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Notes -
I do think admin and moderator decisions (some of which were absolutely necessary) have resulted in its userbase becoming more selected for midwittery, conformity and smugness over time. In 2012, Reddit was so committed to its vision of a free speech-friendly website that there was a major controversy over whether or not to ban a subreddit for photos of attractive teenagers taken without their knowledge (a rare example of a subreddit ban I fully endorse, for what it's worth).
But successive bans of subreddits for weird porn, edgy humour or anything which contradicts woke orthodoxy (most notably The_Donald, but also numerous subreddits which tolerate even the mildest scepticism of gender ideology - I expect the days are numbered for /r/detrans) have resulted in most of the witches and weirdos fleeing the coop, leaving behind only the midwits whose tastes tend toward the anodyne and who can reliably be assumed to believe that we really have always been at war with Eastasia.
Hard to be at all sympathetic given that they banned any criticism of Trump. Hard to complain about being banned for 'contradicting woke orthodoxy' (which I don't think is a fair representation of what happened but nevertheless) when you don't allow any contradiction of Trumpian orthodoxy.
That's the deal they were offered. Pity that Reddit couldn't hold up their end.
More broadly, subjects shouldn't be (and generally aren't) held to the same standards as their rulers. Does filing a FOIA request give the government permission to wiretap you? Does skipping your court date justify the prison skipping your release date? If you lock your apartment, is your landlord justified in banning you from (otherwise-)common areas? If a student skips some homework, can a teacher skip grading their exams?
The only place pure reciprocity works at all is among peers, and even that doesn't always go the greatest.
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I hope you didn't interpret my comment as to imply that I support any and all subreddits which contradict woke orthodoxy. /r/itsafetish was banned, but so was /r/GasTheKikes. My point is that the common thread underpinning the banning of most political subreddits is that they were insufficiently woke, sometimes subtly, sometimes extravagantly. I have yet to hear of a subreddit which was banned by a conservative admin for being too woke.
I don't see anything intrinsically objectionable about a political community banning all criticism of a specific political figure. It's pretty weird to go into a subreddit for supporters of Donald Trump and start ranting about how much Donald Trump sucks, especially when there are thousands of other subreddits (most of which have nothing to do with politics) in which you can do that and get a warm reception. Which is more pluralistic: a website with numerous sub-communities each enforcing their own specific orthodoxy on their members, or a website in which the members of every community have to adhere to exactly one orthodoxy?
Well we can make this argument one stage removed no? Reddit is simply one of many websites enforcing certain values, if you don't like them you can go to another website - it is itself a 'sub-community' of all websites.
Ah yes, the old "if you don't like it, start your own website" argument.
Then someone does start their own website, and woke people don't like that, and immediately start hitting said website with DDoS attacks and putting pressure on their hosting providers and payment processors to drop them as clients.
You seem to be operating from the assumption that woke people, as a group, actually respect people's rights to hold and express political opinions they disagree with. I have absolutely no idea how you arrived at such a manifestly preposterous idea, when the last 10-15 years of Western politics have largely consisted of woke people loudly and explicitly announcing that they do not.
They could and they did! Patriots.win is still up and running. Where do you think you are now?
So you're not even going to acknowledge my point then, cool.
I was responding to you, specifically your smug mockery of 'start your own website', which was silly because that's exactly what they were able to do.
Kiwifarms, though I don't necessarily agree with Cloudflare's decision, was clearly not just banned just for its ideological proclivities.
"No no, you don't understand, woke people are totally fine with people starting their own websites/social media platforms/blogging platforms in which they can express non-woke opinions without fear of censorship. It's just a complete coincidence that woke people attempted to get every such sufficiently large website shut down - not because these websites allow non-woke opinions to be expressed, you understand, but for the entirely impartial reason that these websites were being used to promote hate speech/doxxing/misinformation/harassment/pyramid schemes/fraud. No no, woke people totally respect people's freedom to express opinions with which they disagree, no two ways about it."
Here is where I list several historical examples of woke-friendly platforms being used to promote hate speech/doxxing/harassment etc.
"No bad tactics, only bad targets."
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I'd never heard of patriots.win prior to this conversation, but it's still a terrible example to illustrate your point that "if you're not woke, you can just start your own website and woke people will leave you alone":
If woke people are happy for conservatives to express pro-Trump opinions (as long as they do it in their own space) - why is patriots.win being labelled a hate website, and facing constant threats of being unhosted ever since its inception?
In a vacuous sense, it's true that the mods of /r/The_Donald were "able" to start their own website, but they faced an uphill battle to do so in a manner that I'm sure even you'll concede no woke website would ever have faced.
Hard disagree. People wanted to ban KiwiFarms for the ideological leanings of its userbase and for their unabashed mockery of woke people, so they went looking for something other than "not being woke" they could pin on it as a reason for banning it, even though you'll find woke people doing exactly the same things (or worse) without comment. "Show me the man and I'll show you the crime".
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