Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Gab (and Voat, and, er, Hatreon) were open attempts to create far-right versions of existing websites. I don't think they're good examples of the inevitability of hatred.

I'd hazard a guess that many more people are angry about hate speech on Reddit than about hate speech over email. The difference is that one is a company and the other is a federated standard. If I've understood Tim Berners-Lee correctly, he wants to replace Twitter with a million Mastodon instances rather than a hundred different versions of "Twitter, but for the far-right/far-left/radical-centrists".



They were not created as such (well, maybe with the exception of hatreon). They were created to be similar platforms, competitors or clones, with a promise of better management/operation/features. See also: Vidme.

When you compete with a monolith, your early adopters will be the people thrown off the bigger ship, and most of those people were thrown off for a reason.

Very few alt-repreneurs seem to understand this


Gab was very much created with that kind of content in mind. Its creator was specifically concerned with "left-leaning Big Social media monopoly", after Facebook and Twitter started censoring alt-right accounts. Which is not surprising, given his past history:

https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/12/pro-trump-ceo-gets-booted-...


They were created to be uncensored versions of existing websites. (I don't think there're any examples of Gab limiting left views.)

It happened that the existing websites were censoring far-right viewpoints.

So...by default the predominant users were far right.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: