currently has on speech to be removed.
It's not completely independent - after Reddit started banning subreddits like "Fat People Hate" and anti-trans hategroups, the amount of hate posts decreased on the whole platform, even in completely unrelated groups. This might point to a perception of decreased tolerance of such posts, or be simply a function of the banned subreddits being used to coordinate attacks.
Either way, reddit is unlike twitter and more like a network of networks, so the same result might not occur there.
Fun fact. They banned r/fatpeoplehate over a year before banning explicitly racist subreddits like r/coontown. Really shows where their priorities are.
You mean when reddit stopped being reddit, pushed out their original techy userbase, and invited in the flood of Facebook refugees becoming Facebook 2.0? Yeah, entirely changing your platform's userbase will do that.
I don't know if and when reddit stopped being reddit, but I can guarantee that the "techy userbase", whoever that was, did not leave because a few thousand people where told to fantasize about mass-murdering minorities elsewhere.
I don't have to guess. I was there since 2008. The 2013-2015 time on reddit there was huge uproar and discontent due to the corporate VC money being accepted and immediate changes in policy thereafter. If you don't remember this I'm not sure anything you say about reddit can be taken at face value. The CEO literally resigned after weeks of protest.
> At the same time, Reddit has been trying to increase monetization. In the aftermath of Taylor's firing, reports surfaced that the company was planning to add more video interviews and other sponsored content to generate more money with popular features on the site, something that Taylor apparently advised against.
You're talking about the obvious in your face censorship and bans that were going on at the same time as these other changes to become attractive to advertisers (and their target demographic) fleeing facebook. But these changes all happened at once and they came from the same source. They cannot be separated.
>there was huge uproar and discontent due to the corporate VC money being accepted and immediate changes in policy thereafter.
I remember that, and just like most other times there is a mass protest on a social media site about social media itself, the uproar and discontent was largely weak, reactionary, and disturbingly out-of-touch with the business realities of the company. There's a very good reason the complainers didn't get what they wanted.
I was also there. I belonged to the group of people who begged the reddit admins to do something about all the hate posts, because I didn't want to read about Donald Trump and how bad fat people and Ellen Pao are all day. I wanted to get back to the tech discussion. We could fix /r/theDonald hogging all space on /r/all by not using /r/all, but the people advocating the murder of obese people, trans people and jews were a constant nuisance and invaded every subreddit, and that certainly didn't help to attract or retain a techy audience for the subs I frequented.
My perspective isn't more valid than yours, but I think you might underestimate how many people literally fled reddit due to the deluge of hate and highly antagonistic posts about US politics.
> My perspective isn't more valid than yours, but I think you might underestimate how many people literally fled reddit due to the deluge of hate and highly antagonistic posts about US politics.
Indeed, if Elon Musk takes Twitter private and uses his power to force 'free speech' on the rest of us, and I start seeing references to kikes and fags and such in every casual tech discussion, I'll just close my Twitter account and walk away.
I want a moderated forum. I like what dang does for HN. I don't want a free speech heaven, because it reliably turns into hell. I used to run my own BBS back in the 80s, and even then it was obvious. If you don't put in guardrails, the assholes take over and suck all the oxygen out of the room.
There's a big difference between moderation on HN and sites like Reddit. Reddit completely shadowbans, filters, or bans anyone who doesn't post with the hivemind. This makes it so you can't have a fair contrarian view and it completely pushes out people and makes an echo chamber. I would say that Reddit takes it to the level of the Soviet Union in wrongthink.
While HN is moderated, you can have pretty much any fair view as long as it contributes to the discussion. Which is nice and the ideal middle ground. Although I will say, I never have any issues with Twitter and the moderation is just fine besides some high profile cases I disagree with. I would say it's even to lax.
This further confirms my suspicion that the reason conservatives are censored on social media is because if they were given equal opportunity then they would DOMINATE every conversation and every election.
It was less of a cesspool because it was significantly smaller. This is a well-understood feature of online communities: scale changes them, and not for the better.
Well, the obvious/naive connection/correlation would be that the increased limits were a response to it becoming a "cess pool". And haven't totally succeeded at reversing that, but may or may not have kept it from being even worse than it would have been without them.
People love to ponder how to improve social networking, and what the best model might be. The truth is that the best forum is simply the new one that the masses haven't caught onto yet.
This is an emotionally charged topic, apparently, but I just do not see any reason to believe that if Elon Musk takes Twitter private that they will start banning unions, journalists, and forcing people who are trans to come out. No evidence of that.
W.r.t removing current limits, again I see no evidence of that, except maybe people who were banned for making fun of journalists for telling them the same thing they were telling other people (learn 2 code) might get reinstated. Death threats? No chance. Blatant racism? Nope. Harassment? Well does that happen already? It's not clear. Sexism? Again no clear lines here. Trump I hope never comes back and it may stay that way. I don't think Elon really cares about Trump.
> A guest on Joe Rogan’s podcast has claimed that being transgender is a “contagion” similar to “satanic ritual abuse.”
> Mr Peterson told him that being trans was a “sociological contagion” which he compared to “the satanic ritual abuse accusations that emerged in daycares in the 1980s.”
Ah, a chopped-up, out of context quotation in a clickbait hit-piece article about a 3 hour podcast. Thanks for that. Just the kind of nuanced and thoughtful contribution I like to see.
Sorry, but could you help me connect the dots here. How would a guest on Joe Rogan's podcast be relevant here? You know that both Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson are on Twitter now right? Are they forcing trans people to come out as trans? Are you suggesting that if Elon Musk takes Twitter private, that guests on Joe Rogan's podcast will be free to be on Twitter and then make trans people come out as trans?
I'm really confused here. Joe Rogan has had other guests like Sanjay Gupta and Bernie Sanders on as well. Would their comments be further amplified on Twitter (or whatever you are envisioning here) as well via a similar indirect link to Elon Musk?
I was simply pointing out to the parent commenter that Jordan Peterson does indeed have some rather negative views on trans people, and that it’s not just a narrative made by “the media”.
But the whole blow up was because he did not think the Canadian government should force people to use the correct pronouns. He said he would use them voluntarily if someone asked him, but it was wrong to use force to require others to do so.
I see. I was still thinking in the context of how that would apply to Twitter/Musk. Don’t think it makes a difference and Peterson is on Twitter now anyway.
Actually you were reinforcing that this is a narrative made by the media, by quoting the exact kind of crappy media article that is pushing that very narrative.
He simply stated that we already have [national] laws. I'd have to agree with that. We should get rid of the dystopian privatized legal system and give people their day in court. Imagine how even the worse tyrants in history would share the reason for punishment. People are increasingly building their lives on platforms. With [the potential for] big gains comes [the potential for] big losses.
Amazing? It would be immediately inundated with hateful content, driven by bots more than it already is.
This utopian "free speech" bastion never works out on the internet and always devolves into congregations of hate groups, which normalize themselves and spread. Look at 4ch => 8ch => Brennan's postmortem on the experiment.
Plus there will always be a level of moderation. No censorship of any kind would immediately become overrun with child porn. This has already happened countless times on other platforms.
You think "Lord Edge" is going to make Twitter less of a cesspool? Everything he's said and done indicates he wants the limits Twitter currently has on speech to be removed.