To be an open platform for free speech, no censorship.
Wouldn't it have ended up in the exact same state it is now? Any service that guarantees no censorship is going to have the majority of its userbase be the runoff from other major websites. When voat was created, I 100% believed that they were not attempting to create extremist havens, but their userbase was all the people expelled from reddit for targeted harassment campaigns.
I hate this dynamic. We need a way to break this cycle, because right now it's actively killing competitors to existing social networks.
I agree with your point - it is hard to tell the difference generally, and it is an important point to remember, but the behaviour of the company itself shows that it is not an issue this time.
And it's a bit comical, because Gab as a community experience is much smaller (in my perspective) from even weird sites like minds or funky social blockchain plays. Why they felt the need to ban discusions of marxism or a general strike is beyond me.
I think the first time I ever heard about it was when Firefox banned Dissenter from their addons. Dissenter to me was a genius idea that has an ugly userbase. I'd love to have a version of Dissenter that isn't populated entirely by bigots.
I think the idea of Dissenter really has some value, you walk along the web for all sorts of reasons, and then up in the corner in your toolbar you see "oh, someone from my community has said something about this". Rather than the social network taking you to a site, the site takes you to the network.
Because it was built to be a fascist recruitment channel, and the talk of 'free speech' is just a smoke screen that they don't care about at all.
The hilarious part being that by having the censorship in the first place and not just letting folks work it out amongst themselves, you just increase the echo chamber factor, which at some point, you have to come to terms with in real life on the basis these people exist in the real world. The very act of technically enforced societal marginalization in and of itself is an "extremism" amplifier/polarization catalyst. What confuses me is why I feel like I'm the only one who regularly brings it up. It's not that hard of a realization to reach From first principles. Especially if you spent any time in your life as a social misfit.
Exactly, which is why you are wrong here:
"When voat was created, I 100% believed that they were not attempting to create extremist havens"
It is not as if the major websites are quick to censor their users. If anything they are too cautious and have only banned terrorists after widespread pressure and threats of advertiser boycotts. If you set up a platform that is open to the few people who were so extreme that even Reddit or Twitter banned them, then you are creating an extremist haven, no matter what language you use to describe your intentions.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
This is nowhere close to what reddit/twitter have been doing however.
> then you are creating an extremist haven
...of people interested in anime porn after reddit banned them.
If you want to know how a healthy alternative would have turned out, go looking for one. It almost certainly exists, there have been at least a dozen twitter competitors in the past and I know a few people who tried them out. (I can't remember their names, though.)
You could avoid being large — small, high-trust groups work perfectly fine without censorship.
You could add more moderation (aka censorship), both platform-wide and within communities. Reddit seems to be heading in that direction.
You could avoid being a platform. Some sites are inherently platforms, but does every site need comments?
Or you could genetically engineer humanity into a kinder, better species. This would also be the way to make anarcho-communism work — the economic system with the greatest freedoms, but also the most susceptible to bad actors. The Culture series shows you a glimpse of what this future could be.
Unfortunately this kind of rhetoric is frequently coded language meaning "Hey Nazis, we won't kick you off of our platform for threatening to shoot up a synagogue". I think people should still legally be able to create unmoderated platforms, but the majority of people won't participate in them because they quickly become cesspools of hatred and harassment. Gab is the newer, shinier tech startup version of this, but it's existed before in the forms of 4chan, 8chan, and probably other platforms that I'm not familiar with.
Maybe that's a sign you should pause. Sometimes it is okay to admit you don't know about a subject. It is okay to sit and listen instead of voicing an opinion.
I never know how to handle topic shifts in the conversation trees in Reddit, Hacker News, and others.
Do you speak only to the comment you're responding to? Do you speak as if that comment is in the context of the submission? Do you keep the context as on topic as possible? Do you indicate which one of the three you're doing when you start your comment off? I feel like this is an internet rule I have not sussed out on my own. And I can see its caused some trouble for others. Sorry.
Can you elaborate on this?
Just decide for yourself. Literally the first post I get at the moment comes from "QAnon and the Great Awakening" and is in support of that right-wing vigilante shooter in Kenosha, calling the district attorney who's prosecuting him "evil".
The next few posts I see mention either "arresting the dems", some anti-vax stuff and so many crypto-fascist dogwhistles that I'm getting tinnitus.
If you need more proof I'll let you ding into this.
"Google is censoring apps"
"It's because those apps can access hate speech"
"You can use this other app store"
"They ban this app, though"
"But that's because it's for hate speech"
Come on, this is peak comedy.
Gab was also banned explicitly by URL by any app makers and in many ActivityPub libraries (you can find checks where it hashes the URL and compares it to known Gab URLs).
> a purpose-built platform for conspiracies and hate speech
We're in a bizarre world right now where you can label any opinion you don't agree with as hate speech, dehumanize police and call every conservative a literal Nazi and that's all okay now for some reason.
At some point we have to remember that historically, a lot of people who thought they were right, about slavery, homosexuality, war, abortion, polygamy, and other controversial topics, eventually came down on the wrong side of history.
The attack on speech and ideas has never been more profound. If you don't like an idea, you don't have to listen, but people are going to continue to go to fringes whenever their voices are silences. That will create more extreme platforms and more extremism, not less.
And the history is plastered with censorship the world was never more free than it is now you are just repeating non facts without even doing a hint of research.
Fdroid banned this particuliar app (and maybe others, that's not the point) from their own official repo.
I'm not taking a side either way but am curious.
That's just false.
