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Voat Is Shutting Down

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Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#201

Post by anshumankmr »

nkrisc wrote: post #190
whatthesmack wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a couple that some folks consider to be leftist extremism on Twitter: - Blue checkmarks claiming lockdowns are a net benefit to the world - Twitter adding their corporate opinion on the recent US election to some tweets The aforementioned left-wing extremism has caused many of us to move to Parler.

What's extreme about any of that? Seems pretty tame.

There are a tonne of tankies on the site. Some who claim Holodomor was fake, Tianmen square was an exaggeration and the DPRK/China are heroes, Fidel Castro was a benevolent dictator and that everyone who escaped his regime was a slave owner.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#202

Post by superkuh »

eropple wrote: post #123
superkuh wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

But banning entire subreddits because they share links to good deals on firearms and accessories is. That's because it doesn't have to do with ethics, morality, or even politeness. It's how controversial it is and if it will hurt ad profits. Gentrification in this context is making a site palatable to brands and advertisers.

Once they take large amounts of investment money they have to begin producing a return on it. From that point on users are the product and the brands are the real users.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#204

Post by [deleted] »

intended wrote: post #78
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…

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…

[deleted]

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#205

Post by Throwaway1771 »

ninkendo wrote: post #108
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.

Exactly this. Folks can rant about free speech all they want, but no sane person would actually want to experience it. I support your right to speak, but doesn’t mean I want to listen to you. IMO the only parts of the internet that should be absolutely required to allow unfiltered (legal, protected) speech, should be ISP’s, and maybe datacenters that rent out physical rack space. Everyone else should absolutely consi…

In many cases, the free speech (shocking stuff) is a litmus test for the compromised nature of the platform.

It's important, historically, to test this regularly, and thoroughly.

Voat/4Chan et al MUST be viewed in this context.

Must!

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#206

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#207

Post by tialaramex »

Aeolun wrote: post #169
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…

Holy fuck. That’s way worse than I expected. I can’t imagine people actually think like that. They must be doing it for the shock value, or because of some echo chamber effect.

Not for this, but for the "obviously crazy" Trump beliefs we have a useful proxy. PredictIt ran a large number of betting markets (far more than a traditional bookmaker) for the 2020 US Presidential Election.

Of course the markets about Trump have lots of people spouting outrageous nonsense. You could dismiss that as just "for shock value". But PredictIt is real money (albeit not the sums involved in the "real" international betting markets) and the actual bets placed reflect those same crazy beliefs.

About 24 hours ago the market for how many Electoral College votes Trump will get closed. The answer, as we've known for about a week now, was 232. In a normal healthy market, even if people are writing comments saying that the US military will force people to vote again at gun point, the price for Trump gets 232 votes would be $1 (the way PredictIt works you're getting one dollar for each correct prediction, so if you are absolutely certain of something it's worth precisely $1 and you wouldn't sell it for anything less).

The closing price, less than 24 hours ago, was 96¢. For 96¢ you could buy a dollar, just by being sure of a well known fact about Donald Trump's loss. Because the people "trolling" the comments really believe he didn't lose.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#208

Post by aaron695 »

Voats problem was it was boring. This is why it failed. As far as I could tell they couldn't start or prop up anything like a Pizzagate. It was a poor mans 4chan.

They had a real opportunity in 2015 to be the next Reddit, but seem to have missed it. To many outages, I felt like they didn't embrace Venture Capital as well as they could. They still created something. And it's easy to criticise I guess. But it sucks being stuck with Reddit.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#209

Post by AnthonyMouse »

triceratops wrote: post #196
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> So anyone espousing Soviet ideas like socialized medicine should be excommunicated as well That's a Soviet idea? It seems national health insurance was first conceived in Imperial Germany[0] (which the Weimar Republic, then the Nazis continued), then adopted in Britain, then Imperial Russia (which presumably the Soviets continued). Get your facts straight. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_health_care#Hist…

Who is talking about where an idea originated? Many of these ideas predate written language. Nazis didn't invent racism either, are you trying to say that racism isn't a Nazi idea? The context is clearly that it's an idea associated with them.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#210

Post by tolbish »

whatthesmack wrote: post #167
qlm wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you provide an example of what you perceive to be "left wing extremism"?

Here's a couple that some folks consider to be leftist extremism on Twitter: - Blue checkmarks claiming lockdowns are a net benefit to the world - Twitter adding their corporate opinion on the recent US election to some tweets The aforementioned left-wing extremism has caused many of us to move to Parler.

That's... pretty mainstream actually.
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