Welcome, Reddit ban wave refugees!

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[–]cartman005 12 insightful - 1 fun12 insightful - 0 fun13 insightful - 1 fun -  (13 children)

Hello. Will Saidit be a good long-term Reddit alternative? Will there be any issues with copyright, as the current UI is clearly taken from Old Reddit.

[–]sproketboy 15 insightful - 1 fun15 insightful - 0 fun16 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Nope. It's all based on open sourced reddit code from years ago.

[–]cartman005 10 insightful - 1 fun10 insightful - 0 fun11 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Thank you. I didn't know they did that.

[–]theFriendlyDoomer 16 insightful - 1 fun16 insightful - 0 fun17 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

The culture of Reddit (meaning the Reddit that was but will never return) was started by a really cool guy, Aaron Swartz. He believed in open source projects. He was too good for this world. May he rest in peace.

[–][deleted] 12 insightful - 1 fun12 insightful - 0 fun13 insightful - 1 fun -  (8 children)

Will Saidit be a good long-term Reddit alternative?

Personally, my main concerns for SaidIt as a long-term alternative are:

  • lack of decentralization as a central feature. It's federated at notabug.io/t/saidit.all so that may be solved well enough if notabug.io gets more peers, but you cant send content back into saidit that way (it only backs up and preserves the content). Lemmy may be a better alternatives for the future. I'd prefer a platform that is more difficult to take down, that has less of a central point of failure. If you're interested in other alternatives there's /s/SaidItAlternatives. The creators seem pretty positive about working with other alternative platforms which seems like a big plus to me.

  • I'm concerned that SaidIt will start to censor too much. I'm grateful to have a platform and for everything that works well with SaidIt, but I don't really think that the policies are being enforced fairly and uniformly as written. I also don't think the creator is that personally invested in the pyramid as a style of discourse considering he himself violates it somewhat frequently. It reminds me of the problems at reddit where censorship was happening in unfair ways, and it wasn't being acknowledged that it was happening. I do think it's better than reddit for now, though.

  • I think a more fully free speech platform is probably better. There are positives about the way SaidIt moderates the space (hey, I'm here right now, aren't I? I don't like reading all the gross stuff at some more fully free speech places), but I think ultimately it's not ideal for really free discourse.

[–]Zahn 9 insightful - 2 fun9 insightful - 1 fun10 insightful - 2 fun -  (3 children)

I don't like reading all the gross stuff at some more fully free speech places

Ya know, you don't actually have to read it. Just skip past it.

[–]jet199Instigatrix 4 insightful - 3 fun4 insightful - 2 fun5 insightful - 3 fun -  (1 child)

It's certainly going to get interesting here with a bunch of old school angry feminists and a load of edgy teens trying to out racist each other.

[–][deleted] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Then let it get interesting. Freedom of speech is a better way to weed out bad ideas than moderation teams. If the masses are asses and espouse a bad idea, then it is usually even less likely for a select few to have better ideas in the long run, because those select few change over time. Someone else will wield the power or sit on the throne.

Even people on 4chan generally acknowledge where their opinions go too far, even when there seems to be an overwhelming group dynamic to tend towards a certain position. You might hear words like nigger there all the time and have posts making fun of IQ average of black people, but enough people will also acknowledge intelligent individuals from the same populations, such as Thomas Sowell. Freedom of speech is a better self-correction mechanism than censorship

Maybe your comment already agreed with that. I don't know. I am not saying this with the intention to argue, just share my opinion in the place in this thread where it seems to fit.

[–]emptiedriver 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

there are issues when you have people responding to your comments/ conversations, though. If you join a community that is dominated by really awful and unsalvageable commentators, it takes a lot of commitment before you can get a good group of engaged and sincere members who are willing to stick around...

[–]bug-in-recovery 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

Is there any evidence that Saidit has censored thus far?

[–][deleted] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Yes, there is no site-wide ban log for users or subs yet (though I hope this feature is added!), but user bans are a fairly regular occurrence. Most are for spam or for advocating violence, it seems. I think sub bans are fairly rare, but they have happened a few times too. You can look at the modlog for each sub (link is next to the mod list) which will note when content has been removed (though you can't currently see the removed content), but it won't show site-wide bans or sub bans.

There have been a few attempts to keep track of bans, neither of which look complete:

[–]SaidOverRed 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Good because the second they start talking using "stronger moderation" codewords, I'm out. Just like everyone else, I don't want to see commie propaganda, and I think the facists are a laughing stock, but there's far worse 'acceptable,' 'moderate' things people say. You can't sort it all short of a magic wand, so you just have to deal with yet another whoring glofication or conspiracy that doesn't pan out. Either you are strong enough to bear whatever is potentially useful, or you become a tool of the left.

[–][deleted] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Bad ideas always need censorship to survive. Freedom of speech has a tendency to weed them out. Err on the side of more freedom. It usually ends up not being in error.

There are behaviors such as spamming that can be addressed through technological, algorithmic means. Most sites now have built-in features to impose quotas and rate filters. That way, people are not really restricted in their speech, they have a clear expectation if they do want to build some form of automation for posting, analytics, or aggregation, and people are not impacted in what they can see. Spam can be a way to keep people from using free speech, which comes with freedom to also receive that speech, by obscuring other content. So, there, one can make a clear argument what to restrict that is also less prone to gray zones. If you want to make more than a post every 10 seconds or so, or more than a hundred posts in five minutes, you just have to slow down. There is probably very little that could be said without such restrictions. It is a restriction that impacts computers, which are the only entities that could create posts at such a pace, more than humans.

But I am not on board with the euphemistic way the term spam has come to be used, which is to describe content people deem as lacking value. That is entirely up to the reader and can be wielded in the same cry bully fashion with which harm comparable to physical has come to be alleged online to censor. Neither are we are not mind-readers who can determine with what mindset a person has authored a post.

[–]sistercrap 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

for a while, the source code to reddit was open and publicly available for download, then reddit changed it's position and simply stopped updating it.

to me, this means that they wanted to do things to their source code that they dont want you to know about.