Voat Is Shutting Down

There is a holocaust denial post on the front page right now. Good riddance.

Voat and Bitchute are the platforms that convinced me censorship just radicalises people more. I tried to use Voat a number of times after the subreddits and communties I liked online were censored one by one, but each time this happened I noticed Voat got progressively more extremist as it started to become one of the last places that allowed that type of speech on the internet.

While I never felt I needed to use Voat the problem because there are many alternative communities online, I do feel I HAVE to use Bitchute if I want to watch some of my favourite creators because YouTube banned them for reasons I can't quite understand. I'm aware this is now exposing me to a lot more radical content than I would otherwise be exposed to if I was still watching on YouTube.

For example, just yesterday I shared a funny video I found on BitChute to a friend, but he wasn't able to view it because it was deemed potentially illegal in his country. It was a fairly innocent parody video so I didn't really get why it was banned until I took a look at the channel which was full of extreme and racist content.

I'm self-aware enough to know that exposing myself frequently enough to content like this could shift my views and I'm making efforts not to click on related views on Bitchute, but just to watch and support the content I used to enjoy on YouTube but it's obvious to me how many people can become radicalised by communities that consist solely of radicals that have been banned from the more mainstream platforms.

Here's the video btw, https://www.bitchute.com/video/AlSYTmkVfUFw/ I love Bill Gates and don't agree with all the conspiracies surrounding him but I did find this parody kinda funny. I'm a big South Parks fan though, and it reminds me a lot of that.

There's one way to promote healthy discussion. Instead of just up and downvoting, you can give people the option to vote for "well argued" and "I agree" separately. I've seen a Finnish newspaper site use this.

You have to always remember it comes down to scale. The fact that making the claims is always less work than debunking them already has the balance of power way off into the claimant end. So anyone moderating anything is going to turn to heuristics; you can see which topics tend to attract people acting in bad faith and at the very least have extra standards on. I'll go back to trans people since Ive personally got the most experience debunking bigotry in that arena, what are the odds that some random user on an unrelated forum has independently researched something that's going to completely flip established science on its head? It's fairly low, and allowing argument just creates a false debate. To use examples I would hope get everyone on board, think flat earthers. There's no version of that discussion that doesn't end with "here are all the data suggesting a round earth + things you can literally do yourself with a bit of math and a car" vs "that's just what the want you to think". Since you know how it ends, just ban it to start.

Hell you can see the consequences of not holding a firm line on these sorts of things in this thread. There are people literally "just asking questions" about "men in women's sports" as an example of the "terrible reddit censorship"; as if it's not transparently obvious what they're doing.

So you have to ask yourself, even if you could reliably id anyone who wanted to argue in good faith (i'd argue this is considerably harder than you'd think though that's more of a gut feeling /shrug), if their goals are "convince the world that is causing harm" what is the value of giving that a platform even if you're willing to expend the emotional energy to debunk it (over and over and over and over because even if you have some kind of metric, your users don't and if allowed someone always feeds the trolls).

> This would lead to a large number of injuries and overdoses because of the drug use. IIRC this was happening in soccer with heart attacks happening because of drugs.

Yes, but this is a choice. We still like to imagine that sports must be "natural". There is nothing natural in how the top performers are bred (my wife was a national junior champion and in the very top of Europe and did not continue despite being invited to the national team - all the fun of sports is gone).

Since we accept that we breed people that do competitive sport I see no reason why not to give them all the opportunities. This includes taking risk with their health and life.

The only problem is that sport starts at 4 years old and there is a risk of parents who would be ready for anything for their children to be sport heroes.

My children did al lot of sports and they stopped after their black belt in karate because it was not fun anymore. They were not really interested by the competition so it did not matter. They love sport. I play volleyball in an amateur team that almost always loses. But the fun is incredible.

> The distinction between men and women teams is arbitrary but fairly sensible. If you didn't separate them then you'd have men at the top and women at the bottom, which does not fun make.

I know but since it looks like the gender is becoming a mater of choice, I do not know how this will be deal with.

I was thinking the same thing when I read somewhere that the "appartenance to a racial group" in the US is by choice as well. I wonder why some, say, white people do not assess themselves as "Afro-American" to make use of the positive discrimination for admission at universities (or whatever this is called in the US)