Yesterday, Reddit closed a number of subreddits including r/The_Donald, which they say violated the site’s hate speech rules.
Twitch and YouTube took similar actions.
This is an appropriate moment to highlight that Hubski has no policy regarding user bans. Of course, I do not appreciate or support speech that could be classified as hate speech. It is not relevant that a person might live under the Constitutional right to speak their mind in a public sphere. Hubski is a platform for thoughtful conversation, and hate is antithetical to that goal. Furthermore, if you are the kind of person that communicates with hate speech, you are first and foremost an asshole.
Hubskiers can mute, filter, and block others users, so assholes usually lose their audience soon after revealing their damaged and self-loathing nature. This has happened many times, and the user that hurts others because they are hurting inevitably leaves. That said, Hubskiers are a kindhearted lot, and often assholes will be lent an ear, and chances to redeem themselves. Sometimes it works. We all have our bad days, and each and every one of us has been an asshole for a time, even unknowingly. We all carry pain.
That said, if a user's behavior is making Hubski worse, that user might be banned. They might be given warning. They might not. There is no algorithmic weighting and determination of a user's ban-worthiness or criteria that needs to be met. Hubski is not a judicial body with a goal of fairness, nor an imitation of one. Sometimes assholes do damage for a time before they leave or are banned. Sometimes, Hubskiers quit because of the presence of an asshole. That makes me feel terrible. We have lost some good Hubskiers because we suffered an asshole for too long.
If you are worried that you might be banned for being an asshole, then Hubski is not right for you, at least at this time. When you have love in your heart, we welcome you back with open arms.
Be good to each other.
This is definitely the best approach to "free speech" within the confines of online comment based communication. While there may or may not be complete "fairness" in the euro-centric sense, humans are too removed from robots to be monitored algorithmically and discussion can't be restricted according to a standardized ruleset. +1 for Hubski in my book, as a new user edit: also wanted to make clear that I joined prior to that ban wave, and i am not any sort of reddit escapee
Welcome! Things don't move so fast here. It's nice :). Get back to me sometime this year. I want 0 pages on my desk by Noneday morning
I'm really confused right now. I was only gone a couple of months. What happened to make our workload double in that time frame? This is really inconvenient. I had plans to go out this weekend and stare at a leaf on the ground for a couple of hours. Would I be stepping out of line asking for an extension?
Noneday workload double You're right, the double zero was a massive oversight on my part. I'm fired, brah. Yah, it's fine, you can just @ me sometime in 2022, I'll be around. :)0 pages
asking for an extension
The tools of Hubski also put those controls directly in the hands of the users with the filter/mute/block options, so ... I really have a hard time visualizing what a "bannable event" might be. (Outside of simply illegal content that could put the site owner and host in legal trouble, or course.)
So I was thinking about SEO spam, and you don't actually need to DO anything about it, do you? It shows up, we all mute them, and ... their posts fade off into oblivion, don't they? They never generate hits or links. We hubskites don't see them. So they really just take up a couple k in the server database, don't they? Do you need to actually DO anything? Or does letting them just wither into oblivion suffice?
There have been one or two people who decide to see how much pain they can inflict given the tools and limitations available. The problem is that "I choose to not interact with you in the slightest" is a choice and assholes will occasionally make you choose over and over and over again. We've had users for whom choosing over and over again became too burdensome.
There were one or two times when this place was inundated with a bunch of dipshits from reddit who just started vandalizing the place. We played whack-a-mole aggressively for like two days and it blew over. It hasn't happened in a long time though--that would have been probably like 8 years ago. I guess they eventually decided this place wasn't worth their time. Fucking locusts.
I was wondering. Technically, hubski could have multiple communities that do not interact. Let's say a group of the Donald refugees kpojs hubski. They get muted and filtered by the whole website except for themselves. And they keep posting their stuff between each other and have their own little hub. I wonder if something like this ever happened or is happening. Do hubski-verses exist?
That's always been the dream. Not a group of Donald refugees, but organic communities centered around their own activity and sharing. As kb mentioned, it happened to an extent some time ago. Hubski seems to create the islands fairly well, but trolls don't like islands and lose interest. It remains to see if we could have positive communities that were largely distinct.
Reddit also have an hide option I suppose (I dont have an account, I just lurk) They also shadow banned the sub since i never saw any post for r/The_donald for years as a lurker. I suppose the ban coming now, is just some political statement. I read that piece yesterday about Internet forum nastiness: https://devonzuegel.com/post/the-silence-is-deafening My first "solution" was to add a "glaring look" button next to the "like" button. I bet it wont solve anything, but I'd like to send "glaring looks" 👀