alt Hacker NewsYeah, I agree. It's the inverse of the problem Scott Alexander has observed in the past: when you make an alternative platform based on the premise of "we won't ban people based on having unpopular views", you wind up with a user base of 10 principled free speech activists, and a million people with truly awful views. It turns your platform into an awful place that nobody wants to associate with, even if they agree that it's bad to ban people for having unpopular views.
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bluemoonx • yesterday at 9:12 PM
Sounds fun, sign me up. I want the bad. Moderation is somehow worse. I’m a big boy I can block the spammers myself
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> ... you wind up with a user base of 10 principled free speech activists, and a million people with truly awful views
The problem of a leftist network like BlueSky is that so many people on it defend the totally indefensible. I'll give two examples...
1. Like all those who have a "preference" for young kids: it's nicknamed "PedoSky" for a reason.
You ain't finding me on a network that explains that wanting to have sex with young kids is "just a preference" and that explains that people selling drugs to kids aren't evil for it's all "contextual".
2. There are 300 million female who been genitally mutilated that are alive today. Because the west imported so many people from the middle east and africa, that issue of FGM is present in the West too.
And instead of fighting it, you now have some western "intellectuals" (or at least who believe they are educated intellectuals) explaining that "it's a complex problem".
That's where we are atm: people lecturing us about how we should be respectful of the culture where young girl's clit are removed "because it's complex / because it's contextual / because we need to understand the beautiful things about those cultures / etc.".
No it's not: it's a good vs evil issue.
If you genitally mutilate a young girl by cutting her clitoris or if you sell fenthanyl to teenagers, you are fucking evil. It's as in the TV series Euphoria:
"I don't care what your personal struggles are: if you sell poison to kids, you are evil".
I don't have X anymore but from I can see X is mild compared to the ideas defended on BlueSky.
It can be summed up as: "Musk is a nazi. I defend female genital mutilation because it's complex, I understand grow up men who have a preference for young kids, I believe we should pardon dealers selling drugs to kids for they have their own struggles, I sympathetize with islamist terrorism, ... And it's all OK because I'm so open-minded individual, while Musk is an evil nazi".
While I do believe that at some point it's a good vs evil issue (and I'm not religious) and you have to take an actual stance on those issues instead of weaseling your way out of it by "understanding the feelings" of pedos/terrorists/fenthanyl dealers etc.