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BitChute Suspended By Patreon

bitchute.info

31–40 of 169 posts

Re: BitChute Suspended By Patreon

#31
post #10

Would anybody like to fill us in on what BitChute is, in theory and / or in practice?

BitChute is a YouTube replacement made for people who are "Very Worried About YouTube's Censorship". It uses WebTorrent for distribution to solve the upfront server costs of running a video service. Cute idea. You might imagine that with how endemic some people allege YouTube's censorship is, there would be a variety of interesting and censored content on BitChute. Which is why when you check the front page you get a…

> a far-right reddit clone

I was under the impression that voat was created due to censorship that reddit applied on all kinds of things, including anime porn for example. Not exclusively for far-right content.

I certainly do not doubt that most of bitchute's or voat's users are far-right however. It only makes sense that the groups that are censored from other platforms move to censorship-free* alternatives. That being said it would be great to see other creators who have suffered by youtube's content-id system move to decentralized and censorship-resistant alternatives.

* I do doubt that it is fully censorship free still. Chances are that they are willing to take down copyrighted content from their site for example, even if they can't affect the webtorrent distirbution.

Re: BitChute Suspended By Patreon

#32
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it doesn’t. Free speech means allowing nazis to express themselves so you and others can understand nazism. If you’re genuinely interested in understanding the principle of free speech, I recommend this as an introduction: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freedom-speech/

Yes it does. Free speech means not stopping Nazis from expressing themselves, it doesn't mean you have to help them express themselves. If you want to express something I don't like, then I'm not gonna try to silence you, but other than that you're on your own.

> Yes it does. Free speech means not stopping Nazis from expressing themselves, it doesn't mean you have to help them express themselves.

I'm sorry, but I don't see where @dmerfield says what you are arguing against.

Quoting @dmerfild for posterity:

> No it doesn’t. Free speech means allowing nazis to express themselves so you and others can understand nazism.

---

Interestingly, in most of Europe, "Free Speech" does not include this right. It is pretty uniquely American.

Re: BitChute Suspended By Patreon

#33
The problem with any platform that bills itself as "uncensorable" is that it will always attract the people that everyone else wants to keep as far away from them as possible. The repulsion people feel for those "deplorables", for lack of a better term, easily and automatically transfers to any platform that appears to tolerate them.

For this type of platform to succeed it must focus on self-replication rather than too-big-to-fail uncensorability, propagating through a hydra effect that makes it easy to clone and re-spin when major hubs get brought down.

This is basically what happened with BitTorrent. The trackers and indexes come and go, as whenever one obtains too much prominence the hammer comes down, but the core platform remains and it's reasonably easy for any interested party to pick up the pieces.

If someone really cared, they'd run the most blase service on top of such technology and actively kick off anyone slightly controversial. As they obtained mainstream acceptance, they'd be able to focus on developing the resiliency and portability of the underlying technology. With some work into ensuring this tech becomes known and depended upon primarily for its association with positive things, associations with undesirables can be written off as an unintended side effect, but the ultimate outcome would still be free publication without requiring the control or approval of any breed of censorious supervisor.

Not unlike the internet itself, really.

Re: BitChute Suspended By Patreon

#35
post #6

This is a great example of how 'just set up your own platform' may not be the best solution to issues of censorship and what not. Because if you do, then the platforms you need for things like payment processing are also likely to ban your service for much the same reasons as before, and neutral alternatives to them are few and far between. Still, I guess this does provide a good use case for cryptocurrencies and wha…

> This is a great example of how 'just set up your own platform' may not be the best solution to issues of censorship and what not.

It's more like "don't depends on Silicon valley's ecosystem" these days. Because all these tech corporations went crazy since Trump got elected and clearly decided they'll use their audience and market shares for political goals... which they have all the rights to do by the way, and it's actually a good thing, if leads to a more diverse landscape of tech services. There are opportunities for competition but still a lack of VC that can fund that competition...

EDIT: I obviously do not support violent or "racist" views. But since now even radical feminists get booted out of social media and what not because they don't subscribe to a specific ideology, it proves that at the end of the day it has nothing to do with "fighting Nazis".

Re: BitChute Suspended By Patreon

#36
I don't understand why BitChute can't moderate how the site itself appears to the casual viewer without sacrificing Free Speech.

Free Speech does not mean they have to promote the content that is uploaded, only that they do not censor it. Allow conspiracy theorists and extremists (right or left) to post what they want.. but you don't have to feature all recent uploads on the front page. You actually don't have to feature popular or recent uploads on the front page at all.

Re: BitChute Suspended By Patreon

#37
post #8

Pretty sure they were banned for taking on a public political stance supporting disinformation peddlers like Alex Jones. Payment processers don't want to be associated with this kind of content for obvious reasons.

What are the obvious reasons?

> What are the obvious reasons?

Really?

OK, how about this: he's a polarizing nutcase who has adopted controversial and unsupportable standings on several calamitous events in the past two decades.

Most people that see a mainstream business supporting him assume that business adopts those same ideas, rightly or wrongly. So, the perception of supporting Alex Jones can be incredibly damaging to the reputation of a business.

Re: BitChute Suspended By Patreon

#38
post #10

Would anybody like to fill us in on what BitChute is, in theory and / or in practice?

BitChute is a YouTube replacement made for people who are "Very Worried About YouTube's Censorship". It uses WebTorrent for distribution to solve the upfront server costs of running a video service. Cute idea. You might imagine that with how endemic some people allege YouTube's censorship is, there would be a variety of interesting and censored content on BitChute. Which is why when you check the front page you get a…

Regardless of what it is now you should be happy it exists, look at present day Turkey and 1960s Iran to see how fast freedoms can be stripped by changes in government. Tomorrow it could be leftists being censored. The Communist Control Act is still around in the US, just hasn't been enforced. There's effectively nothing to stop Trump from calling his enemies communists and throwing them in jail and with his stacked Supreme Court who knows if they would rule it unconstitutional?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Control_Act_of_1954

Re: BitChute Suspended By Patreon

#39
post #10

Would anybody like to fill us in on what BitChute is, in theory and / or in practice?

BitChute is a YouTube replacement made for people who are "Very Worried About YouTube's Censorship". It uses WebTorrent for distribution to solve the upfront server costs of running a video service. Cute idea. You might imagine that with how endemic some people allege YouTube's censorship is, there would be a variety of interesting and censored content on BitChute. Which is why when you check the front page you get a…

That's the weird thing about free speech. Any community explicitly built upon it tends to exclusively attract those in _immediate_ need of it: conspiracy theorists and racists for the most part.

There's still a (naive?) liberal side to me that thinks free expression, even of profoundly stupid ideas, might be a net good for society, but I don't want to be a part of a community that is innundated with nasty weirdos who were kicked off of every other platform, so "free speech" is almost a red flag to me at this point. That's kinda sad.

Re: BitChute Suspended By Patreon

#40
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it doesn’t. Free speech means allowing nazis to express themselves so you and others can understand nazism. If you’re genuinely interested in understanding the principle of free speech, I recommend this as an introduction: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freedom-speech/

Yes it does. Free speech means not stopping Nazis from expressing themselves, it doesn't mean you have to help them express themselves. If you want to express something I don't like, then I'm not gonna try to silence you, but other than that you're on your own.

> Yes it does

No it does not. The principle of free speech says nothing about who you are forced to do or not do business with. It only affects expression after all.

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