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Voat Is Shutting Down

voat.co

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Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#141

Post by cbozeman »

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…

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 anyone to take responsibility for what they say, so they say anything they want. Combine with this an entire zeitgeist of people who feel disconnected and alone, and its a recipe for attention-seeking behavior.

And on the converse, sometimes its taken too far, with people losing their jobs for things that clearly meant in jest (Justine Sacco) or for clumsily worded communication. Call-out culture needs to die. SJW culture needs to die. One-up culture needs to die. We have to start giving people the benefit of the doubt.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#142

Post by judge2020 »

TameAntelope wrote: post #132
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 has a place on the Internet, and if that counts as "moderation" then Voat had moderation too.

Voat definitely has moderation, CP and other illegal content is kept off of the platform; but both 4chan and voat can be largely hateful places with threats of violence thrown around. 4chan somehow has funding (it has ads and a paid subscription option but iirc there's also angel investors funding it) so it's going to stay up for the foreseeable future. Unless voat can start a patreon or something of the sorts (maybe chargebee), it's going to be turned off.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#143

Post by eropple »

MinusGix wrote: post #114
intended wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think the issue is one of scale. Having non-perfect free-speech is fine on your usual forum site, and somewhat has to be used to ensure quality. While, at the absolutely massive scale that Reddit and other social media giants are at, they (in my view) should essentially have very little to no say in what content appears upon the site. Now, individual moderators for subreddits could be more stringent due to being su…

This sounds good until you realize that we're dealing with literal-not-figurative fascists here. The world has figured out how to deal with a Nazi. I've linked this elsewhere in the thread, but it is worth understanding the lessons of this story deeply: https://twitter.com/IamRageSparkle/status/128089153745134387...

Say you're something anodyne, like /r/RomanHistory or something (I don't know if that's real). For obvious reasons, that is a topic that Western fascists really like; they're gonna come by, even if their "fascist hat" isn't on right that second. But that train's never late, that fascist hat goes on eventually. And the first fascist might be polite. So might his friends. And maybe you see a few off-color jokes that maybe you, as a slightly-but-not-heavily-invested mod, slap down--but those jokes are the way that they start to find each other. And meanwhile, as things grow? What often happens is that one of their more buttoned-up types ends up on your moderation team, because hey, they're Respected By The Community (and this happens in person, too, when it comes to groups and political entities; this is a very common foot-in-the-door tactic). And then it just grows from there. Maybe you've got the spine to "ruin everything" by kicking them out at this point, by cutting out the rot, but that's going to hurt and hmm, maybe it's best to just go along and get along, especially because any time you try to act against it, you've got those folks who pipe up about how Nazis should have freedom of speech too, even if you don't like their ideas...

...and now you have a fascist community.

"Strong moderation"--the bartender in that story telling the first fascist to get the hell out--is not something that can be even remotely taken for granted. You must insulate your systems against fascism because it is a hack of the system. The instinctual emotional attack it employs on a liberal order requires so much more work to stop than it does to continue that anywhere it can take root, it can strangle everything else. This is real, and this is what those coded "free speech ideals" are being weaponized to protect while it grows.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#144

Post by weare138 »

zamalek wrote: post #77
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…

> It was truly the culture that dominated the site. Voat is proof that we are not yet deserving of free speech. I find beauty in the principle of FoS: we would never have e.g. legalized same-sex marriages without it - and this is why we need it for future ethical advancements, possibly (as one hypothetical example), the right to die/destiny. Advancement of the moral zeitgeist is impossible without it. The utter impos…

>Voat is proof that we are not yet deserving of free speech

It's not the we the people are not deserving of free speech, it's the idea the right to 'free speech' supersedes other rights and should go unchecked at the expense of others that undermines the concept for so many. Besides, it wasn't free speech or lack thereof that's causing Voat to fold. Apparently no one wanted to pay to hear what they had to say. Everyone has a right to free speech but everyone else has an equal right not to listen to it if they don't want to.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#145

Post by jcims »

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".

Neither is cleaning up graffiti or opening coffee shops. Gentrification is a second-order effect of 'cleaning up' a community.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#146

Post by px43 »

JFC that entire comment section is about blaming the Jews and using some pretty fucking horrific slurs to do it.

Let that trash pile burn. Fuck those guys and anyone who would give pieces of shit like that a platform to spread their hatred into the world.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#147

Post by sellyme »

anshumankmr wrote: post #139
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.

True. But the only problem is when moderators hold too much power, like in the case of most subs in Reddit.

Moderators on Reddit hold very little power. Unlike almost every other messageboard in existence, they can do absolutely nothing to stop you from creating a competing community on the exact same website, leveraging the existing userbase.

The only tools are standard moderator ones: content deletion, stickying, and a banhammer. There's not many sites where moderators have less power.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#148

Post by sellyme »

axguscbklp wrote: post #121
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.

I enjoy rude online communities. Sometimes it's nice to go to places where people say what they mean rather than try to be polite and/or politically correct. Pubs and websites are different from each other. I probably wouldn't go to a pub that refused to throw out rude patrons because there would be a relatively high chance of physical violence occurring at such a pub. Online, assuming that my use of a website would…

> assuming that my use of a website would have no consequences like doxxing that could get back to the rest of my life

This is a brave assumption.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#149

Post by jcims »

stavros wrote: post #22
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.

I visited once out of curiosity, and was just shocked to see how overtly racist people were. It wasn't just "immigrants should stay in their countries" (which I was expecting), it was full on "I don't see why I shouldn't be able to kill me a n*gger if I feel like it" speech (censorship mine). Truly disgusting.

Same. It was so on-the-nose I wasn't entirely convinced that everything I was reading was authentic. Obviously that type of person exists but some of the conversations seemed performative.
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