Retalk

Retalk is the newest iteration of the American right trying to provide an alternative to Reddit. This is due to their incessant (and false) belief that Reddit is stifling conservative speech despite having popular conservative-leaning subs like r/Conservative and r/Libertarian.

I think a lot of the issues with sites like this is that they fundamentally don't understand what the issues with Reddit actually are. While there are times where the moderation on certain Reddit subs is an actual issue, that's not an issue that's exclusive to any particular political ideology. It's an issue that comes up because Reddit won't provide a lot of administrative oversight to what mods are doing or what direction controversial subs are going in until it becomes a big deal in the media.

From what I can tell, Retalk hasn't done a whole lot to deal with that issue. In fact, it's quite possible that the site will eventually do less, given that the kind of people who'll use this site will tend to be people who either won't say the things they want to say on Reddit or they've straight up been banned from it. This kind of community will probably tend to skew much further to the right than the centrist/centre-right ideology the site's advertising espouses.

I'm also not entirely sure how the site plans on keeping the discourse civil when it's also using a very similar upvote/downvote system to Reddit. One of the biggest hindrances to open discussion on Reddit has traditionally been its voting system, because once you've gotten a certain number of downvotes, people will be encouraged to make the least forgiving interpretation of what you've just said. Retalk would benefit from transitioning away from this kind of forum to a more traditional style of forum where there isn't a karma system.

Still, this does bring up one of the better ideas that Retalk has implemented. You don't have the option of downvoting posts until you've hit 250 karma. This makes sense in the short term because there probably will be people who'll sign up just to downvote everything they see on the site. I guess it'll also nominally help reinforce its central idea of civil discourse, but I think in the long term it'll probably turn out to not be that difficult to get to 250-ish karma. Most people who can hold in their more jerkish tendencies would probably be able to get to that point within a day or two.

The other good idea they've introduced for the site is that you have to be at least sixteen to sign up for a Retalk account. A Reddit account only requires you to be thirteen. I don't think there's really any way for Retalk to effectively enforce this because I doubt there's gonna be too many fourteen-year-olds signing up just to immediately espouse being fourteen, but the idea itself is good. I think if they nudged the starting age up to eighteen, they might actually be able to avoid some of the issues with pedophilia that Reddit has had over the years.

Still, I'm not holding out too much hope for this site. It's still early days yet, but there's been a fairly storied history of people on the right starting up a site that's ostensibly a conservative alternative for an already popular site, only for it to either never really catch on, only attract the worst possible users from the already popular site, or both. I think Retalk is really gonna have to work on introducing some other stuff that Reddit either doesn't do so well or just doesn't have at all before this site is anything other than a forgettable Reddit clone.

Excellent conservative base. Lively conversations over current topics. ReTalk encourages you to join groups based on your Interests and/or easily create a group on your own.

Claims to be center right and conservative. My first and only post was attacked by a couple of left wing sheep. My total time on the site lasted less that six hours before I left.