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Voat Is Shutting Down

voat.co

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Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#121

Post by axguscbklp »

raldi wrote: post #84

Moderated communities beat unmoderated ones on any metric you can name. Always have, always will. Nobody wants to drink at a pub that won't throw out rude patrons.

I enjoy rude online communities. Sometimes it's nice to go to places where people say what they mean rather than try to be polite and/or politically correct.

Pubs and websites are different from each other. I probably wouldn't go to a pub that refused to throw out rude patrons because there would be a relatively high chance of physical violence occurring at such a pub. Online, assuming that my use of a website would have no consequences like doxxing that could get back to the rest of my life, that wouldn't be an issue.

Also, it's hard to ignore loud people at a pub. On the other hand, it's easy to ignore annoying people on a website.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#122

Post by iKevinShah »

dragonwriter wrote: post #79
1_player wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> decades ago a teenager talking about politics would be dismissed with a "get a hobby, nerd." I was a teenager three decades ago. 1. No one would ever say “get a hobby, nerd” (“get a life...”, OTOH) 2. No one would say that about teens talking about politics, which non-nerd teenagers did commonly. They would say it about talking about computer code, though. > It is an absolute disgrace how it's become normal Why? >…

I am not the original commentor but would like to address :

> > It is an absolute disgrace how it's become normal > Why?

I have seen where almost ALL discussions lead to judgement based on politics and that takes away from the core discussion point. What is the point of having separate subs then?

For example take this link (https://www.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/khlnyz/ronaldinho_o...), this was the top post on the subreddit when I saw it last night, the top-most comment is not about well wishes for his mother OR about how he thought about Covid OR whether or not he denied covid but rather the fact that he is "right-wing". Now I understand how bad it is but that is not the point of the sub. And that has become the norm , at least on reddit, which if not a disgrace, at least leaves a bad taste.

I've seen people take time to go through your profile and dig out one comment and then label you, just one. That feels like a disgrace.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#123

Post by eropple »

superkuh wrote: post #86
herbstein wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But yeah, for every polite person in some isolated corner there were 50 screaming about politics on the front page. The problem with Voat wasn't that some people were "talking politics" on the front page. The problem was that the vast majority where anti-semites, racists, and otherwise horrible. That's beyond "talking politics" in any decent sense of the phrase.

It sounds like you only started visiting voat pretty late. I mostly hung around from when it was still WhoaVerse till the big exodus from reddit when politics took over in 2015/16. That's the lifecycle of these things. They're great at the start then they either gentrify or are overloaded by unpleasant fellows escaping gentrification elsewhere.

Antiracism is not "gentrification".

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#124

Post by artemisyna »

sfblah wrote: post #99
intended wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those days ended fast. I saw it happen. On my forum, that very question was asked, and it wasn’t a philosophical debate. It was an operational one - how do we balance free speech ideals vs actual forum evidence. The framework that fits the evidence and the ideals was 1) we want a market place of ideas to function 2) there is content that easily dominates and sidelines all other ideas. 3) there are Maliciously enginee…

Can you give some specifics of #3 just for color? I'm not interested in debating or trolling at all. I'm just curious what people say that does this. Is it just people cheering for Trump or something?

Not the OP, but as an example:

Take a flat earther argument that's explanations within explanations within explanations to cover whatever "what about x?" type of questions you have.

Change "flat earther" to whatever conspiracy theory/controversial topic of the day, and there you go.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#125

Post by hombre_fatal »

pfisch wrote: post #73
29083011397778 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At which point wouldn't they switch to BTC? Agree or disagree with who Voat is and what they say, but I can only assume at least one coin exchange would be willing to do business with them.

I agree, this doesn't make sense to me unless this person is not good at business. I mean, why not at least try to sell it to parler.

You vastly overestimate the value of Voat and the zeal with which anyone wants to buy it.

Though, speaking of business sense, I don’t see why Parler would want Voat. They already have their own community. If they saw business value in a forum system, they would just build it.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#126

Post by judge2020 »

superkuh wrote: post #7
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…

There were corners of it that were decent in terms of content and tone. Particularly v/justgrowit which was about gardening. But yeah, for every polite person in some isolated corner there were 50 screaming about politics on the front page. But that wasn't the problem with Voat. The problem with Voat was the terrible code making the site non-functional. You literally couldn't submit a URL which had a tilda in it. A t…

I thought Voat was based on reddit's code, but apparently it's a asp.net application?

https://github.com/voat/voat

https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#127

Post by eropple »

axguscbklp wrote: post #121
raldi wrote: post #84

Moderated communities beat unmoderated ones on any metric you can name. Always have, always will. Nobody wants to drink at a pub that won't throw out rude patrons.

I enjoy rude online communities. Sometimes it's nice to go to places where people say what they mean rather than try to be polite and/or politically correct. Pubs and websites are different from each other. I probably wouldn't go to a pub that refused to throw out rude patrons because there would be a relatively high chance of physical violence occurring at such a pub. Online, assuming that my use of a website would…

Don't worry. The places in question do that, too.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#128

Post by zemo »

intended wrote: post #82

Crap. The containment board is down. I never thought I would want to create a go fund me for voat . But if it keeps stuff contained in the long run?

is there any evidence to support the idea that having places for hate speech to grow has a quarantine effect, reducing hate speech elsewhere? Studies on the effects of banning hate speech communities suggest that the mechanics don't work that way. For example, when reddit banned /r/fatpeoplehate and other subreddits centered around hate groups, other subreddits did not inherit the hate speech problem, and former hate group users reduced the amount of hateful content they posted.

http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#129

Post by chrononaut »

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…

This is something that's quite fascinating to me. The unfettered access to social platforms with few limitations on speech and content today, and available to such a large audience, would be unimaginable 70 years ago. Society and individuals are evermore connected to each other en masse than they ever have been in the past. An individual's discomfort now stems from everyone suddenly being aware of everyone else's opinion and now has to face it and interpret it. It would be next to impossible for someone 70 years ago to be able to collect that information at scale so readily, also making it far easier to ignore. Now all I have to do today is scroll through someone's SOCIAL_NETWORK profile to find out or to experience it.

It begs an interesting question to me whether society is more "stable" with this strife of being hyperconnected, or less stable. The past was filled with far more silos of in-person clubs representing political ideals, making it hard for the common person to recognize their existence, at least to the extent of hearing about its minute details and ideals. There was also a great filter of the powerful individuals controlling the means of communication to limit the content that reached every single person.

Despite the real acts or false claims of suppression, it is interesting that there was never a previous time in the past where each individual was more empowered to be heard than today.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#130

Post by judge2020 »

herbstein wrote: post #33
throwaway0a5e wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The default advice for Reddit is "just unsubscribe from all the defaults because they're full of toxic assholes" so I don't see why the same measure wouldn't apply to Voat or 4Chan.

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…

I don't see anyone referring to angel with the star of david in the comments. I think the author of the post was simply using angel to refer to their angel investor that kept the platform funded.
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