Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Voat Is Shutting Down

voat.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 671 posts

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#51

Post by odessacubbage »

ignoranceprior wrote: post #4

Voat was founded as a neutral free-speech platform. After alt-right extremists were booted off reddit, they found a new home there. The site was bombarded by /pol/ chan culture, and after that nobody else of other political persuasions really wanted to join. Kind of like that "paradox of intolerance" meme. Free speech platforms usually end up becoming extremist platforms. I remember going on voat a couple years ago a…

paradox of tolerance is just a meme and not even a very good one.

8chan, which was usually coded in the media as the most extreme platform managed to be host to both /pol/, /leftypol/, a myriad of queer & lgbt boards and /christian/ as well as boards for other religious denominations and multiple competing sects of gamergate and, of course the q boomers. at one point of polling, /v/ was something like 60% lgbt. on zeronet and the webring you see a similar plurality of views and usecases. there have been hundreds if not thousands of imageboard clones over the years with even less moderation than voat if for no other reason than incompetence. fatchan and chen2 were hardly festering havens of white nationalism. there is far more that leads to a website's culture than speech policies and administrator doctrine, the outright user revolts of SomethingAwful and Neogaf stand as a testament to this. this whole idea that free speech is a one way road to the fourth reich simply does not hold when weighed against the facts, especially considering that the 'sensible' platforms like facebook have been used as the rallying grounds for actual genocide and the livestreaming of murders & kidnappings.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#54

Post by tzs »

Most of the original Voat groups were groups that has been kicked off of Reddit, but then people there made groups that corresponded to groups that were still on Reddit, like /v/science and /v/movies.

Reading those is quite an experience. On /v/science right now there is a submission about dark matter and MOND [1], which was also discussed today on HN [2].

The title of the Voat submission will give you a good idea of what the place is like: "Another Jew Science Lie to Fall? DARK MATTER not needed?! Evidence of "modified gravity" in 150 galaxies strengthens dark matter alternative. Gravity has >8 anomalies but this one is solvable."

That's actually a fairly tame discussion by Voat standards. Here's one that was a submission of a video on pilot wave theory from PBS Space Time [3] (or as it is referred to in the comments, (((PBS)))). Voat title: "Kikes have been shitting up science for over a century". See the comments for how the ether is the right theory and the Jews suppressed it.

Here's what a movie discussion is like over there [4], "Mandolorian - Season 2".

[1] https://voat.co/v/science/4169827

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25496725

[3] https://voat.co/v/science/4152241

[4] https://voat.co/v/movies/4164913

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#55

Post by ignoranceprior »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #39
herbstein wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's the toxicity on Reddit on one hand, and then there's the "Hitler was right", casual usage of racial slurs, and insinuations that "jews are trying to stifle Voat" on the other hand. In the linked post you'll see references to "Angel", an anonymous individual that was funding Voat up until - apparently - March of this year. The comments refer to this individual, in a negative light, surrounded by both three par…

Reddit attacks people if they don't have just the right amount of left leaning beliefs for the occasion. 4Chan basically requires you to prefix and postfix all your nouns with certain slurs. People are mostly the same all over so I assume like 90% of the stupid crap you see on Voat or anywhere else is just people trying to virtue signal to each other and they don't honestly believe that garbage (even HN has its own b…

I used to lurk 4chan regularly (granted, not /pol/), and the amount of viciousness and toxicity on voat.co still seems high in comparison IMO.

The way 4chan uses suffixes like "f*g" (which is mostly jocular/memey, even if in bad taste) is not the same as the kind of outright hate speech you'll find all over voat. Voat might be more comparable with /pol/ in particular.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#56

Post by koheripbal »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #50
ignoranceprior wrote: post #4

Voat was founded as a neutral free-speech platform. After alt-right extremists were booted off reddit, they found a new home there. The site was bombarded by /pol/ chan culture, and after that nobody else of other political persuasions really wanted to join. Kind of like that "paradox of intolerance" meme. Free speech platforms usually end up becoming extremist platforms. I remember going on voat a couple years ago a…

> Free speech platforms usually end up being extremist platforms. ...when the popular platforms stop being free speech platforms. Reddit, in its earlier days, was never dominated by the Voat contingent. They were there, but they were far less extreme there than they were on Voat. And then whenever they would post rank inaccuracies, there were clearer-minded people to point out why they were wrong, in the same place w…

I think part of the issue is that the average age of Reddit users plummeted. It was in the high 20s, but I've seen some research that puts it in the high teens these days / early 20s.

That has a huge impact on the quality of conversations.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#57

Post by ignoranceprior »

odessacubbage wrote: post #51
ignoranceprior wrote: post #4

Voat was founded as a neutral free-speech platform. After alt-right extremists were booted off reddit, they found a new home there. The site was bombarded by /pol/ chan culture, and after that nobody else of other political persuasions really wanted to join. Kind of like that "paradox of intolerance" meme. Free speech platforms usually end up becoming extremist platforms. I remember going on voat a couple years ago a…

paradox of tolerance is just a meme and not even a very good one. 8chan, which was usually coded in the media as the most extreme platform managed to be host to both /pol/, /leftypol/, a myriad of queer & lgbt boards and /christian/ as well as boards for other religious denominations and multiple competing sects of gamergate and, of course the q boomers. at one point of polling, /v/ was something like 60% lgbt. on ze…

Yeah, it also annoys me when people assume that all of 4chan and 8chan is /pol/. 4chan has plenty of blue boards like /sci/, /g/, and /tg/ that are relatively decent if you can tolerate shitposting, trolling, and bants. When people write racist stuff, a common response is that they should go back to their "containment board". 8chan used to let users create their own boards, and there were plenty of inoffensive ones. On the other hand, I do think 8chan's /pol/ was just so terrible that it made 8chan overall a definite net-negative for humanity. Even the site's original founder has disavowed it at this point. I also agree with you that mainstream sites like Facebook have their own problems.

But still, whenever I see free speech platforms, they tend to attract a majority of far-right users. I think it's because they're the ones who most often get banned from mainstream platforms and need to find alternatives.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#58

Post by x86_64Ubuntu »

flukus wrote: post #3

At the time of posting the front page of voat has the following threads: A moment of silence for all the FBI glowniggers that just got laid off. - https://voat.co/v/funny/4170215 If you go back to Reddit, you're a double niggerkike - https://voat.co/v/whatever/4170129 Plus a whole lot of misinformation and other crazy mixed in with comments that make youtube look like a bastion of intellectualism. It doesn't look lik…

And this is why the right-wing is so up in arms about private sites booting them off their platforms. Because if they have to start their own i.e Voat, Parlor, they will find that they don't have the necessary tech and financial structures to run such a site. So by fighting to stay on Reddit and Facebook, they can freeload off of the other parts of the sites that provide value and can support the marginal cost of their white supremacist subreddit/videos.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#59

Post by whereistimbo »

tzs wrote: post #54

Most of the original Voat groups were groups that has been kicked off of Reddit, but then people there made groups that corresponded to groups that were still on Reddit, like /v/science and /v/movies. Reading those is quite an experience. On /v/science right now there is a submission about dark matter and MOND [1], which was also discussed today on HN [2]. The title of the Voat submission will give you a good idea of…

Why I suddenly felt like voat is a psychological science experiment?

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#60

Post by 1_player »

koheripbal wrote: post #56
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Free speech platforms usually end up being extremist platforms. ...when the popular platforms stop being free speech platforms. Reddit, in its earlier days, was never dominated by the Voat contingent. They were there, but they were far less extreme there than they were on Voat. And then whenever they would post rank inaccuracies, there were clearer-minded people to point out why they were wrong, in the same place w…

I think part of the issue is that the average age of Reddit users plummeted. It was in the high 20s, but I've seen some research that puts it in the high teens these days / early 20s. That has a huge impact on the quality of conversations.

And politics have infected every single discussion. Nowadays it's cool to be partisans, decades ago a teenager talking about politics would be dismissed with a "get a hobby, nerd."

It is an absolute disgrace how it's become normal. Or that mine is an unpopular opinion nowadays.

Post reply on HN