Blaming the digg exodus or whatever on reddit moving towards images and short, snippy comments is missing the forest for the trees.

Stuff became snappier, smaller, and easier to consume because that's what people want when browsing from their phones.

The main difference is that /r/jailbait directly broke reddit rules, was illegal content, etc.

This is a popular myth, but it didn't break any rules at the time (which is why there was a decent-sized outrage when it happened; reddit basically ignored their own rules to get rid of a subreddit), and it wasn't illegal - there's a reason the government didn't go after violentacrez once Gawker revealed his real identity and he stupidly went on CNN to defend himself. The subreddit drew a line in the sand and banned anything which crossed that line. It was absolutely immoral and creepy as all fuck, but they deleted everything which crossed the line into being actual child porn.

it wouldn't surprise me in the least if some of the moderators were saving the stuff they deleted to their own hard drive (or a server hosted in another country more likely), but what they allowed to stay on that subreddit was within the bounds of legality.

Das Keyboard Ultimate S.

I really wish people would stop treating police brutality as a race problem. It isn't, and treating it as such gives dog-whistle blowers the ability to dismiss it.

Cops are borderline untouchable in most of this country, and they are able to wantonly abuse their power as a result. Just as one example, John Pike, the pig who assaulted protestors at UC Davis with pepper spray for no reason (for which the protesters got won a million-dollar settlement!) received $38,000 in worker's compensation - for "depression and anxiety" stemming from his own abuse of police weaponry against innocent citizens.

If police actually had proper oversight you could have a Klansman on the force in a city full of black people and the minute he abused his power in any form he'd be kicked off the force and thrown in jail with the same sentence a citizen would receive, an additional 3-5 years for abuse of police power, and a lifetime ban from ever being on a police force. Instead, what we have is a system where cops get a paid vacation until the media attention turns away and then it's back to normal.

How much of that has to do with the way the site works, versus just the fact that hubski is still fairly small?

However, if certain communities are interfering with the culture and functioning of other communities (violating the non-aggression principle, so to speak) or posing a threat to the site as a whole, then they can and do get banned.

The continued existence of /r/ShitRedditSays and /r/SubredditDrama stands as a debunking of this being the operant principle.

There is a double standard no matter how you slice it.

When did the SPLC decide to trade in its status for random clickbait crap? They were an organization that usefully tracked, you know, actual hate groups - Aryan Nations chapters and the like. Did the siren call of internet money get them to jump on the bandwagon of labeling random websites as "hate groups", or was there a change in leadership?

That's an odd way of putting it - if I'd rather hang out in /r/cfb than follow /u/Honestly how does that imply that I'm not "interested in human interaction on the internet"?

you're basically saying "I've been here half an hour, it's not what I'm used to, change it for me."

Yeah, that's not what I'm getting at. I'm basically saying that as long as the hurdle to clear just to get started is this high, this is never going to be anything but some sort of relatively tiny insular circle of people who managed to clear the hurdle just to get to what might be the interesting stuff. I mean, it's basically the same problem you identified - it's difficult to bootstrap the "Y axis". Basically I'm just trying to wrap my head around the model (which I seem to have more or less grasped, you didn't really tell me I had anything wrong, just filled in some blanks) and use that to figure out whether it can grow to a reasonable size to where there's actually content worth looking at more than once a day - and this bootstrapping issue suggests to me that the answer is no, people will just leave because it's too hard to get going and there's not really obvious value up front. Which means this won't ever be more than a site I'd refresh once a day so therefore it can't ever replace reddit for me.

Obviously, reddit shows the danger of "defaults", but I'm not sure if it isn't the intersection of "default" plus "community" (as opposed to "default plus "content") that's the problem there.

you were one of the pile-ons during my witch hunt if I recall correctly.

(Side note: voat.co, despite its brokenness at the moment, is a known quantity - it's a reddit clone so it's obvious that it's easy enough for people to jump into and start using. The question is just whether there's enough community/content there for me to make the jump once the site starts functioning again; the system obviously works well enough to last a while. I don't need my reddit replacement site to have 10 million users or whatever, especially considering how shitty the large subreddits become; but I do need it to have something like 100k users with 5k-10k in some of the tags so that there's an actively generated amount of content. I can wait on it to grow - I started /r/tf2 from scratch after all - but it has to have the possibility of growing.)

Which leads to a lot of passive-aggressive ironic tagging.

The interface was borne of Hacker News but has been rewritten since.

following and filtering users, tags and domains gives you a much more complex and nuanced feed.

Hubski is trying to straddle some sort of in between territory and it's doing a bad job of it at the moment, as far as I can make out. If tags could be nested somehow and content out of lower tags bubbled up into higher tags once they got popular enough, maybe... ( #nfl having 32 team tags under it, and when content for a particular team has enough interest it would "overflow" to the parent tag; you'd need multiple inheritance to also have teams linked to their local area - if the Blackhawks win the Stanley Cup it should show up directly from #chicago even if it's not tagged chicago directly.)

Of course, the issue may just be that I have little interest in the "X axis" of following individuals. The people I know in the real world I talk to on facebook or whatever. I'm not interested in following random people on the internet.

(3) comments and replies become a part of an active conversation that can go on for days weeks months or years. Hubski does not archive; it's possible to reactivate old content from weeks ago and have it appear on a user's page.

Yeah, my point there was to contrast it with twitter, wherein "replies" aren't really any different from other top-level tweets. (There's a bit of metadata now tracking them back to where they came from so it's easier to follow conversations after the fact, but that used to not be there.)

PMs are not necessarily person-to-person; they thread and concatenate just like comments.

How does the privacy on this work?

(Side note: this markup language blows, and the lack of preview isn't helpful at all. Apparently an open-parentheses before the tag markup breaks the tag markup.)

If you are looking for a place to create or participate in a community like /r/fatpeoplehate, you won’t like Hubski. We want to host content that is worthy of thoughtful discussion. For that reason, we may remove content that only serves for titillation. We have always been clear on that, and we don’t want to pull a bait and switch on any one. That is not a cool thing to do.

See, I'm fine with this. The problem with reddit's removal of /r/fatpeoplehate is that reddit has claimed to be a free speech platform for the better part of a decade (and continues to make that claim), and therefore they back off and leave it up to the moderators of individual subreddits. In theory.

In practice the admins are just arbitrarily nuking content they don't like with no clear-cut rationale. The problem is not that I liked FPH and want it back - I never visited the place, it was terrible and pointless. The problem is that it shows that the admins aren't willing to let their site operate the way they say it operates. They'll step in and ban stuff arbitrarily, but they won't ban other subreddits that violate the same criteria they used to publicly justify the banning of those subreddits. They'll ban "replacement" subreddits even though those replacement subreddits haven't shown any of the same "harassing behavior" that the original was supposedly banned for, and then they want to give us the double-talk that they're banning "behaviors, not ideas"? No. Fuck that.

Reddit is going to do something really stupid and piss off a large swath of users sometime in the next year or so, and that'll be the end of it. There are a ton of reddit alternatives being built now and one or more of them will be the landing platform.

Now to figure out how this place operates while voat.co is broken.