God damn it. That's the shitty thing about the honeypot running dry. Now all the flies are in one spot and they don't have anything keeping them there.
Voat Is Shutting Down
281–290 of 671 posts
Re: Voat Is Shutting Down
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't have an account. Your claims of a left-wing bias on reddit are also anecdotal.
>Your claims of a left-wing bias on reddit are also anecdotal. Feel free to provide evidence to the contrary. As of right now all the posts on /r/all not right leaning.
> As of right now all the posts on /r/all not right leaning.
That's a pretty funny way to say "all but one or two posts out of 25 are not related to politics at all". Unless you consider things like wearing masks political.
Re: Voat Is Shutting Down
#283Moderated 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.
Even though there are many actual racists in between, I wouldn't take 99.9% of what's posted on 4Chan seriously. It's just a place people talk sh__ with zero consequences. There are no explanations (other than trolling like QAnon), or rationalizations. I guess it's because actually 4Chan is moderated, and it detracts the people with "real agendas".
Voat on the other hand, from the preview I've seen above, seems to be horrifyingly serious. People really seem to be trying to rationalize their racism. From my 5 minutes there, I really got scared about what some of those people would think of other human beings.
Re: Voat Is Shutting Down
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly this. Folks can rant about free speech all they want, but no sane person would actually want to experience it. I support your right to speak, but doesn’t mean I want to listen to you. IMO the only parts of the internet that should be absolutely required to allow unfiltered (legal, protected) speech, should be ISP’s, and maybe datacenters that rent out physical rack space. Everyone else should absolutely consi…
I think this is more of a matter of scale, like in your ISP and datacenter example, social media could be counted in on that too due to the sheer size of it and influence it can have on people. I agree that not having moderation isn't something we can do, for staying on topic or getting rid of certain users. The benefit of Reddit in this is that sub-communities can be made with harsher moderation policies than the ou…
> I think this is more of a matter of scale, like in your ISP and datacenter example, social media could be counted in on that too due to the sheer size of it and influence it can have on people.
It's not about scale, it's about alternatives. It's easy to just not go to reddit if you don't want to. If your ISP bans reddit (or hackernews?), and it's the only reasonable price/performance ISP you have access to, that's a much bigger problem.
Re: Voat Is Shutting Down
#285Earlier 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…
A huge problem, which is the cause of this far more than "free speech" ever was, roots in these platforms optimizing for engagement. And then vacuous controversy maximizes engagement so you're really optimizing for controversy, which is a dumpster fire. But separating the combatants doesn't just stop the algorithmically-promoted unintelligible flame wars. It stops the debate entirely. You lose the ability to even enc…
Pragmatically speaking, that will happen anyway. I’m not gonna use any platform that allows me to encounter Nazis. Voilà: the debate is stopped entirely, even though the platform has done nothing to stop it.
And on that topic, do we really need to debate Nazis? Like, are we so committed to the idea of moral relativism that we can’t draw some lines? Because frankly, I have zero interest in debating with anyone whether or not my family and I should be gassed to death.
Re: Voat Is Shutting Down
#286Earlier 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…
Do you think charging for a forum account would change the outcome? Would having people pay for a user account in order to be able to post on a forum reduce the amount of hate speech and related?
There is a reasonably well-known example of a large forum that charges users for account creation.
Something Awful has charged $10 for account creation for as long as i can remember.
While I do think it has kept away most low-effort trolls, there have certainly been deeply toxic attitudes and arguments still happened. Doxxing, organized harassment, racism and similar nastiness have certainly been issues with some regularity in most of the subforums.
The only reason why it has been kept down is a relatively large team of admins and moderators, and they have been far from infallible, there has been tons of drama in that regard, including at least one mod who literally doxxed other forums users to white supremacists.
On the whole though, the discussions there are a lot more civilized than on sites like Reddit. I think the small entry fee is part of it, but also thanks to an active moderation team and the standard policy being to put people in timeout first, instead of insta-banning for any offence.
Obviously there are differing views on how well it actually works, leading to various spin-off forums, with different policies and philosophies.
Re: Voat Is Shutting Down
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
Plus there is an asymmetry here. Wild “theories” and purposefully inflammatory content is easy to post, and also easy to believe for those that align with them ideologically. Countering them, especially to a degree that can be convincing, takes a lot more work. End result, a lot more of the former and less of the latter.
How come moderators don't fall for those 'theories'? Or more precisely: Why is there a majority of people who upvote those theories but moderators can identify them as what they are and remove them? What has happened to moderators that they can handle the 'theories' that hasn't happened to regular forum members? Whatever that is, can't this be handed out to new members before they are allowed to vote?
Time and effort. The two things that cannot be handed out.
Re: Voat Is Shutting Down
#288Voat 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…
> 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…
> Meanwhile in the 7% of cases when they actually had a legitimate point to make, they could make it
Reddit bans posts and accounts, but cannot ban individuals. If you have something useful to say you can make a non troll account for it.
Re: Voat Is Shutting Down
#289This is why it is important to design decentralization and overgrowth resistance as well as community moderation into the platform itself.
Re: Voat Is Shutting Down
#290JFC 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.
I think trying to win those people may be a better strategy in the long term. People feeling left out are angry, and if the train stops and they ride together, they wouldn't be so anti-social. Again, "I think" (Which is more of a hope, admittedly).