from Hacker News

Reddit alternative Ruqqus shutting down

by decibe1 on 10/26/21, 12:29 AM with 60 comments

• by dang on 10/26/21, 1:12 AM

  Recent and related:

  Ruqqus, an open source Reddit clone, is shutting down their main instance - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28799199 - Oct 2021 (107 comments)

• by hn_throwaway_99 on 10/26/21, 12:58 AM

  I got a slight chuckle out of this because it reminded me of one of my favorite quotes from Slate Star Codex (in this case the blog post was talking about Voat):

  > The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.

  https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservativ...

• by jorgesborges on 10/26/21, 1:23 AM

  I'm not familiar with these alternatives, or if it's true they descend into abhorrent extremism. But the problem with mainstream social media platforms prohibiting content is that it fuels the extremism it's trying to combat. I understand it's their right as private companies yada yada yada. But there's an increasingly narrow space within which to have meaningful conversations. And things are getting bad.

  Moderates from both sides are being shunned for not following dogma. It's nice to see intellectuals begin to carve their own spaces in podcasts and substack. We need people willing to engage in thoughtful, nuanced and charitable conversation.

• by toss1 on 10/26/21, 1:38 AM

  Nice demonstration of the Paradox of Tolerance [1]:

  "Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them."

  This is the naive weakness exploited by every strain of authoritarianism, the idea that if we only object to every form of constraint of expression, we will always be free. Sadly, that is exactly what leads democracies to fall into authoritarian states.

  Played out here in a free-speech site falling into an abyss of hatred that no non-idiot would want to support, so it failed for lack of support.

  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

• by ditonal on 10/26/21, 1:30 AM

  It’s too bad that nobody can find a middle ground between the increasing amount of heavy handed censorship on Reddit and literally all Nazis.

  I thought /r/gendercritical and /r/nonewnormal both fit into the bucket of “I can see why this is controversial, but it’s more dissent from mainstream opinion than clearly ban worthy.” Again I’m not espousing views in those subreddits I just didn’t view them as ban worthy.

  All sorts of “misinformation” is totally fine as long as it goes with the group think such as the Rolling Stone story on Oklahoma covid units being overrun that turned out to be false.

  Reddit has unpaid moderators who wield way too much power and blackmail the company into getting their way. Now Reddit has raised money so we can expect even more purges to become as advertiser friendly as possible.

  Some sort of app that would connect federated backends would be ideal, Lemmy was on the right path but yet another dead on arrival project due to ideology.

  I know we seem to be on a path for increasing centralization but I predict the pendulum swings the opposite way as the user experience on centralized sites keep deteriorating due to pressure to monetize and people get fed up of a few power mods on these sites dictating permissible opinions.

• by kumarvvr on 10/26/21, 1:49 AM

  I am an avid Reddit user and this is the first time i have come across this name.

  And I browse tech and other news sites a lot.

• by Computeiful on 10/26/21, 12:57 AM

  These free-speech reddit clones always seem to descend to far-right Nazism. Maybe you have to ban all political discussion to survive as a reddit clone on the modern internet.

• by exogeny on 10/26/21, 1:02 AM

  It's hard for me to imagine a less surprising result.

  And yet it's going to happen again, and again, and again. Voat, Parler, whatever.