Posted 5 Sep 2020 (2020-09-05)
NOTE: probably some politics. I hate them as much as the next guy but it’s relevant to this so yeah you’ve been warned!
No, not the movie.
So if you’ve been on the internet long enough you’ll have noticed a lot of “copycats” of bigger sites crop up.
During the last American election when Trump got elected, there was the whole saga of people being censored by larger sites such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. This led to different kinds of people deciding “You know what? Fuck this” and going and making their own Twitter or Facebook. A classic example of this would probably be Gab.
Gab is a social media network much like Twitter. It was created by a Christian Trump supporter (yes that is relevant, I wouldn’t include it otherwise. I’m not some mainstream media outlet trying to drag people.) in the hopes to create a free-speech alternative where people aren’t censored by the thought police. While that is a great idea it has came with its issues.
When people found out Gab was being made by someone who was a Trump supporter, of course what they did was they all jumped on the hate bandwagon and started calling Gab alt-right and Nazis. This led to Gab losing who was hosting them and they had to switch to another VPS provider. Then they tried making mobile apps for the Apple and Google Play Stores in which they were censored by both platforms for “breaking the guidelines”. After this it fueled them even more to the point where they joined the fediverse so they could talk freely without being censored. This led to nearly every Mastodon node just blocking access to them thus not solving the issue.
Gab, in my opinion, was part of a big movement of sorts where X is the “left wing” shithole and Y is the free speech alternative but really it’s the “right wing” shithole. An example to prove my point even further is just look at the Gab News page. It’s all politics and is pretty biased towards one side. Then look at the Twitter Explore tab. It’s the same sorta thing but for another side. This trend has became pretty obvious in a lot of copycat sites and is the general basis for this article.
Ruqqus, much like Gab, is a free-speech alternative to Reddit. It was made round about the same time Reddit started banning free-speech and policing wrong think on its site. When Reddit recently done a huge ban wave a lot of banned subreddits moved to Ruqqus. One of these subreddits was r/WatchRedditDie which was started as “a place to track reddit’s abandonment of free speech and decline into censorship”. r/WRD is currently the biggest “guild” on Ruqqus. From my perspective, r/WRD and Ruqqus are just another classic example of this trend. This probably hasn’t helped them in any way. Summary
Overall this is a very common pattern and it leads to nothing good most of the time. The same can be said for YouTube and Bitchute but I don’t know enough about Bitchute to talk on it. All I do know is when you go on to the site it’s exactly what you wouldn’t want to see from an alternative platform because, as the trend tells us, it is very centered on “the other side” from what it is trying to break away from.