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What do you think the difference between a good site and a great site is?
We work with websites every day. What is it about a site that you think makes it great? What holds a site back from greatness?
We work with websites every day. What is it about a site that you think makes it great? What holds a site back from greatness?
Purpose. The difference between a site that wants to be profitable and a site that wants to provide value to its users is like night and day.
Now, obviously there can be a lot of overlap--you don't need to choose just one or the other--but often profitability ends up taking priority over everything else and the only sense of value that ends up being left is that which appeases shareholders.
Along those lines, sites that come to fill a gap or solve a problem, rather than sites looking to be the next big thing.
The people on it.
Interestingly, most social sites start out with a group of quality users posting quality content, then the overall quality regresses towards the mean as the site becomes more mainstream.
Tinder and Facebook are excellent examples of this effect happening. Tinder may have had good people looking for interesting dates at first, but it's since devolved into a cesspool of bottom feeders after reaching a critical mass of users.
Reddit is a perfect example. I've noticed it get worse and worse over the eight years I've used it, but that's going to happen no matter what. More people will always lower the quality.
Though, I will say, the sheer number of users on Reddit leads to the creation of extremely niche communities that otherwise would not congregate. Think about the variety of restaurants in Los Angeles or New York City, as compared to Salt Lake City or Little Rock. The upside to large networks is diversity (as long as free speech is allowed to flourish).
To a point.
If a community goes around parading “WE HAVE FREE SPEECH” trolls and other hateful people will simply use it as a platform to spread hate. As long as the free speech is productive and promotes conversation (not arguing), I think it’s fine.
I completely disagree with this. If someone is saying intentionally toxic stuff such as racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobic, islamophobia, or other xenophobic language then I don't want those users a part of my community. If you want "free speech, then Voat already exists and we already know how that turned out.
I think it's less about the opinions per se, and more about the way they are presented.
Just like we wouldn't want to ban people from this site for just having differing opinions, I don't think we should ban people for discussing them either.
What I do think we should ban people for is hateful/spiteful/mean spirited comments, independent of the opinions they hold, as they do not contribute to discussion.
If anyone is using slurs to describe races, class types, sexuality or anything like that then they need to be banned, no IFs ANDs or BUTs.
I would think the above applies to what you said, but I would also build upon what you said and add anyone using slurs to describe political leanings etc.
We're all people, let's treat each other as such.
I think allowing free speech is a necessary component for a healthy community. Moderation that's too heavy handed prevents discourse from happening. I'm in the camp that differing opinions are absolutely necessary to synthesize approximations of truth when dealing with complex issues.
I think the real problem with toxic users isn't necessarily due to the public endorsement of free speech in online communities, but the nature of anonymity itself. The social feedback loops (aka public reputation) that bind us to behave in pro-social ways in real life is greatly diminished in online communications. Trolling in real life has public consequences— you might be ostracized in friend groups and lose out on social opportunities, but trolling online has weak and difficult to enforce repercussions— it's far too easy to fire up a VPN and create a new handle.
Voat touts itself as "free speech" and it is, and it is by no means a healthy community. That website should be a case study on when "free speech" runs amok. There need to be limits and sensible AND transparent censorship.
Good community, unique gimmick or idea, and good technical execution.
good site adapts, great site adopts.
Could you give an example of that?