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Voat Is Shutting Down

voat.co

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Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#211

Post by hombre_fatal »

andrewflnr wrote: post #156
hombre_fatal wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What almost every comment about Voat here misses though is that when you start a competitor clone to an incumbent like Voat did, there’s literally zero reason for most people to join. The only people who have an incentive are people banned from the incumbent. You see this all the time. As a kid I posted on a forum Opa-Ages that was just weirdos banned from Gaming-Ages (NeoGAF). This isn’t so much about free speech an…

There's no "solution", just like there's no "solution" to "politics". Everyone just has to keep trying really hard all the time so we don't drown in shit. That's it, until the lights go out for good. As for the next step, it looks less like starting a reddit competitor and more like building individual, independent communities that can stand or (more likely) fall apart from any others.

Yeah, it's hard for me to envision what the next iteration on Reddit could be. Maybe there isn't one and instead we're seeing a resurgence of forum silos again that's winning back the mainstream.

For example, I was pleasantly surprised to see Discourse have so much success and high profile roll outs (like Boing Boing and Blizzard). It turns out that everyone was ready for a modern revitalization of the forum experience, not that forums were doomed.

I think I'd liken it to the explosion of Slack/Discord popularity. It would have been a mistake to look at the slow death of IRC and conclude "I guess people don't like chatting anymore."

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#212

Post by superkuh »

zapzupnz wrote: post #95
superkuh wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were corners of it that were decent in terms of content and tone. Particularly v/justgrowit which was about gardening. But yeah, for every polite person in some isolated corner there were 50 screaming about politics on the front page. But that wasn't the problem with Voat. The problem with Voat was the terrible code making the site non-functional. You literally couldn't submit a URL which had a tilda in it. A t…

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?

Hah, oops. I don't know what I was thinking. The only time I see "tilda" is in the famous actor's name. English is my first language.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#213

Post by kibwen »

sthnblllII wrote: post #198
aaron-santos wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makes sense. Lies spread faster than truth, and repetition legitimizes are fundamentally incompatible with the marketplace of ideas mindset.

Really? It took a huge mobilization of media manipulation fear mongering and gas lighting to get the American public to swallow the Weapons of Mass Destruction and/or Saddam did 9/11 lies. If people had been free to speak their minds ( https://www.democracynow.org/2013/3/21/phil_donahue_on_his_2... ) back then we wouldn't have been lead into that war like lemmings. Information is control. I trust the funny cat lady n…

> If people had been free to speak their minds back then

What?

> Lies require censorship of truth to survive.

This is naive. People willfully believe lies if they support their worldview, even in the presence of truth.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#214

Post by JoshTriplett »

sthnblllII wrote: post #198
aaron-santos wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makes sense. Lies spread faster than truth, and repetition legitimizes are fundamentally incompatible with the marketplace of ideas mindset.

Really? It took a huge mobilization of media manipulation fear mongering and gas lighting to get the American public to swallow the Weapons of Mass Destruction and/or Saddam did 9/11 lies. If people had been free to speak their minds ( https://www.democracynow.org/2013/3/21/phil_donahue_on_his_2... ) back then we wouldn't have been lead into that war like lemmings. Information is control. I trust the funny cat lady n…

> If people had been free to speak their minds back then

Are you under the impression that people weren't free to speak their minds "back then"? People did speak their minds, loudly and regularly. That didn't change the outcome.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#215

Post by greggturkington »

heavyset_go wrote: post #101
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. One of Reddit's most visited subreddits in the early days, between 2007 and 2011, was one dedicated to sharing suggestive pictures of minors[1]. It was chosen as "subreddit of the year" in 2008 and the subreddit was the second most searched term on Reddit[2]. There was definitely a core of users with questionable characters on Reddit for whom…

Those weren't the early days; Condé Nast owned it and you could make your own subreddits by then. Early on it was very science, tech, and liberal. Mysogynistic, but not alt-right/hate content like Voat.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#216

Post by Spivak »

sthnblllII wrote: post #198
aaron-santos wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makes sense. Lies spread faster than truth, and repetition legitimizes are fundamentally incompatible with the marketplace of ideas mindset.

Really? It took a huge mobilization of media manipulation fear mongering and gas lighting to get the American public to swallow the Weapons of Mass Destruction and/or Saddam did 9/11 lies. If people had been free to speak their minds ( https://www.democracynow.org/2013/3/21/phil_donahue_on_his_2... ) back then we wouldn't have been lead into that war like lemmings. Information is control. I trust the funny cat lady n…

Other ways lies survive.

* By being easily digestible and easy to state while the the refutation requires a long form explanation.

* By spreading faster and being repeated more often than the truth preying on our innate bias toward things we’ve heard before.

* By being tied to an unrelated political ideology or issue of intellectual or moral superiority.

* By gaslighting where the authority of truth tellers are undermined.

* As a form of the Streisand effect where any attempt to discredit or silence lie tellers is parlayed into more evidence for its truth.

* When the belief in the truth imparts a material, social, or image cost to the would-be believer.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#217

Post by qPM9l3XJrF »

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.

Ideological homophily is a bitch. I actually tried arguing voaters out of their antisemitism for a while. As you might expect, it was a thankless task. I really think that examples like voat should make us skeptical of online communities in general. No one likes to be told they are wrong, or tell others they are wrong, so you get echo chambers.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#218

Post by AnthonyMouse »

NineStarPoint wrote: post #168
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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 principle. It's a reductio ad absurdum. You can take anything and find a tenuous connection from there to something terrible, so arguing that we have to ban the anything because allowing it would enable an influx of people connected to the something terrible is ridiculous. Applied as a consistent principle it would require you to ban everything.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#219

Post by 0xBA5ED »

eropple wrote: post #143
MinusGix wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 obv…

This is wrong on so many levels. You are encouraging witch hunts based on fear and paranoia. Moderation is about maintaining order, not slapping down baddies. You could argue that one leads to the other, but it's the difference in mindset that allows for effective moderation without the need for all that negativity.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#220

Post by deppr »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #2

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 server power than it should) or there's a more insidious reason and the admin just wants the whole thing to go away without giving a reason that will incite the mob against them. You can see them in there already calling for the doxx of the angel investor who stopped paying.

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