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Radical Leftists Built Their Own FOSS Alternative To Reddit After It Banned Them (vice.com)
eeplox shares a report from VICE, adding: "Community-built sites like these are very much needed since Reddit announced they were going closed source": After r/LeftWithSharpEdge was taken down, ziq [one of the subreddit's members] decided to leave Reddit and create an independent anarchist community free from its rules. Raddle.me, which was originally called Raddit.me, is an "alternative that is focused on community building and openness, and not controlled by a corporation," ziq told me. The original name was intended to sound similar to Reddit, but was later changed to avoid potential trademark issues. Raddle doesn't have advertisements or run analytical software, so its size is difficult to calculate -- but that's by design. The site is meant to be an alternative to social networks that profit by monitoring user behavior and serving advertisements. "We have no ads, no tracking, no user profiling and we don't collect or share any user data with anyone," ziq said. The site is community-built and anyone can contribute to the code.
Ziq's commitment to privacy is an appealing virtue for Raddle's users. "I'm always very uneasy about the lack of concern for privacy online," Tequila_Wolf, a user who posts frequently to Raddle, told me in a direct message. "When you have friends on government lists who get harassed at every border because, say, they are members of Anarchists Against The Wall, you know you don't want to get on that list." Raddle ultimately came out of more broad problems ziq and Emma saw with Reddit. Ziq complained about how it has increasingly become a recruiting ground for the alt-right, the social network's overemphasis on America (r/politics, a major subreddit, only discusses U.S.-based politics, for example), and the fact that the site's code isn't open source, among other issues. Emma mentioned what she says is a problem with harassment on the site. "To me, the biggest problem with Reddit is how its administrators ignore the routine harassment and witch-hunts of marginalized people that takes place, with r/The_Donald being the most prominent example," she said.
Ziq's commitment to privacy is an appealing virtue for Raddle's users. "I'm always very uneasy about the lack of concern for privacy online," Tequila_Wolf, a user who posts frequently to Raddle, told me in a direct message. "When you have friends on government lists who get harassed at every border because, say, they are members of Anarchists Against The Wall, you know you don't want to get on that list." Raddle ultimately came out of more broad problems ziq and Emma saw with Reddit. Ziq complained about how it has increasingly become a recruiting ground for the alt-right, the social network's overemphasis on America (r/politics, a major subreddit, only discusses U.S.-based politics, for example), and the fact that the site's code isn't open source, among other issues. Emma mentioned what she says is a problem with harassment on the site. "To me, the biggest problem with Reddit is how its administrators ignore the routine harassment and witch-hunts of marginalized people that takes place, with r/The_Donald being the most prominent example," she said.
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Listen - I may not agree with them on every position - and may even see them as harmful to some of their own goals... but I do see them as a somewhat helpful kind of crazy.
Why? Because for the past generation or so, we really haven't had any real forces of extreme leftwing pushing anything in the US. Not that this is a bad thing on it's own, mind you - but compared to the insanity of an extreme right wing pushing every button on every part of the societal machine, it's actually destabilizing to have the left version largely missing for so long.
Now, I certainly hear an opposing idea just while I'm typing this - that we have Democrats or college campuses, or something - and if you think of that as extreme left wing, you have no idea how the rest of the world thinks.
Without an extreme to exist as a philosophical sounding board, or as a 'wall' of what's too extreme to bounce against, the left of today in the US is largely crippled in culture - and obsessed with minor points of political correctness/friendiness to business, rather than actually tying to advance a real agenda of change.
I'd actually LIKE to have a crazy left to actually exist out there, willing to be grumbled about and dismissed. I'd like to have something Michael Moore can say "Geesh - those loonie lefties", then make a point that plots a 'sensible middle ground', rather than having nationalized healthcare like many modern democracies seem like some loony idea by reflexive 'moderate' idealists.
So go, you crazy folks - be extreme and let me disagree with you. It's cool with me.
what I find most surprising is that they were too far to the left even for Reddit.
Yeah that is surprising. I know they silenced anyone that wasn't left wing enough (hence sites like voat.co) but to hear that someone could be too left wing for even reddit is kind of frightening.
By the way, collectivist anarchism*1 predates anarcho-capitalism*2 by how much? a whole century?
*1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Very interesting link. So these people want to eliminate the government, and replace it with an organization empowered to coerce people into following a set of rules.
Wow. No wonder they can't get anyone to take them seriously.
That's true to a point as long as you do a few things:
1) Group all anti-government, non-Muslim religious based attacks as well as white supremacist attacks into the far-right category while at the same time often miscategorizing other attacks such as classifying Fort Hood as 'workplace violence' even with Hasan's confession about his motivations. That actually required an act of Congress to have to the dead and wounded be recognized as victims of a terrorist attack and awarded Purple Hearts.
2) Assign political motivations to non-political attacks. Not all attacks by right wingers are motivated by their ideology in the same way not all attacks by left wingers or Jihadists are motivated by theirs; sometimes an attack in a parking lot is just road rage with no deeper meaning.
3) Start tracking after 2001 and stop tracking after 2015.
4) Change the definition of threat as it suits your needs. In some reports "threat" is based off of actual deaths and in others it's by incident. So when you need a bigger number you count the 5 times someone was harassed on the street (with no injury) and say that is a bigger threat than a single shooting that killed multiple people.
There is also the fact that many Jihadist plots are stopped before the threat ever materializes due to the massive manpower dedicated to just that while far right attacks are not due to their limited nature and next to no dedicated special policing (they seem to be mostly of the "lone gunman", small or single target variety which are very difficult to prevent) . i.e. it's hard to stop a crazy person with a knife until the attack starts vs someone trying to buy large quantities of explosives.
It's just another case of statistics telling you whatever you want them to and not necessarily the truth.
Of course that's just my opinion...... you could be wrong!
This is absolutely wrong, it's literally the opposite of true. I realize that rhetoric in the US has corrupted the terms "political right" and "political left" but dude, come on.
To repeat the historical origin, which I'm sure you've heard but... I don't know man. Anyway: the terms "political left" and "political right" come from the French Revolution. Supporters of the king (i.e.: "the dude in charge," "the government," "the authority") sat to the right in the hall where the National Assembly convened. Those opposed to the king (i.e.: anti-"the dude in charge," anti-"the government," anti-"the authority") sat on the left.
Thus the left were the anti-authoritarians, anti-establishment, and in the most extreme examples: the anarchists. They are people who want less top-down rule. The right were the opposite of those things. Where you fell on this spectrum generally reflected what you feared the most: authoritarian rule, or mob rule. Fascism didn't exist yet, but the two extremes of the left-right political spectrum are typically given as anarchy on the left and fascism on the right.
I don't know how these terms have become so corrupted in the US, but a guess: the US rebelled against rule by a central authority, and most of the popular rhetoric centers around anti-authoritarianism. "All men are created equal," "Democracy is good," yadda yadda. Thus both sides of the political spectrum have to make claims about being anti-authority, even while they may simultaneously give pro-authority speeches about needing "strong leadership" and so on.
"Collectivism" falls nowhere on this spectrum. A preference for working or living as a group does not imply a central authority, nor does it reject a central authority. There is no reason why an anarchist can't be a collectivist, nor any reason why a fascist can't be a collectivist. In fact, anarchist collectives are common. Here's the first example a search turned up for me.