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Voat Is Shutting Down

voat.co

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Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#531

Post by sonotathrowaway »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #32
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.

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.

What about 8chan? The culture of idolizing white mass murderers has produced several who have posted their manifestos shortly before going on killing sprees, and the 8chan culture is largely the same as voat and 4chan.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#532

Post by rchaud »

mtberatwork wrote: post #421
berryjerry wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is dead on correct. The problem is online most people don't have to hear what you say, they can just not subscribe or not follow you and never hear a word of what you said. This is why over-moderation on the big tech sites like Reddit, Youtube, Twitter, and Facebook is so frustrating. It goes beyond kicking someone out of the bar to not allowing someone to open a bar. And they get their moderation wrong, and I m…

> It goes beyond kicking someone out of the bar to not allowing someone to open a bar. This analogy doesn't work. Anyone can open their own "bars" on the Web. Reddit and Voat are the "bars" here. Voat was created because they were kicked off of Reddit. Voat even mimics Reddit in terms of functionality.

I think he meant open a bar on the same property as the bar that kicked him out, in order to siphon of some of the customers.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#533

Post by rchaud »

cwhiz wrote: post #49
Sebguer wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a pretty weird assertion - Voat doesn't have to worry about literally any of the scale problems Reddit does.

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.

It works fine via third party apps with direct API access, and Reddit Enhancement Suite on desktop. No ads, everything loads fast. My Reddit experience is basically unchanged from 2013.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#534

Post by sonotathrowaway »

PradeetPatel wrote: post #272
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…

Sometimes hate speech must be limited in order for a greater freedom of speech to thrive. My heart goes out to the founder of voat, I'm sure his heart was in the right place when he founded the site. But perhaps he did not anticipate it to organically evolve into a haven for alt-right extremism. Perhaps this will serve as a lesson to many future platform providers.

To be clear, Voat was billed as the free speech alternative to Reddit, when Reddit banned subreddits with names like /r/shitniggerssay and /r/neofags. Nobody was under any pretenses as to the type of person voat was catering to.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#535

Post by sgillen »

lordCarbonFiber wrote: post #483
MisterTea wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ou did not bring them up in good faith, for example, you just used obese and trans people to make a point. You are one of the people the gp is mentioning. Those two are excellent points. There are a lot of people who are uncomfortable with those topics but are open to discussing them. Then people like you come out of the woodwork and accuse them of some nonsensical uptight bullshit and crap on their legitimate ques…

We live in a world where google exists, hell where scihub exists. It's extremely suspicious to show up in a forum "asking questions" when these resources exist. Getting told to "fuck off" in this context is basically being told to RTFM. You can look in my comment history to find just how easy it was to compile some sources to discredit the idea that trans women in sports is some unknown taboo. If we spent just a frac…

I think the two questions being considered are largely a matter of public opinion. You can use something of sci hub etc to justify your opinion, or try to change someone’s mind (esp in this example with the trans athletes). But unless others have already held this discussion somewhere google won’t help you gauge what people think. (Obviously these particular topics have been done to death, but someone has to hold this discussion for the first time on a given platform).

I do actually agree that most people that most people making a fuss about these questions online are doing so in bad faith or “mostly bad faith”. But I still do think both questions are nuanced, and I think a lot of bystanders might benefit from intelligent responses to these questions from the progressive side, but maybe at some point it’s too exhausting.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#537

Post by tootie »

gerdesj wrote: post #31

"It’s embarrassing but it’s true, I just can’t keep it up. I’ve tried meditation, I’ve tried prayer, I’ve tried reaching out for help. Some solutions worked for a little while but nothing has remedied the underlying issue. No matter what I do, I simply just can’t keep it up. I expect most will be disappointed and let down, while others will just point and laugh. So be it, it’s a problem every man like me will face at…

I'm pretty sure voat turned out exactly as he intended. While "Free speech" is laudable goal, he wanted a platform that allowed for racism, conspiracies and threats. I don't think he wanted only racism and conspiracies, but he wanted them to be allowed to flourish alongside and within mainstream conversation.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#538

Post by joepie91_ »

totony wrote: post #372
HorkHunter wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Constant dehumanization of people does not eventually lead to physical violence? someone somewhere must believe that they should do something about these bad people. your argument at best is in bad faith

>your argument at best is in bad faith I disagree (although this was a question more than an argument) >Constant dehumanization of people does not eventually lead to physical violence? What it might lead to is irrelevant, the act of speech does not impede anything and a lot of things have the potential to lead to violence, yet legalizing it is arbitrary at best

> the act of speech does not impede anything

It absolutely does. It leads to a climate of fear for those affected by it, especially once it becomes widespread.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#539

Post by sonotathrowaway »

thinkingemote wrote: post #327
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.

4chan is heavily moderated. The moderation is just that the barrier is in a different place, and it's hidden for the most part. But there is moderation. It's like the pub you don't want to drink in because it's full of the thugs and drug dealers who have the scariest bouncers at the door. Any trouble makers get taken out back, but they do have methods to control what they consider to be trouble makers.

We know 4chan is moderated, simply because 8chan exists and has produced several more mass murderers than 4chan has, despite the close overlap of ideologies. 4chan has a magnitude less users posting their manifestos before committing mass murder.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#540

Post by renewiltord »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #351
renewiltord wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So the answer has to be to stop the witch hunts in the places where everybody else already is. Got to be honest, bro, I don't really care to sacrifice for "the good of society" or whatever. If you make a website where some dude is going to post anti-Semitic shit everywhere and someone else is going to have to politely explain that Jewish lizard people are not conspiring to elect a Black woman as President then sure…

> So you pick: them or me? Don't you create polarization this way?

It just so happens that there are lots of people like me feeling "I want to see cat pics, talk about my Subaru, and about VR and ESP8266". There aren't that many feeling "I want to talk about fanged Jews forming shadowy cabals to suck the blood of gentle babies in the night". I'm okay with drawing a nice bright line in the sand, othering the latter, and having them go start communities where they rage that they can't meet people of the opposite sex.

That sort of polarization is desired. I don't want those guys inside my community. I want them outside. And if you're like "Okay, I think the Jews have fangs but they don't suck baby blood at night" then that's not a degree of moderation I'm interested to have in my community. Out you go. Or out I go. Quite happy to self select out of this community of yours where people want to discuss that.

Remember, I'm here for cat pics, not all that other angry shit. I'm okay with the poles being "normal people" and "weird angry dudes". Seems reasonable.

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