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Voat Is Shutting Down

voat.co

501–510 of 671 posts

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can we discuss if overweight people should pay more for sits in a plane? Can we discuss if a trans male who identifies herself to be a woman should be allowed to take part in female sport competition (box, running)? I am afraid we no longer can discuss such "uncomfortable" topics You can debate those things on reddit without being censored on a lots of subreddits. However, the reason these are such contentious topi…

So, speech about fat or trans people must be limited to "caring about their rights"? If you can't say something nice then you're not allowed to say anything at all?

[deleted]

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#502
post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GP's is not claiming that overweight or transgender people are inhuman. That statement is exactly the type of extremist stance that is causing this debate in the first place. Hell, they aren't even claiming that they are in favor of the points mentioned. Just that it's a bad idea for democratic society to shut down such discussion.

The problem with those discussions is that they tend to devolve in shouting matches. Why is that? It's because this really is about people's feelings and sentiments on those topics. And those emotions range wildly from totally supportive to indifferent to deeply threatened. While that's all completely valid, voicing your emotions unfiltered on the public Internet in front of an audience of anonymous millions comes wi…

> It's because this really is about people's feelings and sentiments on those topics. And those emotions range wildly from totally supportive to indifferent to deeply threatened.

There's another dimension on top of even this. Nuance and shortcuts to commonly-held understanding, provided by body language and intonation, readily used in spoken discussion, are completely unavailable online. Typing out full, unspoken context for argument points takes far too long. So online discussions distill these deeply, deeply held feelings into a few sentences, which leads to oversimplification of one's own argument, and reductio ad absurdum of the other person's. So while "the internet" gives us this "wonderful" opportunity to discuss things that matter in an open and socialized way, it subtly channels such discussions into the most-hyperbolic form of "discussion" by nature of it being typed. Look no further than Twitter for the "best" example of this phenomenon. #SocialMediaIsDestroyingSociety

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#503
post #220

How much was he/she paying a month to keep it up? Why not ask for donations/people to subscribe? I mean, I don't personally use and I don't know anybody who does but...

My guess is that that was a phony reason to mask some other one. I run a reddit clone with as much activity as voat gets, and I do it from the smallest server DigitalOcean offers for $5/month. That includes running it, the Postgres server, etc. It has near instant load times. Either something with their software is really messed up (Lemmy is a great example of a reddit clone that requires an order of magnitude more s…

are you running the literal reddit codebase or a clone codebase, and if so, is it open source?

Lemmy is written in rust, so that is surprising, but it also a react SPA so feels heavy to me when I tried it.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#504

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…

Its not that free speech platforms are destined to fail, its anonymity. You're not responsible for your words. That's why these fail. Notice I use my real name here on this website. Not a pseudonym. Whatever I say here, I would say to you in front of your face. Same as I do on Facebook and Twitter and Reddit and the other areas I post. I've always used my real name. I'll always use my real name. We don't require anyo…

I used to use my real name, until my boss told me my HN comments showed up in his Cortana results when all he wanted to do was search for my email address in his personal contact list. A decent person will feel at least a little bit like a creep searching for someones name on Google to dig up personal details about them, but when all that info just comes along with their email address, it just doesn't sit right. My boss even felt compelled to tell me it happened, not because he saw anything bad, but because he felt like a creep just getting the info like that. Then I started thinking about all the Windows users in the business world that might get the same results under the same conditions, and I just don't need everyone I interact with, across the country, knowing, for example, I'm an atheist before they send me a request to add a new question to a web form.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#505
post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the canonical meme of free speech, but there's a corollary that is becoming increasingly relevant. People who repeat what you just wrote usually seem to ignore it: If every arena where people actually meet is privately owned, and all of these places agree on what ideas are valid topics of discussion, the effect on society will largely be the same as if a state actor suppressed free speech. We're not quite the…

> This is the canonical meme of free speech That's a pretty dismissive way to say "jurisprudence". > If every arena where people actually meet is privately owned, and all of these places agree on what ideas are valid topics of discussion, the effect on society will largely be the same as if a state actor suppressed free speech. The concept that you're edging up to here is called "State Action". It's the idea that the…

I didn't say that you were wrong, or dismiss your viewpoints. I'm pointing out that there is a broader debate here, which has value but is misunderstood by many. Freedom of speech as a philosophical concept spans wider than its codification in law, and probably requires adaption or extension in response to changing circumstances.

The "twitter mob" argument was really an ancillary point to show where one ends up if enough unpopular opinions are silenced. But it's interesting in itself. I don't think a participant in public debate in the 1700s would have reason to fear a crowd of tens of thousands stapling angry and occasionally violent rebuttals to their front door.

Okay, calling someone a fucking moron is protected speech. It would be problematic to censor it. But there is a problem if a crowd screams at someone who has valid (if controversial) points, if this happens to such a degree that they will self-censor or withdraw from the debate entirely, perhaps (rightfully) fearing for their livelihoods and personal safety. My example was a concrete instance of this.

Solution? Hell if I know. There's certainly a problem; a situation that has negative consequences. There's something to the viewpoint that cancelling someone is approaching an act of violence, where it affects a person's ability to earn a living and survive. But this is obviously not the last or only important point in such a debate. It's something that should be discussed widely.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#506
post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The example in sports is a good one too. I think that we should not test anybody for anything because a sportman today is not a normal being anyway. 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. The distinction between men and women teams is arbitrary but fairly sensible. If you didn't separate th…

> 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 invi…

> Yes, but this is a choice.

When _some_ make this choice to be at the top, _all_ must make this choice to be at the top. At that point it's a roulette of who will dare take the most drugs and live to win.

> I see no reason why not to give them all the opportunities.

Some are way more harmful than others, and we should take that into account.

EDIT:

> 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.

Apart from some radical groups thinking so, gender is not really becoming a choice.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#507
post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with this is that it's almost entirely based on prejudice and people saying things that turn out not to be true ... Caster Semenya [has] high natural testosterone Caster Semenya has XY chromosomes and internal testes. Semenya has "high natural testosterone" as a result of having male anatomy and hormones. The specific regulation Semenya has been fighting is explicitly "limited to athletes with ’46 XY DSD’…

Ignoring why the WSA chose 5nmol/L over something closer to the average cis woman's upper quartile (which is closer to 2 [45ng/dL as seen in [0]], not .6 as you're implying with the 7.5x figure), Im not sure what their reasoning is on that without more research. Trans women don't tend to have testosterone levels that high anyway, and if they did their doctors would be worried about it. Obviously not a comprehensive s…

Caster Semenya is not transgender and has not had testosterone blocking hormone therapy, which is what these regulations/debates are about.

I'd wager most women competing aren't hovering around the minimum levels (which is where most trans women are going to be by virtue of how anti-androgens work). Instead of unscientific blog spam

Again, Semenya is not transgender[1] and her T hormones are not hovering around the minimum levels, which is the entire reason for the ongoing debate. The "unscientific blog spam" was referencing the IAAF study of competing athletes[2]

not .6 as you're implying with the 7.5x figure ...

which indeed showed the average T level for 1332 female athletes was 0.67. 5 / 0.67 = 7.46

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2019/05/03...

[2] https://sci-hub.se/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28673896/

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#508

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…

>After alt-right extremists were booted off reddit, they found a new home there. The site was bombarded by /pol/ chan culture.

Nah reddit users bring reddit culture. They aren't welcome anywhere.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nazism isn’t just any philosophy that has harmed people though, it’s a philosophy based on the innate premise of harming people. There is a major difference between arguing for something that the other side believe will cause harm, and arguing for something that’s primary goal is to cause harm. Or, put another way, saying its rapidly getting out of hand because you make assumptions about what else could be banned is…

The original claim was that you have to preemptively eject anyone with even a weakly implied fascist sympathy because otherwise you'll soon be overrun with actual Nazis. No sense of irony in claiming that a counterargument is the slippery slope fallacy? And the point I'm making isn't that you would eject all communists and capitalists in practice, it's that you would have to do so in a consistent application of that…

I am wary of continuing to feed the troll, but you understand that there's a difference of kind between a communist and a Stalinist, yes? Tankies can and should be bopped on sight, too. There is a crucial difference, in that they are not generally actively attempting to subvert the liberal order--they are disorganized and, tbh, generally not really capable of doing so--but they don't belong in decent company either.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now do this 1,000 times. Now 10,000 times. It is trivial to suck all the air out of a forum by repeatedly posting this.

Spam detection has been a feature of email clients for a long time. I'm sure even a rudimentary automated detection mechanism could prevent a significant portion of the dupes.

Is that not censorship then?
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