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Voat Is Shutting Down

voat.co

461–470 of 671 posts

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#461

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 anyo…

> you being encouraged to use your real name? Again, the question of whether anonymity emboldens trolls is not the force of that article, it isn't about their behavior, it is about yours.

> "But merely 'branding anonymity as bad' isn't going to stop the cyberbullying misogynists." You are correct, which is why the spokesperson for this crisis is Amanda Hess. No one is trying to stop cyberbullies, there's no point, they don't shop and no one wants to look at them. Hess has entirely misunderstood what the medium wants. The whole game is to get women-- not the cyberbullies, not criminals, but the consumers-- to voluntarily give up all of their privacy, while paying lip service to privacy at home-- knowing full well women that women will pay money not to have the kind of privacy they have at home. Voluntarily exposing yourself makes you a targetable consumer and targetable consumable. Is it worth it?

https://web.archive.org/web/20200420063821/https://thelastps...

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So the answer has to be to stop the witch hunts in the places where everybody else already is. Got to be honest, bro, I don't really care to sacrifice for "the good of society" or whatever. If you make a website where some dude is going to post anti-Semitic shit everywhere and someone else is going to have to politely explain that Jewish lizard people are not conspiring to elect a Black woman as President then sure…

Yes, but there is some middle ground between antisemitism and following what mainstream loves the a given point of time. And right now if someone dares to stick outside mainstream views this is considered hate speech, anti-XXX, etc. Can we discuss if overweight people should pay more for sits in a plane? Can we discuss if a trans male who identifies herself to be a woman should be allowed to take part in female sport…

I love how, in a screed about "censorship killing good faith arguments", you make 2 incendiary claims with no sources to back them up. You're doing the thing, you're the bad faith actor.

Here, have an actual source regarding women competing in women's sports. Minus transphobic dog whistling. [0][1][2]

Repetition legitimizes and it's way less effort to "have discussions" then actually do the work in debunking them. What is this mainstream you're so worried about defying? Is it the currently accepted academic consensus? Then publish your counter claims, why are all your ideas being wasted on internet debates. If it's just laypeople, then where are your sources to back up your ideas that people can engage with in good faith?

[0]“there is no direct or consistent research suggesting transgender female individuals (or male individuals) have an athletic advantage at any stage of their transition (e.g. cross-sex hormones, gender-confirming surgery)

and, therefore competitive sport policies that place restrictions on transgender people need to be considered and potentially revised.” https://sci- hub.tw/10.1007/s40279-016-0621-y

[1]“[t]he available, albeit incomplete, evidence makes it highly likely that the sex difference in circulating testosterone of adults explains most, if not all, the sex differences in sporting performance.” https://sci-hub.tw/10.1210/er.2018-00020

[2]“[a]ny athletic advantages a transgender girl or woman arguably may have as a result of her prior testosterone levels dissipate after about one year of estrogen therapy.” https://www.ncaa.org/sites/default/files/NCLR_TransStudentAt...

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The examples @piokoch made are very good. Seats in planes were designed for average people. It means that myself, as an average person, have the right to be relatively comfortable in that chair. If an obese person sits next to me, I have nothing against them on a human level - but the fact that they use my space. They are not comfortable either (certainly physically and probably psychologically) so if we accept obese…

Your last sentence contains the kernel of a reality that much of the internet would rather we don’t notice: that we don’t have to care about most of the stupid shit we see on our screens every day. We don’t need to engage in flame wars or virtue signaling or any of these asinine debates. People got along with their lives just fine for thousands of years without feeling compelled to debate a stranger from hundreds of…

“People got along with their lives just fine for thousands of years without feeling compelled to debate a stranger from hundreds of miles away for 10 minutes about theoreticals that scarcely affect their daily lives.”

That’s debatable (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missionary). They even went out and tried to kill strangers hundreds of miles away (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_war)

Many of those were in times when it took a serious commitment to even travel that far, let alone to wage war. It probably helped that staying put didn’t guarantee a quiet life, either.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but there is some middle ground between antisemitism and following what mainstream loves the a given point of time. And right now if someone dares to stick outside mainstream views this is considered hate speech, anti-XXX, etc. Can we discuss if overweight people should pay more for sits in a plane? Can we discuss if a trans male who identifies herself to be a woman should be allowed to take part in female sport…

These comments always reek of hipocrasy. Try having a debate on the existence of God, the legitimacy of the church or even the right of gay people to exist somewhere in rural US, you often get threatened with violence (and I mean the actual physical kind) very quickly. But somehow it's the poor antisemists, or homophobes who complain about being "censored" in these discussions. Two examples of the hipocrasy: John Saf…

The idea that getting told to fuck off by random people is remotely comparable to getting banned from twitter or reddit is a great example of the desperation to point to some hypocrisy to distract from one's own lack of principles.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#465
post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying without free speech it wouldn't have happened?

[flagged]

>You can either: believe people are inherently evil and will support genocide at the first opportunity; or people can be influenced by pointed words from a group intent on manipulating them.

It is also possible this was a prevailing thought, or that the environment was encouraging of such thoughts, in that nation at that time; that something caused division, and that the nazi used this as a way to assert power and spearhead their ideology.

To think people can just tell you to participate in a genocide and everyone will follow is not recognizing the agency of human beings. The WW2 was a dramatic period that had a lot of factors, but having restrictions on free speech is unlikely to be one that would or even did matter much.

Edit: plus, the restrictions on free speech are executed and decided by the oligarchy, and when the nazism was its most vicious it had little reason to restrict that kind of speech. The idea that free speech restriction help in preventing propaganda is wrong; it prevents only some subset of propaganda which does not further the elite, which imo is worse than not restricting it at all. And even then, free speech restrictions cannot stop the spread of ideas and prejudice, whatever they are.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#466
post #282
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Whether you accept a small inconvenience to save other people's lives is pretty political, yeah.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#467
post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trans folks in the LGBT movement were an inextricable part of the movement since day 1. Partly because distinctions at the time between gay men who did drag and trans women did not exist, but also partly because the overarching theme of the movement (and the hate it received) has been the sense of 'disgust' by mainstream society of its subversion of heteronormative values. Many trans men and women lead the movement v…

Okay well I’m a gay man and I like men with penises. Only recently does that make me a bigot. I think a vocal minority of the trans “movement” is really doing a lot of damage to themselves by trying to coerce sexual consent on a cultural level. Maybe people should be more comfortable with living and letting live. To me that is how I remember the LGBT movement pre-Twitter days.

It doesn’t make you a bigot. “You must be willing to sleep with people with any kind of genitals” is not a widespread belief system among transgender people and activists.

But referring to transgender people as “frankensteins monster” is bigoted.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#468
post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don't get more conservative as they get older, they get more conservative when they have more to lose . It just so happens that as people get older they tend to get houses, families, long-term careers, etc, which tilts them towards preserving the status quo in amber so as not to threaten what they have. And if, hypothetically, a generation were to grow up and find themselves unable to afford a home of their ow…

People get more conservative as they get older because they realize things cost money, how hard they have to work to earn it, and how bad the government is at spending it for them. I'd say modern day conservativism is more akin to individualism - don't let others spend money for you because you spend your money more wisely, and if you don't it's your fault. I think you'll find most young people don't even make the co…

This is not only incredibly patronizing, but also just false.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#469
post #444
post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you search /r/unpopularopinion or /r/changemyview you’ll find plenty of examples of such topics being discussed.

I challenge you to do it. You'll instantly be shadowbanned by bots from multiple subreddits, people will actively seek out your posts and point out you're an extremist on unrelated topics (again, triggered by bots pointing you out), and people will use your post history against you in arguments unrelated to whatever you said in those posts.

What challenge? The question of transgender people in sports comes up like three times per week at the top of change my view.

Re: Voat Is Shutting Down

#470

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…

> So the answer has to be to stop the witch hunts in the places where everybody else already is. Got to be honest, bro, I don't really care to sacrifice for "the good of society" or whatever. If you make a website where some dude is going to post anti-Semitic shit everywhere and someone else is going to have to politely explain that Jewish lizard people are not conspiring to elect a Black woman as President then sure…

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