Reddit alternative Ruqqus shutting down

I kind of doubt the majority of reddit posters cares about reaching the frontpage.

They tend to reach smaller audiences but not that much smaller. It's been only a few months since Alex Berenson got banned from Twitter (for a tweet that contained true statements taken from the US government's own documents, sigh), and his audience on Substack is now closing in on his prior Twitter audience. Given they're different mediums and he would have had some lapsed followers (e.g. who followed him in older times but no longer paid attention), that's not too bad, especially as it's much easier to monetize the new Substack audience.

Other people who got cancelled or pushed out - like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald - now stand to get really very rich indeed off their new audiences. Writing, it turns out, can be profitable. Just not the sort of writing you find in most media outlets. This also applies to Scott Alexander, quoted above, though he wasn't directly cancelled, "just" doxxed by the New York Times.

Does this fuel extremism? Well it certainly fuels distrust of large institutions and mainstream media narratives, although what "mainstream" means is increasingly unclear. Joe Rogan pointed out the other day that given CNN's tiny audience sizes, it's really Rogan that's mainstream and CNN that's the fringe now. Groups like CNN, MSNBC, even the BBC seem increasingly extremist to me. The rationality and moderation you might hope for from older journalistic institutions is now to be found elsewhere, like the places they like to insinuate are full of extremists.

When the donald was on reddit there was some limits on what they could do. When they got banned they moved to their own domain and there was no limit whatever.

Humans have created a rather extensive historical record of seeking freedom from oppression in all forms, all of which involves intolerance. I.e., a large majority of humans want a tolerant environment

Most often, they do NOT actually manage to transform their intolerant society from within, but leave to find tolerance elsewhere. This is the most basic history of the worlds largest superpower - it's European inhabitants fled the various forms of intolerance at home, and then declared and fought for their independence when the rulers tried to extend their intolerance into the new lands.

This can also feedback to provide assistance to those still in the original lands. Also, the intolerance occasionally gets so bad that it will cause revolts and uprisings, which is typically how new tolerance is created.

The tolerant countries also can feedback and support such fights. One of the more notable ones was when Intolerance rose to a severe form in Germany in the 1920s, and we fought WWII to overcome it. Tens of millions died to fight intolerance, showing that fighting intolerance is a rather strong drive in humans.

I can think of few examples where tolerance gradually grew.

What happens is that a tolerant society is created first with great vigilance, and then after a few generations of getting comfortable with it, vigilance declines, and vacuous arguments like this pop up, attempting to separate freedom from responsibility for maintaining it, and an opening is created for the few to exercise their intolerance on the many.

So, nonsense, just because intolerant societies can be overthrown by the majority that just want to be left alone and 'live and let live' —and this usually requires massive effort and usually bloodshed —, that has zero bearing on whether intolerance can grow and drive out tolerance in a tolerant society.

In fact, the situation is the opposite.

If tolerance was the metastable state, then intolerance would never be able to grow in tolerant societies, yet it almost always does grow — and that paradox is how it does so.

>Anyone who can solve the the "less echo chamber than Reddit but less racist than Ruqqus" hosting dilemma stands to gain a large audience.

Do you believe that is possible? Ruqqus would lead me to believe that it's not. The moderation needed to make it less racist is anathema and unpalatable to the audience that would need to support it in the first place. And that's not even mentioning the lack of a viable business model if it's not brand-safe.

>For their extremely broken brains, everything is political discussion.

If I had a nickle for every not dead comment on HN saying "everything is political" (though it seems to be in a lull these past couple months) I could get a pizza delivered a couple times a week.

“The personal is political” attitude is not something that was invented on the right. I doubt it is comparatively more popular there. It is strange to accuse them of that…

> There are many left and far-left forums out there too, though yeah they aren't billed as "free speech" clones.

I'm reasonably sure that in far left forums, though you can (for example) find quite a bit of antisemitism and similar toxic opinions, you won't get a lot of "Stalin was Right" memes, or admiration for the Khmer Rouge.

There is a qualitative and quantitative difference between the extremes of the right and left in US political discourse as well as the amount of cover the mainstream is willing to extend.

How is that a shallow dismissal? Pointing out a pattern is a shallow dismissal? A dismissal of what?

Of course one is biased in favour of ones own product, but the network effects of AIM were essentially completely overtaken by facebook messenger, thanks in part to a technological change (phones) and delivering a product that didn't require both parties to be online at the same time.

Digg died and the population moved to reddit. MySpace is deader than most zombies.

In my admittedly naive way I always hope that they will win out by having the better product. But to your point, I think the network effects are much, much, much stronger than anyone (including Theil, from which I first heard this concept) had ever anticipated.

So maybe the question is how does one beat the network effects that are so prevalent?

I mean, sure, yeah, Stormfront is still up too.

I don't think "remaining up" is the totality of their goals. I think what the writer of the post is getting at is that pursuing this direction leads to no outcomes better than a marginally sustained existence.