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Discord bans r/WallStreetBets server, subreddit went private for a while

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Re: Discord bans r/WallStreetBets server, subreddit went private for a while

#381

Remember: Parler tried “making their own X”. They were taken offline by a concerted effort at every level, despite the fact that a large portion of the capitol protests were organized on Facebook and YouTube. Anyone who’s ever been an activist for long enough knows that the censorship that silenced your enemies will eventually silence you. Corporate policing of speech needs to stop.

Parler was explicitly unmoderated by choice and hate speech was its selling point. You’ll have a hard time finding a) a service provider willing to tolerate that and b) much public sympathy for the service promoting hate. Yet it called into question freedom of speech. Same thing today with WSB, but the focus is clearly not hate speech (even if Discord says so). I find today’s bans way more objectionable than Parler,…

And if you intentionally want to have content that is objectionable, putting it on AWS seems like an awful idea. That's how Sci-Hub and TPB have managed to stick around for decades, and they've shown censorship on the internet isn't really a thing. God knows how many powerful forces have tried to censor them, to no avail.

While I agree that in some ways this is worse than the Parler case, it also is a free service that costs Discord a ton of money, especially with the hundreds of people constantly hanging out in voice chat [0]. A ventrilo server of that size would probably cost upwards of $100 a month [1]. So I'm not surprised with Discord wanting to enforce their ToS more readily than AWS who was actually making good money out of Parler.

[0] https://twitter.com/tomwarren/status/1354532238524874753

[1] https://www.ventrilo4.com/ventrilo-server-hosting-prices.php

Re: Discord bans r/WallStreetBets server, subreddit went private for a while

#383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its the last part of #4 that we have to prevent. > but avoiding a complete loss of control We need the complete loss of control. Corporations control entirely too much of American, and really, worldwide, life as it is. We can't give this one to them. Its too important. The ability to freely communicate ideas, even in vulgar, poorly considered ways, is too important and too fundamental to humanity to be allowed to be…

I was once like you, but. Doesn't it seem to you like something is fundamentally worse about politics now than it was 20 years ago? Isn't it true that people are more disconnected now than they have been in the past 50 years and institutions like clubs and political organizations reduced to merely a place to send money. Obviously the causes of this are varied (for one thing social media is way newer than 20 years), b…

Social media opened people's eyes to just how many different points of views there are on any given issue in the world. In the 90s or 00's, there was only 1-2 consensus views pushed by media.

Obviously its going to be a bumpy ride as the whole of society suddenly has to learn to cope with so many views, learn the critical thinking it takes to grapple with false information, learn who is trustworthy and who is not etc. but in the long run we will be much much better off for it. This is merely what society wide growth looks like - its not going to be a straight line up. Pulling the plug on that is deeply, deeply wrong no matter how scary it seems.

Some of the other issues like disconnection are amplified by existing institutions. In the 60s or 70s, a single working person could provide for an entire family. Now, most households have both parents working to provide barely the same standard of living or lower. When the vast majority of your time is directed into work by economic necessity, of course there is little time left for socializing or anything else. Don't believe the bullshit that it is somehow social media's fault. The trend of disconnection goes longer, and it has just as much to do (or much more IMO) with no free time, no money, stress and insular urban planning.

The institutions are dying because they are ineffective or do not serve the public and have been for far too long. How is it that we had almost a year to prepare for a plan to distribute vaccines but we found out there is none now? How is is that corporations lobby for and routinely pass laws that hurt people? How is it that the health insurance industry still exists and causes millions of deaths when most other countries have lower costs AND better outcomes with socialized healthcare? How is that the central banks are now printing so much money that it will devalue all peoples personal savings by 10-20% over the years without really explaining thats what they are doing, without any approval? How can you keep desperately clinging to some illusion that institutions safeguard society when every institution is failing so badly?

Social media is just the evil boogieman media loves to blame for every modern problem, when in fact it only surfaces the problems that have always existed but been completely ignored by traditional media. Heck even the problem of people being easily fooled by fake news is a reflection of how education completely fails to teach critical thinking. The institutions have failed us all for FAR too long - they cannot be reformed. Burn them down and build new ones.

Re: Discord bans r/WallStreetBets server, subreddit went private for a while

#384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently 4chan floods with increase in traffic after such waves. 8chan , which was far better, went under for it though.

The fact that 4Chan itself has not been the target of deplatforming efforts is confusing to me. If I were to put my tinfoil hat on for a bit, I might speculate that it’s a honeypot that shares data with the feds.

The same way ThePirateBay and Sci-Hub haven't gotten deplatform even while having far more powerful forces after them. It's because the people hosting it aren't incompetent, and unlike what these people crying foul lately will have you believe, censorship on the internet isn't really a thing. You may not get a free megaphone like Twitter, but as long as you know what you're doing, you can have a voice online just fine.

Re: Discord bans r/WallStreetBets server, subreddit went private for a while

#385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Risk of SEC involvement. This admin is probably nowhere near as lenient on this kind of stuff as the last was, and the recent nonsense with GameStop is probably bad enough to attract negative regulatory attention.

This admin's official response to the GameStop situation was literally "Our Treasury Secretary is a woman!" https://twitter.com/Quicktake/status/1354496816738422789

I for one don't want the administration to have an "official response" to this, so a non-sequitur is positively delightful.

Re: Discord bans r/WallStreetBets server, subreddit went private for a while

#386
post #14

And they chose today as the best possible time to enact this ban? Really? I really think they should have put more thought into the timing of this decision; a lot of users are going to be upset and will suddenly start to realize that a single company has a monopoly on their online social life (this may seem like an exaggeration, but it feels quite true to me colloquially, especially if you're a younger US male and/or…

> I really think they should have put more thought into the timing of this decision; a lot of users are going to be upset and will suddenly start to realize that a single company has a monopoly on their online social life (this may seem like an exaggeration, but it feels quite true to me colloquially, especially if you're a younger US male and/or play video games).

What? I have never used Discord.

If you think that a company has a monopoly on your social life, that's on you. There are lots of chat services There's even gasp email, and double gasp group texts.

The problem here isn't that we need a new decentralized system, the problem is that people are too lazy to use the decentralization we have today.

Re: Discord bans r/WallStreetBets server, subreddit went private for a while

#387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Risk of SEC involvement. This admin is probably nowhere near as lenient on this kind of stuff as the last was, and the recent nonsense with GameStop is probably bad enough to attract negative regulatory attention.

This admin's official response to the GameStop situation was literally "Our Treasury Secretary is a woman!" https://twitter.com/Quicktake/status/1354496816738422789

Does the President owe us a response? Way way bigger fish to fry right now than GameStonks.

Re: Discord bans r/WallStreetBets server, subreddit went private for a while

#388
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wonder if they'll go to /biz/

/biz/ has been flooded with r/wallstreetbets traffic for days and days now. /smg/ threads hit bump limit in 20 minutes sometimes ever since this GME thing really got going. It's even outdone the usual crypto posting on /biz/ which I didn't ever think would happen.

finally

Re: Discord bans r/WallStreetBets server, subreddit went private for a while

#389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an ex-scientologist, I know how labeling websites "Hate Speech" can be abused. It's only when I ignored their "Hate Speech" warnings that I was able to figure out the fraud that is Scientology.

Yeah, I'm sure those people spamming racial and sexual slurs have something to teach us if we would just listen. /s

It may not be said eloquently or politely, but assuming you know better than people because you don't like the language they use sounds elitist to me.

That said, choosing who you do and don't interact with is your own business. Perhaps "I know I know more than them because they use homophobic slurs" isn't the strongest reason though, as one does not always map to the other

Re: Discord bans r/WallStreetBets server, subreddit went private for a while

#390
post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently 4chan floods with increase in traffic after such waves. 8chan , which was far better, went under for it though.

8chan did a rename but is indeed still going, https://8kun.top That link is now banned on Wikipedia even though...

I know, but it is a ghost town there now compared to the old 8chan.
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