Hope for Free-Speech Alternatives

Creating a safe space for non-witches

In Freedom on the Centralized Web, Scott Alexander writes:

There’s an unfortunate corollary to this, which is that if you try to create a libertarian paradise, you will attract three deeply virtuous people with a strong committment to the principle of universal freedom, plus millions of scoundrels. Declare that you’re going to stop holding witch hunts, and your coalition is certain to include more than its share of witches.

So while some small percent of Reddit’s average users moved over, a very large percent of its witches did. Sometimes the witchcraft was nothing worse than questioning Reddit’s political consensus. Other times, it was harassment, hate groups, and creepy porn…

Already, we see why the typical answer “If you don’t like your community, just leave and start a new one” is an oversimplification. A community run on Voat’s rules with Reddit userbase would probably be a pretty nice place. A community run on Voat’s rules with the subsection of Reddit’s userbase who will leave Reddit when you create it is…a very different community. Remember that whole post on Moloch? Even if everyone on Reddit agrees in preferring Voat to Reddit, it might be impossible to implement the move, because unless everybody can coordinate it’s always going to be the witches who move over first, and nobody wants to move to a community that’s mostly-witch.

I think this argument is true, but there’s more hope for free-speech alternatives than Scott Alexander presents. To look at why, we should look at why people don’t want to move to a community that’s mostly witch.

Why Not Witches?

The reason that people don’t want to spend time with political extremists is that political extremists are annoying.

For example, consider Ovarit, the alternative to Reddit for anti-trans radical feminists. At the time of writing, in addition to dozens of posts in the circles intended for being about opposition to trans activism, the posts include:

• A post on the Books circle about whether, setting aside the OP’s support for J. K. Rowling’s anti-trans activism, the Harry Potter books are worth reading

• A post on the Games circle about whether the boycott of Hogwarts Legacy caused normal people to be more against trans activism

• Posts about sexism with comments that point out that trans women don’t face this so that shows how trans women aren’t really women

• A bunch of circles that are theoretically about feminism in general (Activism, Feminist Videos, Good News For Women, etc) but are 90% about trans people

If I were an ordinary person who happens to believe that trans women are men, I am not going to want to participate on this website, because I would like to occasionally think about anything other than trans people. If I believed that trans women are men, I would like the place where I talk about books to reliably be about books, and not about how much trans activism sucks—just as, in actuality, I believe trans women are women, and want the place I talk about books to reliably be about books and not about Florida school library policies. Therefore, the website’s audience is exclusively people who want to talk nonstop about how much they hate trans people.