In a way, it is. It's the perfect embodiment of "careful what you wish for", which is referencing people's inability to anticipate unintended consequences. Every HN post about Patreon or Youtube banning somebody leads to lengthy treatises about free speech.
Well, here's Voat. All free speech, all the time. What's that, bigots have taken over the platform and chased out all the non-bigots? Who could have seen this coming?
Well, voat was a community founded and populated by all the people banned or unwelcome by mainstream platforms. I don’t think it follows that Reddit would become as bad a voat if it was “all free speech all the time”.
> I don’t think it follows that Reddit would become as bad a voat if it was “all free speech all the time”.
Do you remember r/uncensored_news, a sub that sprang up in the wake of the Miami Pulse nightclub shooting? Apparently its raison d'etre was to show people "the truth" because r/news moderators were not approving the numerous news posts about it fast enough. Unsurprsingly, that was considered censorship.
It took all of 3 months for that sub to become filled with racist and bigoted misinformation. Reddit's admin policy is very generous. On numerous occasions, they have allowed hate speech communities to grow, right up until the inevitable calls to violence occur. At which point Reddit kills the sub and pretends it never existed.
That's a true -but incomplete- picture of what happened.
I never made an account there, but from what I read on reddit they modified some of the parts of their software so that you weren't able to do anything if you didn't get upvotes or whatever, and if you got too many downvotes you were basically shadow-banned.
The impression I had was that it's a more extreme version of what Reddit does.
Free speech would be "ok, here's my sub on anarcho communism", but that's not what happened -because you'd be effectively shadowbanned before you had the chance to create that sub.
