Cam: People should be able to discriminate by race if they want. The free market will close businesses that discriminate against race if it's wrong.
Also Cam: Reddit shouldn't be able to discriminate against me! REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE OPPRESSION!!!!!!!!!!

i doubt ddos attacks by reddit users on other websites fall under the same umbrella of your hypothetical example

this would be like some deranged reddit user ddosing this site cuz they read ghot’s posts

Yeah, the whole position doesn't really make sense to me. I'm confused if people like Cam believe that monopolies only form in government regulated markets and that they would never happen in a 'free market'.

For sure. Weird to follow people and DDoS them after they've left. I agree.

Oh, that's easy. No matter where it is they can point to some form of government and blame that, since some form of authority always exists in human societies.

I always get a chuckle out of these arguments aimed at libertarian fallacies, maybe it appeals to cam or someone, but I've always been ready to use dark magic to reanimate Teddy Roosevelt's corpse and send it lurching towards the nearest anti-competitive monopoly. The free speech rights of private citizens and the diversity of opinion in the public square outweighs any corporate political agenda. It shouldn't even be a debate. If monopolistic companies want to throw their weight around to censor the American public and micromanage what the average person can express in their private life and public sphere, then its the duty of the government to regulate the shit out of them with whatever intervention is necessary.
All it really demonstrates in the end is why libertarianism is a naive political philosophy, because the same people who believe strongly in market forces and social darwinism don't recognize the cancerous effects when monopolistic forces and corrupt agendas stop playing fair. Personal liberties are only maximized in the system when the authorities are both able to intervene to break up abuses by private entities, as well as safeguarding the public against their own oppressive excess. Its a balancing game. And the authoritarian left and libertarian right are both in entrenched extremes that fall off that razor's edge.

The bolded part is key: I could live with reddit applying really tight rules about hate speech and disparaging comments equitably. Their new rules on hate speech could and should have been very simple: "Do not attack or disparage people."
But that's ostentatiously NOT what they are doing. Instead, they released these rules:



They are going out of their way to release a complicated new set of rules which amounts to "we only want to censor the right-leaning voices and opinion". They are going out of their way to give special protections to all the left's favorite victim groups while explicitly allowing identity-based hate against whites, men, straight or cisgender persons.

https://www.reddithelp.com/en/categories/rules-reporting/account-and-community-restrictions/promoting-hate-based-identity-or


To name just one example: r/gendercritical, a subreddit of passionate, if not radical, feminists who were critical of transgenderism was shut down under these new rules, even though their mods did absolutely everything in their power to abide by all of reddits rules. But being critical of transgenderism is in and off itself considered "promoting hate" according to these new rules. They simply define every opinion challenging the views espoused by the contemporary liberal mainstream to be hate speech and use this as a justification to censor on them.

On the flip side, racist subreddits like r/fragilewhiteredditor or r/blackpeopletwitter are left untouched, as are various subreddits full of people endorsing violence against the police or Republican officeholders.
The double standard with which reddit is cracking down on conservative-leaning opinion and subreddits while giving left-leaning ones a free pass is why I call their approach 'abuse' instead of 'use'.


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In a political sense, the power of big social media sites like reddit or facebook is the ability to reach people with your content who aren't already a part of your echo chamber. This is, by definition, no longer the case when reddit wilfully turns itself into a left-wing echo chamber and forces conservative-leaning communities into echo chambers of their own (like thedonald.win). And needless to say that such a deliberate "community split" at the bare minimum requires time for those alternative sites to build their infrastructure, funding and userbase. Meanwhile, the now openly partisan reddit keeps all its infrastructure, habitual users and ad revenue.

Unlike goom, I dont think that it is fundamentally impossible for alternative sites like .win or ruqqus to eventually establish themselves and to become viable competitors to reddit et al - but when the big split occurs just 4 months before the election, it's just impossible for this consolidation to be done "in time". Which is the whole point of the timing of this ban wave: keep conservative voices away from mainstream reddit for the hot phase of the campaign and, at the same time, make sure that they're busy collecting themselves and rebuilding their own sites instead of directing their energy at the upcoming meme war.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Jun 29 2020 10:47pm

that's really the thing isn't it. Its not just a double standard, its the fact that given months of preparation and a long awaited banwave that everyone knew reddit was up to behind the scenes, they couldn't even come up with a coherent standard to enforce their political discrimination. I mean, people used to complain about p-hacking style rules where admins on social media would invent arbitrary criterion just to suit their intended ban thresholds, like how reddit hid the_donald from their front page years ago. But despite all the time and money they had, the best they could come up with was to create a contradictory standard that doesn't even make sense at face value (allowing discrimination against minorities they don't like).



I think you're underestimating two forces: The natural force of users to congregate into a leading platform, and the anti-competitive oppression the SJW mobs will be capable of to try to stymie any startups.
Having conservative voices flock to an array of startups means a fragmented and dispersed community that is only a tiny fraction of the greater userbase. Reddit, facebook, twitter, etc know that they have a monopoly share of their markets and they can do pretty much whatever they want and users will stay on them because the alternatives are just too small. When Youtube gets abusive with its bans, do you stop using Youtube? What do you use, the other minor sites nipping at it? Bitchute is what, 1/100000 its size? And even bitchute is becoming usurped by the censors. But the second half of that is the forces that will come to aggressively tear down rival platforms. Even if people flock to a site like .win, that won't be the end of it. SJW mobs from Tumblr and Reddit and Twitter don't stop there. The DDOS attacks are only a small taste of whats in store. Look at 8chan. When the censors come for you, they will attack on every vector: Trying to ban ad revenue and terrorize potential sponsors, ban links and content across other platforms they control, attack the infrastructure directly with DDOS. They'll dox people involved with sites, trying to get them fired from their day jobs, try to coerce services like Cloudflare or server hosts into shutting it down, even try to block it at the DNS level and try to have governments outright ban it. The US might have a first amendment (for now), but other countries don't and their users can get shut out. I fully expect to find out in the near future that Google Chrome won't even take you to some of these sites, just block it with its warning message like it does warez.

Yes there's a big element here of timing and we all expected this to come in advance of the election (I figured september), but this has been a trend ongoing for a decade and its only accelerating. Its not going to magically get better after election day, short of any thing but government intervention

This post was edited by Goomshill on Jun 29 2020 11:31pm

Oh, not you specifically. I'm just talking about many of the groups affected by Reddit's policy.

by this point the misrepresenting his position has to be a meme. calling something shameful =/= "shouldn't be able to"