Is this place going to become the anti-thesis of Voat?
I just joined this website today and I like it quite a bit already. Several of the design choices seem to be really well thought out and the community seems pretty open to discussion, etc. While reading the initial email you receive when signing up, the creator talks about how this place isn't going to be a bastion of free speech and certain types of content (hate speech, etc) won't be tolerated and I understand where he is coming from.
I'm sure many people are aware of Voat and how it was a response to Reddit censoring several subreddits (/r/the_donald, /r/fatpeoplehate, etc) and if you go there now, it's pretty much exactly the type of demographic you would expect to occupy those subreddits originally.
But while I can see where the creator is coming from with his approach, I guess I'm just curious where you guys would draw the line? Because making a place that caters to people that you could say are on the opposite side of the Voat spectrum seems like a great breeding ground for another echo chamber. And I guess I've become a bit disillusioned with the idea that I can get "balanced" opinions on controversial topics on content-aggregate websites. Maybe that's not even possible with this format. Either way, I'm wondering if anyone feels the same.
While this site is not deliberately intended to be a safe space for left-wing politics, I believe it will end up with a strong left-wing bias, due to its rules and its philosophy.
Let me start with a digression... (because... well... I want to!)
There's a concept here in Australia called "indirect discrimination". It's the concept that a perfectly impartial and unbiassed policy might indirectly (and usually accidentally) discriminate against a certain group. The classic example used to illustrate this is having a staircase at the entrance to your building. You are totally impartial and unbiassed about who enters your building: everyone is welcome! And everyone who comes to visit you in your building is welcome to use your well-built staircase: it's open to all. However, your totally impartial and unbiassed staircase has the unintended consequence of discriminating against people in wheelchairs (and parents with prams). They can't get into your building. Your impartial and unbiassed staircase is blocking them. This is indirect discrimination.
Similarly, I believe that @Deimos' impartial and unbiassed policies here will indirectly discriminate against certain types of people, and prevent them participating here as much as they might otherwise want to.
For example: the fact that there even is a Code of Conduct at all will limit some people's participation here. Some people believe that online communication should be totally unrestricted. These people believe they should be able to say whatever they want to whomever they want, wherever and whenever they want. Often, these are people with a strong ideological support for free speech. However, Tildes' Code of Conduct does not allow for unfettered free speech. If these people try to exert their right to free speech here in certain ways, they will find themselves facing restrictions, starting with having their comments removed, and possibly ending in having their accounts banned. (This has already happened at least once, and is guaranteed to happen again.) People who have a strong ideological support for free speech are more likely to be considered right-wing than left-wing.
To take another example, so-called "hate speech" will not be allowed here. "Hate speech" is defined to include certain types of bigotry, such as racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and so on. However, there is a section of the population who sincerely hold opinions that other people define as racist and/or sexist and/or homophobic and/or transphobic. If these people try to express their sincerely held opinions here, they will almost certainly find themselves running afoul of Tildes' Code of Conduct. Again, these opinions are more commonly found among people with right-wing political leanings.
So, while this site isn't necessarily intended to be a left-wing cuddle-fest, its impartial policies will indirectly restrict participation by some individuals espousing some right-wing views.
This isn't just hypothetical navel-gazing; this is based on my personal experiences moderating political discussion spaces over on Reddit. We had similar policies there to those here on Tildes, and I observed that right-wing people were more likely to come into conflict with those policies than left-wing people.
And, just to clarify: I totally support Tildes' vision, policies, and rules. :)
Incredibly well said and well reasoned! When my next exemplary vote resets, it's yours.
I think another aspect to this indirect discrimination issue is also due to methods of recruiting users to the site. I have been primarily recruiting from reddit because that's one of the few places where we can openly do so without spamming, and also because it's what we are most familiar with. And the problem is that by primarily recruiting from reddit we potentially inherit a lot of the biases and baggage that users carry over from there, especially since people looking for alternatives naturally must be at least somewhat disapproving of the direction reddit is heading. But I honestly can't think of any other places I should be trying to recruit from where my efforts wouldn't be seen as spammy, obnoxious or inappropriate, so I am sort of stuck with it.
Which basically means I/we need help... and I think if the reasonable Conservatives who are already on Tildes (I know there are quite a few, since I invited many of them) are the perfect candidates for doing so by making an effort to reach out to their friends and acquaintances who are similarly reasonable and asking them to join the site. It won't be easy for them, no doubt... this site definitely does have a pretty heavy Liberal lean to it for all the reasons you mentioned... but becoming a radical leftist safe space is honestly not the goal of the site so we need help to avoid that. I can't speak for Deimos or anyone else who has been here since the beginning, but I personally want Tildes to become a place that both sides of the now highly polarized political divide can share, coexist peacefully in and maybe even start bridging the divide through productive dialogue with each other. Idealistic? Maybe... but even still, it's at least worth trying to make a reality!
As they say, even a broken clock is right twice a day. Sometimes I accidentally stumble on to something resembling common sense.
Thank you.
Does there really need to be a political goal to this site? If it simply aims to be an inclusive forum for discussion, without hate speech and such, why does there have to be hand-wringing over it being "liberal?"
All good point and to me it boils down to behavior. It's important to be able to discuss extreme views on both sides and it's doable if the users can do it in a civil manner. Of course things will get heated some times but as I said elsewhere it all comes down to the users and the environment they create.
Without getting into the political aspects of this, there's something that I want to mention that I think a lot of people don't take into account a lot of the time in discussions like this: people always use "echo chamber" like a self-evident description of an undesirable type of community, but in reality, a lot of the aspects of an "echo chamber" are what people would want out of a good community.
As an example, take ~anime. When people that enjoy anime think about what they'd want out of a place to discuss anime, they're not thinking, "I'd love a community where half the users don't even like anime and every thread is an argument about whether anime is good or not." They want a place where, overall, most of the users will have the same kind of "foundation"—that they enjoy anime and want to be able to discuss it with other people that are passionate and knowledgeable about the topic as well. A community where they have to constantly be on the defensive and get involved in repeated debates about the very basics like "anime is enjoyable" isn't going to make a good anime community.
But then that definition—a community that isn't full of dissent, where people mostly just agree with each other's opinions—is exactly what a lot of people would consider an "echo chamber".
I tend to agree. Many fandoms (cough Star Wars cough) are becoming fairly toxic because of various influences.
While it is nice to discuss the good and the bad, lately many of the communities, from popular video games, popular movies, and popular books, have really grown quite toxic and I'm not sure what is happening. I mean I don't want a 100% happy feel good place, but the pure anger and vitrol at something that is entertainment and, at least it's supposed to be, fun is just so strange.
It's been around for a long time, just look at the whole gamergate thing. It may feel like it's gotten worse lately, and in some aspects it has, but those tendencies have been around for a long time.
Gamergate isn't that long ago. It was 2014. It really changed a lot for the worse in nerdy online communities, together with the whole redpill movement. Suddenly communities that were mostly dominated by nerdy people who value logic and in-depth discussion had their own reductionist battlecries. Suddenly things got political.
Supposedly Steve Bannon lists gamergate as one of the puzzle pieces that brought a lot of younger men towards the alt-right. I think there was a really effective push to target nerds, who often feel shunned by women and who think that women taking over their escapist sanctuaries (videogames, comics, etc) in the name of feminism is an attack on them. And what side are feminists on? The left.
Fun fact—Mark Judge (the other guy in the room with Kavanaugh and Ford in 1982) is a gamergater and wrote an article titled "Why Gamergate is Really About Political Correctness": https://acculturated.com/gamergate/
Ugh, I sympathize. Watching Star Trek and Star Wars tear each other apart because of the new entries into their respective franchises has been painful to watch.
I think it's just a combination of old franchises with dedicated fans take it personally when the franchise doesn't develop the way they want. And the internet now allows them to express that and find others who agree. It's not even an echo chamber effect (the level of in-fighting should make that clear), just people trying to express their distaste and the internet let's them do it anonymously, so there's no limit on vitriol.
To some degree, with "old" franchises like Star Wars and Star Trek, I understand. If you're 40+ now and grew up with the original trilogy or TOS, to now see how The Last Jedi went or Abram's reboot, it's probably like watching someone ruin key parts of your childhood. Younger millennials, such as myself, might see the problems with said movies but it's not an assault on our childhood. Which is also absurd and people should not act like spoiled children just because Johnson made a bad movie, but I get why people are made and I don't think it's necessarily due to an echo chamber.
I think it might be due to the fact that different people are going to expect different 'foundations'. ~anime has a very specific subject and purpose, it'd be downright confusing for there to be people hanging around who are indifferent to anime.
But Tildes at large aggregates everything and nothing, excluding memes sets the bar somewhat higher but it's still a very broad foundation.
I agree with you, but couldn't we say that, based on the ideals of the site, Tildes's main aggregation is users rather than content? I'm here not because of what gets posted but because I want a place where people remain civil and comment in good faith. That ideal still gives us a specific purpose on top of a broad foundation.
But what does remaining civil and commenting in good faith mean, in practice? Ask a dozen people and you'll get a dozen different answers.
I think that's a fair question and concern. I'll try to give my take.
I see good faith as an openness to discussion and changing your mind. You don't have to know what will change your mind (though it definitely would grease the wheels of discussion). You don't have to read literally every word that gets said. All you have to do is try.
That said, people can easily demonstrate a disinterest in being persuaded. These would be behaviors like repeatedly mischaracterizing someone's argument after they've already corrected you, or using vague and over-broad generalizations to poison the well against attempts to persuade you. There's also the "I'm just asking questions" trope where people will pose a seemingly absurd question to provoke an audience. Basically, when someone is seeming to care more about "winning" the discussion than about listening to the most valid points that another person is bringing up, we're walking on thin ice.
I do just “ask questions” without ill-intent. Sometimes I just want to know why someone thinks the way they think and how they arrived at those conclusions. I'm a fan of mayeutics. Asking questions is the best way for my brain to discuss things.
Yet, most of the times, when I ask a question, it is assumed I meant to disagree and I'm judging the opinion holder critically. Which couldn't be further from the truth.
Part of what attracted me to Tildes was the premise of not trying to interpret things in bad faith and having some trust in the user. If it stays that way, I'll be happy to stay and make a home out of this site. If it doesn't, then it'll probably just end up like Reddit.
Asking questions is wonderful when your purpose is to investigate a part of another person's argument you are unsure about (generally), but there is a common type of trolling to strategically blur the burden of proof in an argument from the question asker to the askee. It is this behavior I'm referring to as a trope and a sign of active disinterest, not all questions ever.
It's also worth noting that asking good questions is hard work! Figuring out what is still keeping you from understanding or accepting another person's view and then asking a question based on that is taxing and should be rewarded even when the attempt misses the mark. I would much rather someone asks a question of me if they're not clear about something I've said than that they move forward with one of the multiple understandings they could have taken.
I know. I'm saying that, because of that trolling behavior being so prevalent, honest questions are met with hostility.
Yeah, I don't think it's nearly as prevalent as it's accused of being, but it definitely does happen.
It may be that one problem is defensiveness in light of a genuinely asked question that is either misinterpreting a claim or is seen to be. If someone just asked a pretty damning question about your argument, and you believe it's unfair to discard your view because of the likely answer, you're potentially liable to mistake the question as having ill-intent when its purpose was investigatory not burden-shifting. If the burden of proof should always have been with the person being questioned, the question asking isn't just asking questions, because the question is in direct response to a prior claim.
Are you defending asking unprovoked questions that have nothing to do with any claim being made? It doesn't seem that way to me. And the reason is simple: the Socratic method has nothing to do with that. The Socratic method was never just asking questions of people and putting a new burden of proof on them. It comes in responding to an argument with questions, keeping the burden of proof where it should always have been.
I suppose I should be more clear about what I see as an appropriate burden of proof. If you're making a claim, you have the burden of proving that claim. If no claim is made but questions are asked anyway, such as if I were to ask you right now why you don't believe in the flat earth theory, that's shifting the burden from the claim maker to the recipient. In the act of asking unprovoked about this flat earth theory, I'm forcing you to pick up the burden of proof to show why flat earth theory is wrong, even though you've made no claim about it whatsoever. The implied claim being made would have been mine in the act of asking the question.
I don't think we're disagreeing, but this does seem to be a decent opportunity to distinguish between the good and bad question asking.
I hear you on not wanting to be seen as a troll but also wanting to ask questions. I think a big part of conveying tone, particularly through internet comments, is not the question itself but the rest of the comment around it. Basically, don't just make the question a one-liner, but show sincerity and genuine curiosity/confusion with the rest of your comment. That's how people can tell the difference between a good-faith question and a question intended for less constructive purposes.
If you simply ask a question without displaying any of your own thinking, especially on an inflammatory or divisive topic, it can come across as the "just asking questions" type of trolling. It's low-effort and an easy way to derail a conversation or make a passive-aggressive point. On the other hand, more people will be willing to give you the benefit of the doubt if you're willing to state where you're coming from and why you're asking the question. No doubt you'll get better answers too, as much of the discussion will center around the beliefs you actually hold rather than around beliefs projected onto you based solely on the question you asked.
That's an surprisingly good point. I've always been focused on good content but seeing what has happened to reddit I think your right. With "good" user comes good content. What that "good" means though is hard to determine but I've got a good feeling about this place. To me it's a personal responsibility to engage in a constructive manner an be open minded. I crave a place where we can be honest, mature and get away from the 4-chanish approach that has eroded a lot of social media.
That's fair, but I have to point out that when people complain about echo chambers that's not really what they're referring to, to put it into your example it would be more like criticizing Attack on Titan and then getting mass downvotes and hate. This behaviour is more encouraged on say Reddit than Tildes but no community is perfect.
Tildes isn't entirely immune to that sort of groupthink, but there is an important limiting factor in the sense of no downvoting. If you post to ~anime about how you didn't like a certain overwhelmingly popular anime for such-and-such reasons, you won't get downvoted to oblivion. The only avenue of disagreement is replies, and those replies have the same quality standards as any other comment.
there's also an interesting factor in the fact that those replies then push the thread to the top of the front page, which will usually bring a more diverse set of viewpoints onto a topic since there are more eyes on it and more people who might engage in said thread (especially since threads take awhile to slide due to the lower amount of activity and the aforementioned bumping every time someone replies anywhere in the thread)
You're not wrong, I absolutely agree.
I think that point about an echo chamber is fantastic.
In the early days of the wild west before reddit I used to spend all my time on forums. The one I spent the most time on that I remember is one that was specifically about a book series written by an Australian author, and then I'd go to another one to discuss a different TV show. The idea being that even if maybe there'd occasionally be off-topic discussions, everyone was on that specific forum for a specific reason and 99% of the time the conversations happening across the forum were related to that subject.
I'm curious to see where tildes goes with this as they're setting up as similar to reddit in that they cover a wide variety of topics, but so far I've seen mostly good things.
Well, that's what groups are for. Isn't it?
I feel like an echo chamber where people recognize scientific realities like climate change and reject pseudoscience like 'race realism' and where people respect each other despite their identities is actually a pretty great sounding echo chamber.
I'd say as a far left progressive, Tildes is not the left-wing community some seem to think it is. There are a wide range of views on issues around race and gender here and many of those views fall well outside the boundaries of 'left' or 'progressive'.
I give up. I don't know what will convince people any more that Right-wing does not have to mean socially conservative, does not have to mean principled opposition to any kind of government regulation, does not have to mean absolutist libertarianism. I don't know how to show people that there is actual plurality of opinions in Tildes, and that it really isn't going to get better if you invite some people from Voat over. At that point who else do we invite to the party? Maybe some people who oppose the idea of human rights to counter-balance the pro-human rights circlejerk? Maybe we should get some anti-vaccination activists in too.
Sometimes I wonder if this is just a result of the majority of the users coming from a US perspective where "Right" and "Left" seem to have completely different definitions than here in Europe.
There's this idea in contemporary US politics that every political opinion, and even every fact, has two opposing and equally valid sides that must be considered to have equivalent merit, and anything less than that is censorship. It's ridiculous.
Amen.
Facts are the center. That's the foundation. Interpretations are always open for debate, but allowing nonsense that clearly isn't supported by facts to fester and pollute the discussions is just plain counter-productive. The idea that there's an opinion or interpretation that's equally valid yet contradicts the facts is an age-old tactic used to shut down rational discussions. When that happens the 'other side' in a debate needs to expand the facts with more facts that support their position - not empty rhetoric aimed at derailing the discussion. If they can't do that, then that position is no longer fit to be part of the debate.
I wouldn't say it's extremely politicized here as well. It's definitely more left-wing but I think since the culture that is taking shape here values well thought out comments it helps to avoid it turning into too much of a political echo chamber. There's been several times I've thought about responding to a post with something that doesn't really contribute much to the conversation so I stop myself.
honestly i think even if tildes was a purely left-wing "echo chamber", it wouldn't be much of an echo chamber. there are pretty big differences in how socialists or anarchists see things and how liberals see things, or how American left-wingers and European left-wingers see things. i think people sometimes think ideological diversity has to be left-right, which not is not necessarily the case, although it's probably easier to maintain with a wider view divergence.
That's not true. It's just that the people with "right-wing" opinions tend to be assholes about their opinions which Tildes doe not tolerate. Tildes does not censor ideas and many actual conservative views have been brought to the table and discussed civilly within the community. See the code of conduct for more info.
https://docs.tildes.net/code-of-conduct
Come on now... that's a pretty inappropriate statement, IMO. There are plenty of people on the right side of the political spectrum that are not assholes, you just tend to only notice the noisiest and most obnoxious of them. The rest of them (like my father, for example) just don't care enough to argue and generally keep to themselves.
The US is not the world and Tildes is not strictly an American site... in fact it's headquartered in Canada. And I think it's incredibly "dishonest" to "generalize" everyone on the right based on a radical element of the US Republican party.
It's dishonest to say that Donald Trump is not the Republican Party and furthermore to ignore that countries all over Europe, Africa, and Asia have right wing strongmen and resurgences.
Sure, you may have specified the US, but meghan certainly did not, which is who I was referring to. And even in the US I don't wholly agree with that statement. Are there lots of right-wing assholes in the US? Sure, but there are a great many left-wing ones as well, IMO.
p.s. And my point about being in Canada was that the extremely polarizing language (sweeping generalizations and vitriol) thrown about without consideration by many people the US does not need to be tolerated on this site (from either side of the political spectrum), regardless of the number of US users here. Nor should it be tolerated, IMO.
Donald Trump is a fascist. His supporters are the supporters of a fascist. Donald Trump's supporters are fascists.
No platform for fascists.
this is true
however, as much as I'd like to listen to the non obnoxious ones, they don't say anything, and silence speaks approval of the ones who do speak
i think the issue is that the sort of right-wingers you mention here either don't tend to browse the places i'm imagining people on tildes would be recruiting from (provided they're not just outright inviting friends), or they've been actively forced out of those places by the more obnoxious set of right-wingers as a consequence of (american) polarization. it's not that they don't exist (in fact i'm sure outside of american-dominated spaces, there are plenty of them)--rather, it's that if you're trying to explicitly invite them here, it's probably going to be hard to find people in those spaces who fit the criteria of people you'd want to invite in the first place.
As a fairly "right-wing" conservative American who feels very much left behind by the last few years of insanity from the GOP, and yet strongly disagrees with most of the American Left, I'm probably one of those people you're thinking of.
From my perspective Tildes, or at least a very vocal subset, skews heavily left and often aggressively so. Especially on political topics, the extreme polarization of American politics is pervasive enough, even here, that I largely just avoid those topics entirely. The atmosphere I perceive is such that, even my saying that much, is probably enough for some users to make all sorts of assumptions about the extremity and validity of my views.
The general sense is that my worldview, which I had always thought was pretty moderate, is simply not going to be welcome here, so I simply refrain from sharing it. I believe I'm not alone in that, and I suspect that's a big part of why it appears that there are not very many non-American-Left users here; we do exist, but mostly avoid political discussions.
I think what you've said is pretty rational, you might not want to deal with that hostility. However I would also encourage you to speak up. It's hard to keep a level head about conservatives when the majority talking have extreme views. You will likely experience some pushback and negativity, but tildes is still small and people will change after a number of engagements with someone not so extreme.
Edit: You know what, on a second reading, I do think that meghan is calling most right-wing folks assholes, so nevermind.
Not being meghan, I can't say for sure, but I'm pretty sure that comment only referred to right-wing people who have commented here on Tildes; they're saying that many people who have expressed right-wing opinions here on Tildes have not done so respectfully. I don't think meghan was saying anything about right-leaning folks in general.If you're saying that there are two groups in the right wing (and you might not, I just can't tell from your wording): a vocal frothing mob and a silent reasonable remainder, the corollary to your statement is that arguments to explicitly make space for right wing voices in otherwise reasonable discourse is to capitulate to the frothing mob.
If I have to go out of my way to make space for right-winger type 1 AKA the kind that talks online, then I absolutely disagree with you.
Or did I read you wrong initially?
That is absolute horse hockey, IMO. You can absolutely make room for reasonable Conservative voices to express themselves and feel welcome while still fighting the extremist elements on that side, just as you can make room for reasonable Liberals while fighting the extremists on that side as well. Hate speech, harassment and threats can come from both sides and regardless of which it's coming from should not be tolerated.
I love that.
I agree. My understanding of the comment above me in the thread was that the reasonable people don't say much online since most of them are intellectual conservatives and not youtube watching partisans.
I feel like if you conclude someone is an asshole before hearing what they think, you get yourself into a self-fulfilling prophecy that of course reinforces your existing narrative.
I wish we could have some sort of understanding that for every disparaging remark you make about people you politically disagree with, you tried to criticize something about your "side's" beliefs too. It would certainly make for much more interesting political discussion than what we normally get from the likes of Twitter.
I don't pretend I'm not a liberal, but I don't think I win any points with people who disagree with me by calling them assholes before we even talk to one another. I don't win any points by generalizing support for a distasteful politician as a moral statement of all people who when they say they approve of Trump they mean something like "I agree with most of his nominations to the Circuit Courts and I appreciate his prioritizing these nominations."
Tribalism always leaves a bad taste in my mouth wherever I see it. I don't think there's anything wrong with being left-leaning (I am myself). But I do think there's something wrong with being prejudiced against people who think differently (within reason). That "within reason" will do a lot of work. I don't care to be arguing nonstop about whether the earth is flat. There are certain ideas not worth the time to engage with. But if we were calling all right-wing people hypocrites for caring about due process and being upset about the timing of sexual allegations coming public, that's probably not a fair cop. We should be less interested in playing "gotcha" with people who disagree and more interested in finding those areas we can agree about.
But that's not what's happening. Mainstream "vocal" right-wing has drifted into "triggering the libs". They end up sprinting straight to "wrong side of history" points of views on any molehill we want to more society forward on. Now we have blatent regressive misogyny, racism, transphobia, theocratic, climate change denial (the non-scientific, pro corporation, just to trigger the libs type) being misrepresented as reasonable discourse, when it's really just "being an asshole as an ideology".
I feel like you're naive if you don't think it's happening like this at all. There are so many liberals who I know personally (and whom I respect) who jump very quickly into broad generalizations about right-wing thinkers that force the person who holds right-wing views to defend what they don't want to defend. I love them, but they are tribal about their political beliefs to such an extent that to identify with conservative beliefs is to be an asshole, or a bigot, or backward, or any number of other unfavorable generalizations that are trending.
You are engaging in that very same behavior it seems.
I am saying that is not at all rhetorically effective to a right wing person and reinforces your view once you've started off putting them on the defensive. After a certain point, and with enough eroded trust, you will get a lot of people giving up and saying "why bother? this liberal is only going to think the worst of me anyway. Fuck that."
Nah, usually there only reason I know someone is right wing is because they just spout out bigoted nonsense. I've never seen a right winger slammed for bigotry they didn't dig themselves into.
If the only people you identify as right wings are because of bigoted views, and all the other right wing people who don't express bigoted views fail to be identified by you as right-wing, don't you think your view of the whole would end up skewed?
Skewed towards not being a bigot and a bully, sure.
Skewed as in not being aware that there are people that seriously think I should become their property and forced into a monogamous marriage with a man I didn't pick, I wish. That's not even close to possible in this political climate.
"If I can't barge in and tell everyone which minorities I hate, it's an echo chamber."
yeah ok
I would like to think that a right-wing group could be established, as long as it doesn't degenerate into hateful "jokes" and "memes". In fact, the same could be said for left-wing groups!
Tildes seems like the place for intellectual discussion, or at least, as intellectual as any group of people on the internet can be. And right-wing theory can undoubtedly be discussed in an intellectual and unhateful manner.
I think a right-wing group could very well be established and while I may not agree with many they could be capable of serious, intelligent discussion. The problem is simply that the current culture of right-wing people encourages actual discussion to be drowned out by the loudest trolls and extreme bigots.
The problem is that the loudest and most obnoxious of each side is often the most discussed. There are plenty of reasonable people in the middle of the isle who don't get noticed.
The current culture of America and social media causes discussion to be drowned out by the loudest trolls. The problem in America is the lack of compulsory voting. In countries with compulsory voting there are a group of people who are very extreme and fixed on the party they will vote for and will never change. These people are mostly ignored by the parties and instead the focus is put on convincing the undecided rational people that their party is going to do best for them. In America the political advertising is all about aggravating and energizing the most extreme people so they can be bothered to show up and vote.
I don't think it's any surprise that the current demographics of the more politically inclined is left leaning. I would guess that many of us come from sites with similar demographics to reddit, largely left-wing, male, young, young, young, maybe with a background in tech. Asking there be a substantial right wing contingent is an uphill battle just in terms of the demographics of who is getting invited. Then you have things like various pew research polls suggesting that extreme left wing and extreme right wing individuals have virtually no friends from the opposing ideology, it seems natural that the people we invite to the site would have similar political beliefs and fall into similar demographics.
So I think when it comes down to the standard for "balance," you can't demand equality in terms of opinion weight. You can only ask for an attempt at a fair and open discussion. I think we usually get pretty close to that standard of balance from what I've read, even if sometimes we don't hit the mark.
Yeah that's actually what prompted me to post this. You see a couple of the political posts here and can immediately get a sense of which way the website leans. And it wouldn't be much of a problem if that was limited to just the discussion of an article but when you don't even have right-wing articles posted then everything is pushed in one direction from the start.
It just reminds me of visiting my parents (who are right-wing) and how we just fundamentally disagree on many things politically. Even though I may disagree with them, it's still interesting to hear their side of things. And sometimes they prove my assumptions wrong as well. They get their information from a completely different sphere than I do and it makes me realize that even though I feel like I have "the true information", they feel the same way. By taking in information from a source that doesn't support your beliefs, you can understand why someone believes that and challenge the roots of that belief instead of just butting heads.
If by "the opposite of Voat" you mean not accepting the behavior found regularly in those subreddits, then yes, we are. See the code of conduct for more info. https://docs.tildes.net/code-of-conduct
I think you request is very ridiculous. I also think it is totally reasonable that you would ask this question and that it raises some of the most crucial online debates at once.
Okay I get why you would use that word (what else do we call it after all?) but using it totally misrepresents why these communities have actions taken against them in reddit. Therefore it also mischaracterizes the exodus of its users from reddit.
You use a few watch words like "echo chamber" and "balanced" that make me think you are under the impressions that the actions again CringeAnarchy, FPH, the_donald were ideologically motivated and that sanctions against them have been done to tip the scales to the left. This is in fact an inversion of the truth. The reason they were allowed to stay was to keep some semblance of impartiality. The actions against these subs were taken because the users were abusive of TOC as well as other users.
Also I would like to refute the notion that there exists some ideal condition in reporting called "balance" and that it is a desirable aim for any news outlet. It is impossible to just objectively state the facts of a news story. There must always be some sort of analysis. Injection of the views of the author is inevitable since personal bias cannot consciously be overcome. I can't step out of my biases because they are unknowable in their totality and extent. I can't know what all my biases are and then correct for them just the right amount.
The other notion I wish to relieve you of is the search for balance. The right wing of most nations political spectrum is radicalized to an extent that I do not think enough people have come to fully realize - America notwithstanding. They say crazy shit all the time.
I don't want news coverage that balances out, or treats as equal the notion that climate change is real or that immigrants are a dirty raping mongrel horde. People that think those things can fuck off. I don't care if that makes me biased and if my desire to exchange ideas exclusive of people who think the world is flat or that Hillary Clinton run a child pizza rape dungeon then sobeit. Bring the fucking echoing ruckus.
E: Also shouldn't your handle be SenorLimpio not SenorClean?
I actually don't want to request that anything be done honestly; I just want to generate some discussion on this to see how people felt since this community is relatively new.
I agree and that's exactly why I think it would be a good idea to read articles from news outlets that don't align with your political views. My aim isn't to form a completely balanced opinion. I know this is completely futile. My aim is to understand how people who believe fundamentally different things came to those conclusions. And I guess based on the answers in this thread, using one content-aggregate site isn't a feasible means to accomplish that.
Ah! See that's a different thing. When you come from a place where you're talking about "balanced opinions" that makes me think you're a reactionary since I have seen this line 1000 million times.
"How the hell did it get like this?" Is a totally different question and one I think about all the time.
Check out The Brainwashing of My Dad for some commentary on the alt-reality of the right and Hypernomalization for a discussion on why optics and fake reality have come to dominate political narratives on the left and right, Why There's No Conservative Jon Stewart for an assessment of the right wing media climate. That's about all I got for ya.
This is a pretty good (long) article about the topic too, I think: How America Lost Its Mind
I've seen Hypernormalization before and also Century of Self which were both interesting. I'll check out those other two though thanks for sharing!
The Brainwashing of My Dad, despite the implications of the title, is actually an incredibly in-depth and pretty objective look at the history of the right-wing political machine and rise of their media empires in the US. I highly recommend it.
Oooh then you should check out Bitter Lake. Some more Curtis - this one about the un-reality of Afghanistan. Thematically linked to CotS and Hypernormalization but more about perception management and politics.
Do you believe in the existence of a shared reality which we can touch & a common meaning in language such that we can hope to discuss said reality? If not, why are you here? What is the point of conversation?
No I don't think there is a shared reality people have their own ideas about everything. The point of conversation is to figure out what those ideas are. I'm here because the people here have ideas worth knowing.
The antithesis of Voat would be Raddle. I really hope that Tildes wouldn't end up like either of those, so use your invites wisely.
White supremacy, antisemitism, islamaphobia, genocide/eugenics apologetics, trivializing rape and promoting discrimination would also not fly here since they would be considered "being an asshole" IMO. However antisemitism != rational, well-informed, good faith criticism/debate on Israel and/or Judaism, and Islamophobia != rational, well-informed, good faith criticism/debate on Islam and/or the politics of Islamic countries. I suspect on Raddle those would be counted as being included in what's prohibited, whereas here it's a matter of using common sense to determine the various degrees of what is considered acceptable/unacceptable, rather than blanket bans on any potentially contentious topics.
Given the general design and attitude of Raddle from cursory browsing I'd say it's the closer one to Voat. It's still more or less a Reddit snowclone, with a clear preference for image-based posts and the same voting system. Banning a lot of topics is essentially just their version of "free speech zone" as a means to signal themselves to like-minded people.
/r/shoplifting also moved over there when it got banned, and I think it's consistently been the most active community on Raddle. Not exactly the best community to have as the "face of the site", but they seem to be fine with it.
it might have started out that way but really it looks more like a general leftist and anarchist clone of reddit now, presumably because of reddit's recent move against the more radical leftist subreddits
I have trouble equivocating the idea that disallowing discussions that are pro ethnonationalism and disallowing random users to constantly challenge every minority including women and trans on their right to exist and right to agency is somehow likely to create an echo chamber.
It does create an echo chamber. When you exclude certain points of view, the remaining points of view become dominant; that's an echo chamber.
It just happens to be an echo chamber you agree with.
"If I'm not allowed to barge in and tell every minority they don't deserve personhood, it's an echo chamber."
"If the only people allowed to barge in are people who are pro-immigration, pro-feminism, and pro-transgender, it's an echo chamber of pro-immigration, pro-feminism, and pro-transgender opinions."
You're completely missing the point. You can have a large range of diverse intelligent discussions on those subjects without bigotry and Nazis. You can't have have a large range of diverse intelligence discussions on geology if flat earthers invade every discussion to deny basic science or deny the other side is composed of real humans instead of reptiles. It's possible that an echo chamber could emerge, but it's not happened just because you're not allowed to be racist. Instead discussion quality has sky rocketed because every conversation isn't degraded into the same low effort bigotry every time.
But those "diverse intelligent discussions" are occurring within an echo chamber where everyone agrees that the Earth is round. Opinions to the contrary are excluded.
And you're going to point out that flat-earthers are wrong because science has proven them wrong, and that's totally different to bigots who only hold opinions... but it's your analogy, not mine.
As I understand it, an echo chamber is an internet forum where everyone agrees on certain things. (EDIT: Deimos even wrote about this elsewhere in this thread.) If everyone on a forum agrees that ethno-nationalism is wrong, that's still an echo chamber. Within that echo chamber, there is still room for dissension, but there's still an overall agreement on the parameters within which it is permissible to dissent: one can disagree about how to handle immigration; one can disagree about how to deal with economic globalisation; one can not disagree by saying all blacks should be deported to Africa or all Muslims should be excluded from immigrating. There are limits to the permissible disagreement. There's an overarching agreement about the parameters of discussion: it's an echo chamber.
That is, fundamentally, an incorrect use of that term. That is the social group equivalent of saying "You're not open minded, you're close minded because you will not accept that the Earth is flat [based merely on me asserting it with no evidence]".
I think the flat earth example doesn't exactly work here though because there is a significant amount of objective data to contradict that idea. A lot of the issues that seem to generate vitriolic discussion on forums tend to be sociopolitical issues where there isn't as clear "yes or no" answer. Using @Algernon_Asimov's example above, if I were to say that I think immigration into my country should be very difficult because I think the social systems and culture in place would be heavily modified/burdened, it's much more difficult to prove this is flat-out wrong.
I think that would be a pretty unpopular opinion here and I would be in the minority. Expressing this opinion would likely just be an uphill battle for me because 90% of the responses to my comment would be trying to refute my points. And I'm not saying this is bad either because it could lead me to reevaluate my reasoning but the comments reaffirming the majority's mentality will likely be upvoted more and more numerous and give the impression that my opinion is wrong almost immediately. So then I would ask myself: "why even bother expressing this opinion?". And if this cycle continues, you only have people responding that already affirm the majority's beliefs and I would consider that an echo chamber.
I'm not anti-immigration or anything either just to make that clear. I was just using that as an example.
EDIT: And the definition I found for echo chamber was: "a situation in which people only hear opinions of one type, or opinions that are similar to their own". I think the term is pretty apt here
You can have anti immigration opinions without being racist and without submarining: "but somebody technically broke a law, therefore it's a license to freely put children in cages'. I doubt Tildes is an "echo chamber" for no borders.
Again, it's a fundamentally incorrect use of the term. This is analogous to a movie reviewer that only rates movies 1 or 5, stating "this movie blows" and "this movie is epic", with nothing in between. A false dichotomy.
That you are not allowed to be racist does not automatically make Tildes an echo chamber.
Exactly. Your comment outlines what I was trying to get across but didn't express as clearly evidently. Several people in this thread have immediately assumed that I'm right-wing or hold specific beliefs just because of what I asked and none of these assumptions are true. It's just annoying that people (and I include myself in this as well) are terrible at being self-critical (interesting article that was posted on Reddit a while back about it)
Well, I'm on all three sites, so if this one becomes an echo-chamber, I still have the other two.
Seriously though, I feel like it is becoming a heavily left-leaning echo-chamber(forgive the cliche). Certain kinds of sentiments are more likely to be approved of, and there is a particular judgemental quality in the air. It's been only a few months since I joined, but the site has already taken a definitive tone.
For the time being, I still like tildes for its lack of bloat/spam.
Not American btw.
That's actually been my opinion as well so far. There's definitely a specific tone to threads but the lack of bloat and genuine conversation is a nice change of pace from Reddit. I guess using the term "echo-chamber" was a poor choice given how often people have referenced it.
Your comments seems to be a restatement of to what degree is there censorship? My feeling is that "hate speech" is not on my spectrum of "balanced content"; I do not want to see it and rely on the censors to assure it is not present. Just as vulgar statements can be made, but some people will avoid others who make such, so that is a degree of censorship. Whether some censorship results in an echo chamber is also a question of degree.
I don't think anyone knows where the line will be drawn, but the creator and various users have made meta posts to generate community discussion when administrative action is taken against certain behavior or speech. I expect the takeaways from those conversations will slowly evolve into a formal policy. We're still in early days though.
The answer to this question has two parts.
First, and I'll keep saying this: We need to make a distinction between how we talk and what we talk about. I went over that in this older comment. That's the silver bullet to solving the free speech vs civil speech problem.
Second, the groupthink - something I've been worried about for a long time. Deimos made the case very well that we are looking for echo chambers - that's what every subreddit is, even if it's just one small topic like /r/vintageobscura or /r/dndbehindthescreen - the users all need to be on the same page in any given community for that community to operate well. Some groupthink is going to be inescapable.
What we can do though is challenge that groupthink. The bubble-up mechanics should help with that problem. I went over how that should play out in this comment. I think that mechanism stands a fair shot at keeping groupthink in check, by progressively exposing a group's discussions to related groups as any given submission travels up the group-subgroup-subgroup chain.
If we ever create a ~politics hierarchy here that'll be the strongest possible test of that mechanism in action. I think we need to refine the mechanism on other topics before it'll be ready for that challenge, though.