8 ms·

BitChute is a YouTube replacement made for people who are "Very Worried About YouTube's Censorship". It uses WebTorrent for distribution to solve the upfront se

• AnaniasAnanas 8y ago
  > a far-right reddit clone I was under the impression that voat was created due to censorship that reddit applied on all kinds of things, including anime porn for example. Not exclusively for far-right content. I certainly do not doubt that most of bitchute's or voat's users are far-right however. It only makes sense that the groups that are censored from other platforms move to censorship-free* alternatives. That being said it would be great to see other creators who have suffered by youtube's content-id system move to decentralized and censorship-resistant alternatives. * I do doubt that it is fully censorship free still. Chances are that they are willing to take down copyrighted content from their site for example, even if they can't affect the webtorrent distirbution.
  • phire 8y ago
    Reddit only banned anime porn that depicted characters under the age of 18. Regular anime porn is very much still there. There was a lot of scaremongering around the time that voat was launched, the "under 18" part was often left off when people were using that ban in an argument.
    • AnaniasAnanas 8y ago
      Actually it banned anime porn that depicts characters that look under the age of 18, that excludes characters like Oshino Shinobu and most Touhou characters for example. Only a very small minority of anime porn portraits characters that are and look over 18. Saying that Reddit banned anime porn is as correct as saying that a byte is 8 bits: while wrong in theory it is basically true for the vast majority of the CPUs.
    • claudiawerner 8y ago
      Let us argue the point including the "under 18" part, then. If it was legally an issue I can understand the ban. Otherwise I see little justification in the decision.
  • IAmEveryone 8y ago
    Well, your impression was wrong. Goat was created by racists and sexists to be racist and sexist and anti-semitic. If they fooled you with a veneer of grandios cries of all-caps censorship than you are easily fooled, or willfully ignorant.
  • rsynnott 8y ago
    There were three major exoduses of reddit people to voat and similar sites, years apart. The first was when reddit cracked down on paedophilia, the second when it nuked fatpeoplehate and associated subreddits, the third when it banned and/or hid some of the more egregiously Nazi-oriented subreddits. The third was probably the largest and most influential, but yeah, there’s other horrible stuff on there. Of course, all of this makes for a charming community.
• beginningguava 8y ago
  Regardless of what it is now you should be happy it exists, look at present day Turkey and 1960s Iran to see how fast freedoms can be stripped by changes in government. Tomorrow it could be leftists being censored. The Communist Control Act is still around in the US, just hasn't been enforced. There's effectively nothing to stop Trump from calling his enemies communists and throwing them in jail and with his stacked Supreme Court who knows if they would rule it unconstitutional? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Control_Act_of_1954 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Control_Act_of_1954
  • IAmEveryone 8y ago
    How exactly are goat and whatever bitchute is saving us from Trump turning totalitarian? As opposed to, you know, the New York Times or even the Supreme Court.
  • notahacker 8y ago
    First they came for the Gab, and... I was actually pretty pleased because I didn't think the sort of web host that would stand behind forums run by the sort of people that gloated about how many hits their association with a synagogue shooting brought them were actually potential allies in fighting fascism... Bitchute isn't the home of people posting Trump critiques. It's the home of people explaining why all criticisms of Trump must be dismissed as conspiracies initiated by the real enemy: Jewish New World Order reptilians https://www.bitchute.com/hashtag/trump/ https://www.bitchute.com/hashtag/trump/
    • a1369209993 8y ago
      The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that there's a inexaustable supply of blatantly evil assholes for oppressive laws to be first aimed at and establish precedent against; by the time they come for you, everyone is too desensitised to care.
    • 8nd9rfi 8y ago
      It's ironic that you are alluding to the quote by pastor Martin Niemöller that was making a point completely opposite to yours. Free speech is not about protecting popular opinions. I cannot believe how many comments hostile to free speech are on this thread. It's almost like people are begging for oppression.
• jim-jim-jim 8y ago
  That's the weird thing about free speech. Any community explicitly built upon it tends to exclusively attract those in _immediate_ need of it: conspiracy theorists and racists for the most part. There's still a (naive?) liberal side to me that thinks free expression, even of profoundly stupid ideas, might be a net good for society, but I don't want to be a part of a community that is innundated with nasty weirdos who were kicked off of every other platform, so "free speech" is almost a red flag to me at this point. That's kinda sad.
  • jarfil 8y ago
    That's why you want to participate under a different pseudonym. If you're OK with participating at all, that is.
    • jim-jim-jim 8y ago
      I don't want to participate at all. What I'm saying is that I'm pro free speech and decentralization, but if all the content is just racist shit, then what draw does the community have for me in the first place? Assuming the motivations behind them are genuine (a big assumption), then there's nothing inherently wrong with BitChute, Voat, Gab, etc. But the actual content on these platforms is the polar opposite of the "diversity of thought" they claim to promote. That may not necessarily even be the site owners' faults (again: a very generous assumption), but a set of circumstances that arises from who actually takes advantage of "free speech" in practice. I don't have any good answer for how to address that contradiction.
      • jstanley 8y ago
        I don't see why the "contradiction" needs to be addressed. If you want to publish non-racist videos, you can publish them on BitChute without endorsing the racist videos.
        • jim-jim-jim 8y ago
          I don't publish videos. I watch them. I'm not gonna bother flipping through 90% nonsense on the off chance there's something interesting available. There's nothing technical that prevents sane people from uploading videos on BitChute, but there's not as strong as an incentive for them to do so. The platforms are fundamentally good ideas. There just needs to be a way to bootstrap a diverse community before they're killed in the cradle by angry nerds. To observe the ideological flipside of this conundrum, I invite you to browse many Mastodon instances, where discourse is driven by the most unbearable carelords imaginable.
• ballenf 8y ago
  Sounds like the early days of YouTube, Reddit and others. Fringe groups are always the first to seize on new platforms where they can get in front of new eyeballs and aren’t yet drowned out by quality or truthful content. I don’t think it’s fair to compare the content on a startup platform to a well-established corporate behemoth. That being said I checked out bitchute for videos on fringe chemistry demonstrations that wouldn’t survive on YouTube. Some pretty cool stuff in that category. But still haven’t been back there because the production values of most are just terrible and painful to watch.
  • mikeash 8y ago
    Sounds like YouTube right now if my recommendations are to be believed. I don’t know why YouTube thinks I want to watch nutcase conspiracy theorists and alt-right whackjobs and compilations of “SJWs getting owned” but it seems to have plenty of them to show me.
  • raverbashing 8y ago
    I'd argue that "early adopters" are not the same as fringe groups. There's an important distinction. As an extreme example, it would be the same as saying 4chan and voat attracted the same type of users in the beginning (as much as 4chan involves some fringe groups) Corollary: a known, named extremism will have an opposite extremism that can be as bad as the thing it purports to oppose, though it will operate in an orthogonal way and it might not be always have a specific name.
  • notafraudster 8y ago
    I won't evaluate whether or not your claim is true, but I waited 6 years to join reddit (and when I did, I immediately blocked and unsubscribed from all the main subreddits) and never made an account on YouTube. So I feel like I should be able to criticize platforms until they reach a stage that I want to use them, right? One presumes that people are not in any way obligated to use garbage platforms they don't like to consume content they don't want in service of some higher commitment to a platform that does not exist but might emerge later under ideal circumstances. Rather it is typically the platform operator's job to manage the platform in a way that attracts content of interest, right? And surely interesting content emerging is not a given. Voat is 4 years old (older than reddit and YouTube were when I started using them, at a point where most of their content was not fringe stuff). The front page is: Far-right politics, libertarian politics, some weird political thing about the french, a guy complaining about YouTube censorship, MAGA memes, MAGA memes, a picture of a cute cat cuddling with Nazis, an attempt to bandwagon someone who wrote a code of conduct, a meme about how George HW Bush is in hell because he doesn't support Trump, PewDiePie, Linux is over because of code of conduct, a meme about how there are only two genders, a meme about how liberals don't believe in fumigating ant hills because they're weak, a video about how George HW Bush is a piece of shit because he likes Israel, a post rhetorically asking why anyone is sad about George HW Bush dying, a Washington Times article about "illegal immigrants", a conservative article alleging Hollywood are all pedophiles, a nazi webcomic, an article about how Democrats stole all the California house seats, a post about how it would be good if someone lynched Emmanuel Macron and how that would be enjoyable, and a meme about how right-wingers should ironically wear burqas to own liberals while they are beating liberals up, a meme of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez saying she's a stupid idiot (this is a "parody" -- not actually clear what it's a parody of, but whatever). There are a couple I didn't copy-paste here because the titles have racial slurs in them and I couldn't figure out a way to summarize the content without repeating them. So I hope you'll provisionally yield that Voat has not yet grown beyond what you call the "startup platform" phase. I guess it's possible that Voat is just about to turn the corner, but if I had to guess...
• Upper_Onion 8y ago
  Many right-wing Youtube personalities are civic nationalists, identitarians and (actual) classic libertarians or regular conservatives who are repeatedly de-monetized and have strikes put on their channels. https://i.imgur.com/29qnxka.jpg https://i.imgur.com/29qnxka.jpg If you actually hear what they have to say you'll realize all they are doing is criticizing the status quo, disagreeing with leftist positions and covering racial statistics that the mainstream media wont do. It's a stretch and really extreme to call anyone a Nazi which doesn't even make sense cause it just means someone who is a German supremacist and national socialist. Easy to brush off things you disagree with as conspiracy theories but it's not intelligent.
• CM30 8y ago
  It's the same issue any service or platform dedicated to freedom of speech has. The people you find there are the types who get banned or blocked elsewhere for controversial views outside of the mainstream. But hey, that's true of any right protecting service or platform. The initial adopters will usually be the people who need that protection earliest, which often translates to criminals, extremists and nutcases. See also most privacy focused tools and platforms (like Tor) which attract the exact same audiences. It's one reason marketing a service or platform based on privacy or free speech is usually doomed to fail. But it's not an unsurmountable obstacle. These services just need to attract average Joes with mundane topics as early as possible, and build up communities about non political, non controversial topics as their main priority. That way, while the nutcases will still join en masse, you'll attract enough 'normal' people that people's perceptions will be of you as a neutral provider rather than crazy fringe community.
  • spookthesunset 8y ago
    > These services just need to attract average Joes with mundane topics as early as possible, and build up communities about non political, non controversial topics as their main priority. That isn't possible unless you filter out the bullies and nutcases. If you don't filter out those folks, the place will eventually get taken over by them. The irony is, if you filter them out those very same people will cry about "censorship" and "FREE SPEECH". You can't have Truly True Free Speech on the internet. It is too cheap for a few folks to spoil things for everybody else. In order to keep a good level of discourse, some people, some times, just have to get lose their right to access certain platforms. I mean, what is spam filtering besides "censorship"? Everybody filters spam... Thriving communities with good, open content have to filter out bullies and troublemakers the same way.
• blancheneige 8y ago
  >conspiracy theories about the Mueller investigation Surely you meant the actual conspiracy theory Mueller is investigating?
• csense 8y ago
  If you build a new society where there will be no witch-hunts, you will attract a disproportionately high number of witches.