Squabbles, another recent reddit alternative, seems to be taking the doomed "free speech" path
Squabbles, another recent reddit alternative, seems to be taking the doomed "free speech" path
The problem with platforms advertising that they're free speech platforms is that you'll get a lot of people who gives no flying fucks about freedom of speech, they care about that specific discourse that got them banned from other platforms, and only a few people who actually care about free speech as a principle.
And that backtracks all the way into
- The false dichotomy that freedom of speech is binary (either you have it or you don't). It's quantitative - you have more or less of it, never full or empty.
- That nasty, robotic tendency of plenty social media users to stick to the words themselves, instead of the underlying concepts. Cue to "ackshyually". In this case "free speech" makes them think about some random law of some random country, what it allows and what it doesn't, instead of thinking on the principle itself.
- The incorrect belief that only people above you in a hierarchy can lower your freedom of speech, when we do it all the time. (For example: specially stupid users reduce the freedom of speech of the others, as they discourage their participation.)
Once you work around those three, you realise that, in a lot of situations, forbidding a discourse actually increases the freedom of speech of some other group; so sometimes you need to do it to maximise the overall freedom of speech of all parties involved.
In other words, "free speech platform" is not actually "free speech platform," rather it is a dogwhistle.
In other words, “free speech platform” is not actually “free speech platform,” rather it is a dogwhistle.
Often, but not always. It's a mistake to immediately assume that it is one (the reason is at #2). Because sometimes it's just the result of cluelessness over the three things that I listed.
What will decide if Squabbles' admins are genuinely dogwhistling are their future actions. The dogs will get on the garden; let's see if they shoo the dogs or give them treats. (I think that there's some chance that they shoo the dogs, based on "With the exception of racist content, the use of slurs (racial or otherwise), targeted harassment, and incitement of violence").
I went on Squabblr.co to check the news out and one of the first posts I saw was from user "14ss8bb8" talking about how transphobia isn't hate speech.
Yeah that place just became Voat 2.0. What a fucking idiotic decision.
This is why when a social media site gets past a certain size, the admin team and the moderation need to be clearly defined, and siloed from each other's core responsibilities, so the admin team focuses on running the site and the mod team focuses on making it sing.
Looks like the people actually moderating clearly had a handle on the situation. The admin was clearly overworked and didn't agree with the direction the community was taking, and made a quick decision that was poorly thought out.
The reason admins are admins is because they're good at running machines. You can turn a machine off if it's broken, and change how it runs with the flip of a switch.
A community requires a much different approach, and never, no matter how wise the decision, reacts well to being told how to act. It takes a different skill set to properly moderate and run a community than it does to run a server - in fact most admins I know make notoriously bad moderators (myself included, although I'm no longer an admin).
To be honest, the admin here is acting exactly like your stereotypical libertarian tech-bro computer guy who pays lip service to the left while pocketing the more palatable pieces of the philosophy of the right. I've worked with a lot of them in tech. LGBTQ+ is hard stretch for these guys in general - they'll declare gays have rights but won't march in Pride, use slurs when in like company, and generally see LGBTQ+ as a lifestyle choice and not an inescapable biological state of being.
They don't understand that it's not a switch you can flick on and off.
Just glad I'm on the Fediverse where this particular admin's meltdown doesn't matter too much, but I have a feeling Squabblr's fate is going to be the same as Voat (which was cool for about two weeks before the alt-right overran it).
Very good points, especially on siloing the admin from the mods. Like you said, the mods had been doing a great job performing damage control from the last few rounds of drama.
I've said this before, but I don't envy an admin for a social media site. I certainly wouldn't want to do it. So I get he was stressed, and had been getting a lot of backlash, but again he could have stepped back and let his team handle it.
Welp, looks like that's the end for Squabblr. Most of the front page is people hating on this decision and announcing plans to go to Discuit (another non-fediverse Reddit alternative). Turns out that, if there's an equal alternative to go to, people WON'T stick around when you let in fascists and bigots.
Gross. Once kbin stabilized after those first few days full of Reddit refugees, I stopped going to squabbles, but I made a point of deleting my account today. The dev was oddly secretive and non-collaborative, had a weird cadre of posters extolling his virtues, and his only presence on Reddit was half-baked shit in an entrepreneur subreddit. Now, I have to admit I was expecting a more mainstream enshittification as he tried to monetize, not a full-on (and super quick!) Voat situation.
my experience is eerily similar to yours. Used it a bit in the first few days, popped in on occasion. Deleted my account today. When I first went on, one of the questions I asked was "is this FOSS or privately owned" and got bombarded with that cadre of users explaining why it's better and safer for it to be owned by one person and that Jake would never make bad decisions like this exact one. At one point a user was being so agressive about how I should just trust Jake that I said I must be talking to his mom.
I also briefly had a Voat account when I thought Reddit was cracking down too much/too arbitrarily, and quickly realized that I was not in good company. I’ve been very optimistic about this Reddit exodus because it really doesn't have the same ideological bent to it, so the diaspora isn't just the dregs of reddit.
I just checked it out after seeing this post.
I just don't understand why most are dead set on moving to discuit (?). I have absolutley nothing against that site but...
Come on. Reddit kicked your balls. Squabblr just basically suddenly decided to fuck you in the ass. And now you're moving to another centralized platform where things can drastically change at the whims of a few individuals who are in charge? Haven't you had enough? Smfh.
Edit: oh it seems they also changed the TOS to be more reddit-like. IE: your data is theirs. Lol.
Can you provide more context? Maybe the posts that are being linked to in that screenshot?
Here's the link: https://squabblr.co/u/jayclees/post/KB0LM3g1oy
That site is really difficult to use.