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Voat Is Shutting Down

voat.co

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Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#151

Post by andrewflnr »

kfrncs wrote: post #76
cwhiz wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit has usability problems by design. Reddit want to make it as obnoxious as possible to use on a mobile phone, so that you’ll download their stupid app. They also push you to login to view more content, so they can track you. Reddit is just a cesspool, and it’s by design. Absolutely nothing to do with scaling problems.

Ever since they’ve started nagging to get the app, nagging to log in, not letting me read more comments without logging in, I’ve stopped using Reddit. I came here instead. I opened Voat one time because I found some people in a ~6 year old FOSS Reddit thread who had used a script to replace all their comments essentially with ‘Screw Reddit, I’m going to Voat.’ That place is a _cesspool_.

Old.reddit.com still exists, and is a lot more usable.

Ed: to be clear, I use it logged in. I don't know how dark-patterny it is when logged out.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#152

Post by mech422 »

aaron-santos wrote: post #137
mech422 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't respond to AntiImperialis2 directly anymore, so I'll leave this here... I don't think that because Boomers and (a lot of ?)GenX tended to grow more conservative as they got older proves it's 'the natural order'.. Millennials are approaching 40 now and the liberal ones I know are still very liberal.. I'd argue that Truman getting elected in 1948 meant that there were a lot 'progressive' older folks back then.…

Telling someone they will more conservative as they get older is a great in innoculation against that event occurring.

Perhaps...

I've also read it cyclic, with the pendulum swinging from very conservative to very liberal every couple of generations ?

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#153

Post by mr_toad »

Pfhreak wrote: post #136
sfblah wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I believe this is called the "Gish Gallop". The idea being that I can come up with many, many more questions that are hypothetical, but that require more energy to answer than they take to ask. Often times the person will combine this with a carefully worded question that has to be unwound by the counter-debater. Like, "Knowing that this will cost working class Americans jobs, why do you want X?" Well... X doesn't co…

> Like, "Knowing that this will cost working class Americans jobs, why do you want X?"

A good politician would never answer that question. Instead they would answer a different question that they already had a good answer to. “I think the important thing to remember here is...”

This tactic works just as well online. Never directly answer a question you don’t like. Always stay on message.

By the time you finish your answer the listener should have already forgotten the question.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#154

Post by octoberfranklin »

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.

> Moderated communities beat unmoderated ones on any metric you can name.

Prevalence of power trips?

Let's face it, almost nobody gets paid to moderate, so the compensation has to be something else. I never had much interest in IRC because the format (live/real-time) has a much higher moderation (op) burden, more powerfully attracting people who like power trips and narrative control.

The solution isn't Galilean absolute-frame-of-reference moderation. It's something more relativistic, like the PGP Web of Trust.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25405128

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#155

Post by cbozeman »

DrAwdeOccarim wrote: post #20
Thorentis wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As opposed to Reddit where every subreddit aside from those dedicated to alt-right topics has a left-leaning tinge. Every platform has biases. It's just that Reddit chose to ban a specific group, so it's logical that group alone would dominate alternatives.

Eh, reddit is a big place. The subreddits I subscribe to have zero politics; I never found that on voat...

There's a lot of subreddits that should be zero politics, where people are being banned because they're members of other subreddits, or they aren't even members, but posted in those other subreddits.

You can find about a post a week in /r/WatchRedditDie of someone who posted an anti-Trump response to another person in a Donald Trump-friendly subreddit and they end up banned from other subreddits like /r/OffMyChest... for the crime of disagreeing with a Trump supporter, in a Trump subreddit. The very act of even associating, even in an antagonistic way, with a Trump supporter is ban worthy?

Every moderator whose ever done that should be immediately stripped of all power and banned at the IP level.

If Reddit admins weren't absolute cowards now, they would do it, but the site is sufficiently corporatized now.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#156

Post by andrewflnr »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #120
_opc6 wrote: post #88

I've said this before and got downvoted for it. But if companies allow extremists on their platforms then the moderates will leave. It's not so much a paradox but a cause and effect.

What almost every comment about Voat here misses though is that when you start a competitor clone to an incumbent like Voat did, there’s literally zero reason for most people to join. The only people who have an incentive are people banned from the incumbent. You see this all the time. As a kid I posted on a forum Opa-Ages that was just weirdos banned from Gaming-Ages (NeoGAF). This isn’t so much about free speech an…

There's no "solution", just like there's no "solution" to "politics". Everyone just has to keep trying really hard all the time so we don't drown in shit. That's it, until the lights go out for good.

As for the next step, it looks less like starting a reddit competitor and more like building individual, independent communities that can stand or (more likely) fall apart from any others.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#157

Post by anshumankmr »

sellyme wrote: post #147
anshumankmr wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. But the only problem is when moderators hold too much power, like in the case of most subs in Reddit.

Moderators on Reddit hold very little power. Unlike almost every other messageboard in existence, they can do absolutely nothing to stop you from creating a competing community on the exact same website, leveraging the existing userbase. The only tools are standard moderator ones: content deletion, stickying, and a banhammer. There's not many sites where moderators have less power.

True, but there should be a way to control the moderators as well. The Reddit admins are pretty useless. Redditors and especially, Reddit moderator are not known for tolerating even a slightest difference in opinion.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#158

Post by Kequc »

PurpleFoxy wrote: post #42
Kequc wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Banning people from speaking doesn't change their mind. Every single tech site baffled.

Banning them stops them spreading this content on mainstream platforms and stops normal people falling in to the trap. It also makes the site tolerable.

Not everyone is as stupid as you're projecting them to be. You're in a bubble you created yourself.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#160

Post by AnthonyMouse »

eropple wrote: post #143
MinusGix wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the issue is one of scale. Having non-perfect free-speech is fine on your usual forum site, and somewhat has to be used to ensure quality. While, at the absolutely massive scale that Reddit and other social media giants are at, they (in my view) should essentially have very little to no say in what content appears upon the site. Now, individual moderators for subreddits could be more stringent due to being su…

This sounds good until you realize that we're dealing with literal-not-figurative fascists here. The world has figured out how to deal with a Nazi. I've linked this elsewhere in the thread, but it is worth understanding the lessons of this story deeply: https://twitter.com/IamRageSparkle/status/128089153745134387... Say you're something anodyne, like /r/RomanHistory or something (I don't know if that's real). For obv…

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