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Voat Is Shutting Down

voat.co

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Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#181

Post by schoen »

phire wrote: post #171
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Free speech platforms usually end up being extremist platforms. ...when the popular platforms stop being free speech platforms. Reddit, in its earlier days, was never dominated by the Voat contingent. They were there, but they were far less extreme there than they were on Voat. And then whenever they would post rank inaccuracies, there were clearer-minded people to point out why they were wrong, in the same place w…

> Reddit, in its earlier days, was never dominated by the Voat contingent. Reddit never had free speech as a key attracting point. People came to reddit not because it was free speech, but because there was good conversations and content there. Reddit's early "free speech attitude" came about mostly because they had a staff of 4 people who spend all their time trying to keep the site from crashing as it scaled. It wa…

I recall a clear period of time when at least some of the people running Reddit seemed very proud of how they didn't take down or ban subreddits that many people thought were inappropriate, offensive, or harmful. Unfortunately, since Aaron Swartz was the only sometime-Reddit leader I knew, I can't immediately point to other people from Reddit leadership who were explicit about this (as Aaron certainly was).

I believe there was a rough Reddit equivalent to Twitter executives' famous "the free speech wing of the free speech party" statement, but I can't cite one and I may be letting my memories of Aaron's views get projected onto his colleagues.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#182

Post by [deleted] »

whatthesmack wrote: post #167
qlm wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you provide an example of what you perceive to be "left wing extremism"?

Here's a couple that some folks consider to be leftist extremism on Twitter: - Blue checkmarks claiming lockdowns are a net benefit to the world - Twitter adding their corporate opinion on the recent US election to some tweets The aforementioned left-wing extremism has caused many of us to move to Parler.

[deleted]

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#183

Post by [deleted] »

whatthesmack wrote: post #167
qlm wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you provide an example of what you perceive to be "left wing extremism"?

Here's a couple that some folks consider to be leftist extremism on Twitter: - Blue checkmarks claiming lockdowns are a net benefit to the world - Twitter adding their corporate opinion on the recent US election to some tweets The aforementioned left-wing extremism has caused many of us to move to Parler.

[deleted]

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#184

Post by schoen »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #179
zapzupnz wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really a reply to the whole tech debt bit, but the ~ symbol is called a tilde in English. I suspect spelling it with an a at the end comes from another language?

No, the symbol is called a tilde in Spanish , where it's part of the writing system. It's unused in English and therefore doesn't really have a name, but people who have learned Spanish may call it a tilde. If you were studying Greek, you'd call it a "circumflex". (Or, if you were Greek, you'd call it a "perispomene".) Spelling it as "tilda" just reflects the fact that a reduced vowel in English may be spelled in any…

I think it's fair to say that, even though it's not part of the English writing system, "tilde" is the standard name of the mark in English now when English-speakers who are familiar with it want to discuss it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilde

This includes lots of detailed discussion of the mark under the name "tilde", including names of Unicode characters that include this term. Wiktionary also views it as an English noun borrowed from Spanish.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tilde#English

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#185

Post by yakireev »

sellyme wrote: post #147
anshumankmr wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> they can do absolutely nothing to stop you from creating a competing community on the exact same website, leveraging the existing userbase.

Admins can though. I see a recurring pattern of this in U.S. politics or politics-infested parts of reddit: mods of /r/PoliticalHumor or /r/MurderedByWords can make a pro-D. echo chamber out of their subreddits, but an attempt to make a pro-R. echo chamber of the similar temperature would be quarantined/banned/whatever.

For an outsider, it was quite disturbing to see how dissenting opinions on U.S. politics were silenced on reddit in a matter of couple of years (2017-2018, I guess?). I do not care about U.S. politics that much, but erasure of dissent is scary.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#186

Post by fake-name »

Aeolun wrote: post #169
tzs wrote: post #54

Most of the original Voat groups were groups that has been kicked off of Reddit, but then people there made groups that corresponded to groups that were still on Reddit, like /v/science and /v/movies. Reading those is quite an experience. On /v/science right now there is a submission about dark matter and MOND [1], which was also discussed today on HN [2]. The title of the Voat submission will give you a good idea of…

Holy fuck. That’s way worse than I expected. I can’t imagine people actually think like that. They must be doing it for the shock value, or because of some echo chamber effect.

It's worse. They actually believe that.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#187

Post by alrs »

edoceo wrote: post #14
technion wrote: post #8

Whilst the content on voat kept me from using it, I clicked this link and couldn't help noticing how quickly it loaded. How much content was on the screen. How many comments I could read before hitting "load more", which simply loaded more rather than sending me to a different page. For a site with funding issues and limited Devs, voats usability should be a huge embarassment to the Reddit it based itself on.

Once again tho, it's not the tech that makes/breaks the company/platform

Tell that to Friendster.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#188

Post by eropple »

mr_toad wrote: post #153
Pfhreak wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe this is called the "Gish Gallop". The idea being that I can come up with many, many more questions that are hypothetical, but that require more energy to answer than they take to ask. Often times the person will combine this with a carefully worded question that has to be unwound by the counter-debater. Like, "Knowing that this will cost working class Americans jobs, why do you want X?" Well... X doesn't co…

> Like, "Knowing that this will cost working class Americans jobs, why do you want X?" A good politician would never answer that question. Instead they would answer a different question that they already had a good answer to. “I think the important thing to remember here is...” This tactic works just as well online. Never directly answer a question you don’t like. Always stay on message. By the time you finish your a…

Thing is--you are assuming that both sides want to exercise rhetoric.

The weakness, and it is a weakness, of the generally liberal discussion participant is that they very often want to discuss what a thing is and what it means. Wonkishness is a positive trait in discussing policy, but it means that rhetoric, no matter how openly disingenuous, has to be addressed; the consequences (or the inanity) have to be dissected, that's part of why they are there.

Incidentally, this is what leads to the current state of affairs--the side that is unmoored from any pretense of reality can say whatever the hell they want and will put the other side into knots.

It isn't clever, and it is frustrating because your advice is good, but it is real.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#190

Post by nkrisc »

whatthesmack wrote: post #167
qlm wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you provide an example of what you perceive to be "left wing extremism"?

Here's a couple that some folks consider to be leftist extremism on Twitter: - Blue checkmarks claiming lockdowns are a net benefit to the world - Twitter adding their corporate opinion on the recent US election to some tweets The aforementioned left-wing extremism has caused many of us to move to Parler.

What's extreme about any of that? Seems pretty tame.
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