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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 /p

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 and the front page was filled with anti-Semitic and white nationalist propaganda, and racial slurs were everywhere. Even non-political subverses had an alt-right tinge. It was truly the culture that dominated the site.

Thorentis 6y ago
As opposed to Reddit where every subreddit aside from those dedicated to alt-right topics has a left-leaning tinge. Every platform has biases. It's just that Reddit chose to ban a specific group, so it's logical that group alone would dominate alternatives.
- santoshalper 6y ago
  Society has a left-leaning tinge. Especially society in the age range that reddit caters to. There's no grand conspiracy. Right politics are wildly unpopular with young to middle-age people.
  - AntiImperialis2 6y ago
    That's true. Younger people seem to lean left. As they grow older, a lot of them start to lean conservative. My hypothesis is that when they are young and underdeveloped, they have incomplete understanding of the world, are prone to believing in unrealistic utopian ideas, and hence are easy to manipulate. No wonder, the leftists want the voting age to be lowered even further. As they grow older and wiser, they see it for what it is. The younger conservatives are explained by the fact that some kids who grow up in conservative households don't fall for the same manipulation and older liberals are explained by the fact that some people are more reluctant to change, mostly because they weave their personalities around their identities in early adulthood. Some is of course explained by influence of peers (i.e. people adopt a political view to fit in) and hence location... but I think this covers it all. I know I will get downvoted for this which is fine but I'd like to know your hypothesis for the same population leaning conservative as they age is... if it's not too much trouble.
    - strenholme 6y ago
      [Citation needed] Please compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_United_States_presidential_election#Voter_demographics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_United_States_presidentia... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_United_States_presidential_election#Voter_demographics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_United_States_presidentia... Observe: The 1984 youth voted conservative. The 2004 youth voted liberal. And, oh, the 2020 youth voted even more liberal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election#Voter_demographics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidentia...
  - mech422 6y ago
    I can't respond to AntiImperialis2 directly anymore, so I'll leave this here... I don't think that because Boomers and (a lot of ?)GenX tended to grow more conservative as they got older proves it's 'the natural order'.. Millennials are approaching 40 now and the liberal ones I know are still very liberal.. I'd argue that Truman getting elected in 1948 meant that there were a lot 'progressive' older folks back then. Especially since there was a more conservative "Dixiecrat" on the ballot as well. So growing old and becoming conservative may not necessarily go hand in hand...
    - aaron-santos 6y ago
      Telling someone they will more conservative as they get older is a great in innoculation against that event occurring.
      - mech422 6y ago
        Perhaps... I've also read it cyclic, with the pendulum swinging from very conservative to very liberal every couple of generations ?
      - kibwen 6y ago
        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 own, unable to afford a family, and unable to land a career, they will find themselves with very little to lose and very little incentive to preserve the status quo, regardless of their age.
        berryjerry 6y ago
        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 correlation that everything governments spend costs money and that money comes from their own pockets. They usually consider the government to have infinite money and have barely stopped being taken care of by their parents or still are. You even see cities like Detroit going bankrupt because, no, governments don't have infinite money. You do have to pick and choose what to spend it on and you can't get everything that just sounds nice.
  - noema 6y ago
    (Responding to now defunct comment claiming that conservatism is correlated to age because of life experience blah blah) Age here is a proxy for wealth, of course.
- herbstein 6y ago
  I'm not entirely sure I understand this point. Even if I were to concede the point that all of Reddit has a left-leaning (in a US sense of the word) tinge, is that at all comparable to the right-leaning tinge of Voat? Is advocating for e.g. defunding the police, medicare for all, and free college comparable to saying immigrants should be shot on the border, that the holocaust simultaneously didn't happen and wasn't effective enough, and that racial minorities should be hanged? Even if you vehemently disagree with the three examples of left-leaning policies I used as an example, and any other examples I could've used, surely you can recognize that they are fundamentally different to the stuff that permeated every crevice of Voat? Saying Reddit and Voat both have a tinge completely ignores any context and nuance. EDIT: There's an example I'd like to bring. It's from a thread on the frontpage called "Voat, I could use a little life advice". It's from a person that is having trouble paying their bills, and can't do much doordash driving because they refuse to wear a mask. The most upvoted response is this: > "Was a really good programmer for years". Good, not many people are and it's a skill that's good for decades. n* * * * * * can't fake coding skills like they do everything else Another upvoted response from the thread says this: > Why don’t we create funds for fellow nationalists like the n* * * * * * and the ki* * *? Somewhere to pool resources to lift white brothers in need. Mind you, this is from the front page of both the AskReddit-equivalent and the global front page. And this is on a question that wasn't about anyone but the original poster and their money trouble.
  - ALittleLight 6y ago
    I think it's very problematic to conflate "right wing" with "racist". There's nothing inherently right or left wing about being racist, and I suspect you'd find many racists who support government healthcare and strong social safety nets.
- DrAwdeOccarim 6y ago
  Eh, reddit is a big place. The subreddits I subscribe to have zero politics; I never found that on voat...
  - cbozeman 6y ago
    There's a lot of subreddits that should be zero politics, where people are being banned because they're members of other subreddits, or they aren't even members, but posted in those other subreddits. You can find about a post a week in /r/WatchRedditDie of someone who posted an anti-Trump response to another person in a Donald Trump-friendly subreddit and they end up banned from other subreddits like /r/OffMyChest... for the crime of disagreeing with a Trump supporter, in a Trump subreddit. The very act of even associating, even in an antagonistic way, with a Trump supporter is ban worthy? Every moderator whose ever done that should be immediately stripped of all power and banned at the IP level. If Reddit admins weren't absolute cowards now, they would do it, but the site is sufficiently corporatized now.
- honkycat 6y ago
  I don't see this. There is right-wing content hitting front-page reddit constantly, and a lot of the most popular sub-reddits like "change my view" are just soap-boxes for right-wing talking points.
  - gruez 6y ago
    >I don't see this. There is right-wing content hitting front-page reddit constantly front page as in "/r/all", or your front page? At least on /r/all there isn't much "right wing content", aside from some posts from /r/greentext and /r/PoliticalCompassMemes.
    - honkycat 6y ago
      I don't have an account. Your claims of a left-wing bias on reddit are also anecdotal.
      - gruez 6y ago
        >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.
        creato 6y ago
        > 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.
        joepie91_ 6y ago
        Whether you accept a small inconvenience to save other people's lives is pretty political, yeah.
        gruez 6y ago
        >That's a pretty funny way to say "all but one or two posts out of 25 are not related to politics at all". That's not wrong, but it also has nothing to do with my previous comments, which were only talking political lean, not the presence/absence of politics.
- devwastaken 6y ago
  Reddit banned demonstrably fabricated extremist content. It just so happens the political party most associated with it continued to eat it up. /r/conservative is a gated community only for people they agree with. Reddit perfectly allows them to exist in their own created hypocritical bubble, along with lots of other subreddits.
superkuh 6y ago
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 tilda, ~, like at the start of every college account website URL everywhere. And it wasn't just tilda, it was a whole set of characters. And the devs, never, ever fixed it despite months then years of occasional notifications.
- santoshalper 6y ago
  I really don't think the problem with Voat was tech debt. I think it was humanity debt.
- herbstein 6y ago
  > But yeah, for every polite person in some isolated corner there were 50 screaming about politics on the front page. The problem with Voat wasn't that some people were "talking politics" on the front page. The problem was that the vast majority where anti-semites, racists, and otherwise horrible. That's beyond "talking politics" in any decent sense of the phrase.
  - Threeve303 6y ago
    When the hardcore believers from /r/The_Donald moved to Voat, I was happy that it was still possible for anyone to read what they were saying. Similar to a honeypot or sting operation, we are probably worse off when they scatter back to the shadows.
    - faitswulff 6y ago
      I’m fairly sure both honeypots and sting operations were carried out on voat.
    - efwfwef 6y ago
      All in all, these people think as hard as us that they are right, that they are the better people, that they have the better ideologies. I just can't fathom it. I'm convinced at this point that the only way to think about it is to understand that the IQ average of that group must be pretty low.
Causality1 6y ago
That's sort of the question isn't it. Is it that there are so few of these neutral grounds that they collect the people unwelcome anywhere else, or that those ideas out-compete everything else unless there's a finger on the scale? Personally I think it's a hybrid. Extremism and outrage are memetically advantaged in all circumstances but the specific atmosphere is what chooses the flavor prevalent in a particular community. Voat was formed by far-right elements and so that became the culture.
AnthonyMouse 6y ago
> 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 where the same people could see it. Meanwhile in the 7% of cases when they actually had a legitimate point to make, they could make it, and the people who benefited from hearing it would actually hear it instead of continuing to be unawares and consequently continuing to be wrong about something. But it doesn't work to have one popular platform which allows nearly everyone except for Those Deplorables and another that allows "everyone" but the only people with the incentive to move are the people being forcibly ejected from the popular one. Because witch hunts are bad, but if there is a place that owes its existence solely to a policy of not having witch hunts, it's going to be full of witches. So the answer has to be to stop the witch hunts in the places where everybody else already is.
- koheripbal 6y ago
  I think part of the issue is that the average age of Reddit users plummeted. It was in the high 20s, but I've seen some research that puts it in the high teens these days / early 20s. That has a huge impact on the quality of conversations.
  - 1_player 6y ago
    And politics have infected every single discussion. Nowadays it's cool to be partisans, decades ago a teenager talking about politics would be dismissed with a "get a hobby, nerd." It is an absolute disgrace how it's become normal. Or that mine is an unpopular opinion nowadays.
    - 0xy 6y ago
      Reddit stopped caring about political manipulation by organised bots and paid shills since before the 2016 election. In fact, PACs openly admitted to the practices during the election. Reddit absolutely doesn't care, they'd rather bombard you with ads and tracking garbage and pretend they're a viable platform through half-assed initiatives.
odessacubbage 6y ago
paradox of tolerance is just a meme and not even a very good one. 8chan, which was usually coded in the media as the most extreme platform managed to be host to both /pol/, /leftypol/, a myriad of queer & lgbt boards and /christian/ as well as boards for other religious denominations and multiple competing sects of gamergate and, of course the q boomers. at one point of polling, /v/ was something like 60% lgbt. on zeronet and the webring you see a similar plurality of views and usecases. there have been hundreds if not thousands of imageboard clones over the years with even less moderation than voat if for no other reason than incompetence. fatchan and chen2 were hardly festering havens of white nationalism. there is far more that leads to a website's culture than speech policies and administrator doctrine, the outright user revolts of SomethingAwful and Neogaf stand as a testament to this. this whole idea that free speech is a one way road to the fourth reich simply does not hold when weighed against the facts, especially considering that the 'sensible' platforms like facebook have been used as the rallying grounds for actual genocide and the livestreaming of murders & kidnappings.
- ignoranceprior 6y ago
  Yeah, it also annoys me when people assume that all of 4chan and 8chan is /pol/. 4chan has plenty of blue boards like /sci/, /g/, and /tg/ that are relatively decent if you can tolerate shitposting, trolling, and bants. When people write racist stuff, a common response is that they should go back to their "containment board". 8chan used to let users create their own boards, and there were plenty of inoffensive ones. On the other hand, I do think 8chan's /pol/ was just so terrible that it made 8chan overall a definite net-negative for humanity. Even the site's original founder has disavowed it at this point. I also agree with you that mainstream sites like Facebook have their own problems. But still, whenever I see free speech platforms, they tend to attract a majority of far-right users. I think it's because they're the ones who most often get banned from mainstream platforms and need to find alternatives.
zamalek 6y ago
> It was truly the culture that dominated the site. Voat is proof that we are not yet deserving of free speech. I find beauty in the principle of FoS: we would never have e.g. legalized same-sex marriages without it - and this is why we need it for future ethical advancements, possibly (as one hypothetical example), the right to die/destiny. Advancement of the moral zeitgeist is impossible without it. The utter impossibility of it in practice is unavoidable. There are few more willing to violate the rights of others than those who demand the right to speech.
- weare138 6y ago
  >Voat is proof that we are not yet deserving of free speech It's not the we the people are not deserving of free speech, it's the idea the right to 'free speech' supersedes other rights and should go unchecked at the expense of others that undermines the concept for so many. Besides, it wasn't free speech or lack thereof that's causing Voat to fold. Apparently no one wanted to pay to hear what they had to say. Everyone has a right to free speech but everyone else has an equal right not to listen to it if they don't want to.
  - totony 6y ago
    >'free speech' supersedes other rights and should go unchecked at the expense of others Curious about this, what right does anti-Semite/racism rhetoric removes from others? How can words affect your rights as a person?
    - glouwbug 6y ago
      > How can words affect your rights as a person? Remember the holocaust
      - totony 6y ago
        >Remember the holocaust I'd posit the words weren't the things affecting people, but whatever actions they took
chrononaut 6y ago
This is something that's quite fascinating to me. The unfettered access to social platforms with few limitations on speech and content today, and available to such a large audience, would be unimaginable 70 years ago. Society and individuals are evermore connected to each other en masse than they ever have been in the past. An individual's discomfort now stems from everyone suddenly being aware of everyone else's opinion and now has to face it and interpret it. It would be next to impossible for someone 70 years ago to be able to collect that information at scale so readily, also making it far easier to ignore. Now all I have to do today is scroll through someone's SOCIAL_NETWORK profile to find out or to experience it. It begs an interesting question to me whether society is more "stable" with this strife of being hyperconnected, or less stable. The past was filled with far more silos of in-person clubs representing political ideals, making it hard for the common person to recognize their existence, at least to the extent of hearing about its minute details and ideals. There was also a great filter of the powerful individuals controlling the means of communication to limit the content that reached every single person. Despite the real acts or false claims of suppression, it is interesting that there was never a previous time in the past where each individual was more empowered to be heard than today.
cbozeman 6y ago
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 anyone to take responsibility for what they say, so they say anything they want. Combine with this an entire zeitgeist of people who feel disconnected and alone, and its a recipe for attention-seeking behavior. And on the converse, sometimes its taken too far, with people losing their jobs for things that clearly meant in jest (Justine Sacco) or for clumsily worded communication. Call-out culture needs to die. SJW culture needs to die. One-up culture needs to die. We have to start giving people the benefit of the doubt.
- howlgarnish 6y ago
  "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." -Cardinal Richelieu, c. 1600 (attributed to, anyway) Given the political climate we're in and the complete intolerance to anything but the most milquetoast pablum in Silicon Valley these days, it's a brave or foolish person who posts anything online under their real name these days.
  - base698 6y ago
    Seriously, all risk and no reward.
- brayhite 6y ago
  This may have been true at one time, but in the age of Youtube videos and live broadcasts being a popular vehicle for all of the above, I don't think folks care anymore about anonymity. It's a toxic race for attention and engagement to either a.) generate revenue, b.) acquire some taste of "fame", or c.) both. Being anonymous plays a role in some corners of the internet, but the ones that are contributing the most to the cultures you mention above don't depend on anonymity. They're being perpetuated and propped up by very knowable online identities, and I highly doubt the folks doing the propping think they're safely anonymous.
cable2600 6y ago
The alt-right needs to go somewhere to leave the rest of us alone. No matter what they will blame liberals for the loss of Voat and other sites. When you have no censorship it is like the Wild West and the biggest guns rule. Back when I worked as a CO-SYSOP for a College run BBS I had to delete posts that had cuss words in them or were hateful or porno. They had to keep the subboards clean because we had 13 year olds on there downloading info about the college and playing Tradewars, Stock Market, Food Fite, etc. One of the people I censored was Larry Kite, an alt-right troll. Who got mad and claimed he was going to the computer lab to meet the SYSOP and see his boyish face. My supervisor had a beard and met Mr. Kite and explained to him it was not personal we do that to everyone. Especially on networked subs where they have rules against it.
- read_if_gay_ 6y ago
  > The alt-right needs to go somewhere to leave the rest of us alone. Hmm, I wonder why the political divide has grown to become such a huge problem in the US...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
PradeetPatel 6y ago
Sometimes hate speech must be limited in order for a greater freedom of speech to thrive. My heart goes out to the founder of voat, I'm sure his heart was in the right place when he founded the site. But perhaps he did not anticipate it to organically evolve into a haven for alt-right extremism. Perhaps this will serve as a lesson to many future platform providers.
- sonotathrowaway 6y ago
  To be clear, Voat was billed as the free speech alternative to Reddit, when Reddit banned subreddits with names like /r/shitniggerssay and /r/neofags. Nobody was under any pretenses as to the type of person voat was catering to.
janoc 6y ago
Well, the front page has literally "Holocaust didn't happen" plastered on it right now (crime in many EU countries) ... Not really going to miss this one. "Neutral" and "free-speech" have unfortunately become euphemisms for a license to spew hate that wouldn't be allowed elsewhere (i.e "censored").
austhrow743 6y ago
Linked post references red pilling and 4chan, celebrates being hated by people, talks about how great their terrible user base is, and mentions Christian shit multiple times. Gives me the impression that it was always intended to be populated by the types of people that populate it.
kace91 6y ago
For someone who has a bit of context: is this supposed to be real or tongue in cheek? It sounds like mental illness to me but maybe I'm just incredibly out of touch with the reality of the average voat user. > I will lay Voat upon the cross on December 25th 2020 at 12 noon PST. I have chosen Christmas as the day to do so in honor of the only True thing you will find in this world and that is Jesus Christ, the son of God, and the only way to the Father. I chose 12 noon in honor of the twelve disciples who spread the message of salvation to the world.
- dwardu 6y ago
  nothing bad about that. are you just annoyed jesus was mentioned?
  - kace91 6y ago
    I'm not annoyed, I just wonder if it looks somewhat normal in other countries/cultures. It does not feel inappropriate, just completely coming out of nowhere. It's like having a regular interaction like "hey, at what time do we meet up?" "at 10:20, because 2010 is the year justin bieber relased his first big hit and justing bieber is the best artist I have loved in my life, he is the best among all." The way I read it it's out of place to the point where it sounds creepy/makes me wonder about the mental state of the person making that connection.
  - millzlane 6y ago
    As a "born again christian" it came outta left field. I had no idea voat had anything to do with Christ. It's probably why they had the hottest girls there. It was gods gift to them.
vmchale 6y ago
Same with parler. It's now totally dominated by weenieheads.
chanfan 6y ago
>After alt-right extremists were booted off reddit, they found a new home there. The site was bombarded by /pol/ chan culture. Nah reddit users bring reddit culture. They aren't welcome anywhere.
commandlinefan 6y ago
> Voat was founded as a neutral free-speech platform. I was optimistic about Voat as I was about Parler: Reddit/Twitter, but without the left-wing censorship. But I found the same reality you did: the only people who bothered to migrate were complete lunatics.

Thorentis 6y ago

As opposed to Reddit where every subreddit aside from those dedicated to alt-right topics has a left-leaning tinge. Every platform has biases. It's just that Reddit chose to ban a specific group, so it's logical that group alone would dominate alternatives.

santoshalper 6y ago
Society has a left-leaning tinge. Especially society in the age range that reddit caters to. There's no grand conspiracy. Right politics are wildly unpopular with young to middle-age people.
- AntiImperialis2 6y ago
  That's true. Younger people seem to lean left. As they grow older, a lot of them start to lean conservative. My hypothesis is that when they are young and underdeveloped, they have incomplete understanding of the world, are prone to believing in unrealistic utopian ideas, and hence are easy to manipulate. No wonder, the leftists want the voting age to be lowered even further. As they grow older and wiser, they see it for what it is. The younger conservatives are explained by the fact that some kids who grow up in conservative households don't fall for the same manipulation and older liberals are explained by the fact that some people are more reluctant to change, mostly because they weave their personalities around their identities in early adulthood. Some is of course explained by influence of peers (i.e. people adopt a political view to fit in) and hence location... but I think this covers it all. I know I will get downvoted for this which is fine but I'd like to know your hypothesis for the same population leaning conservative as they age is... if it's not too much trouble.
  - strenholme 6y ago
    [Citation needed] Please compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_United_States_presidential_election#Voter_demographics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_United_States_presidentia... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_United_States_presidential_election#Voter_demographics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_United_States_presidentia... Observe: The 1984 youth voted conservative. The 2004 youth voted liberal. And, oh, the 2020 youth voted even more liberal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election#Voter_demographics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidentia...
- mech422 6y ago
  I can't respond to AntiImperialis2 directly anymore, so I'll leave this here... I don't think that because Boomers and (a lot of ?)GenX tended to grow more conservative as they got older proves it's 'the natural order'.. Millennials are approaching 40 now and the liberal ones I know are still very liberal.. I'd argue that Truman getting elected in 1948 meant that there were a lot 'progressive' older folks back then. Especially since there was a more conservative "Dixiecrat" on the ballot as well. So growing old and becoming conservative may not necessarily go hand in hand...
  - aaron-santos 6y ago
    Telling someone they will more conservative as they get older is a great in innoculation against that event occurring.
    - mech422 6y ago
      Perhaps... I've also read it cyclic, with the pendulum swinging from very conservative to very liberal every couple of generations ?
    - kibwen 6y ago
      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 own, unable to afford a family, and unable to land a career, they will find themselves with very little to lose and very little incentive to preserve the status quo, regardless of their age.
      - berryjerry 6y ago
        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 correlation that everything governments spend costs money and that money comes from their own pockets. They usually consider the government to have infinite money and have barely stopped being taken care of by their parents or still are. You even see cities like Detroit going bankrupt because, no, governments don't have infinite money. You do have to pick and choose what to spend it on and you can't get everything that just sounds nice.
- noema 6y ago
  (Responding to now defunct comment claiming that conservatism is correlated to age because of life experience blah blah) Age here is a proxy for wealth, of course.
herbstein 6y ago
I'm not entirely sure I understand this point. Even if I were to concede the point that all of Reddit has a left-leaning (in a US sense of the word) tinge, is that at all comparable to the right-leaning tinge of Voat? Is advocating for e.g. defunding the police, medicare for all, and free college comparable to saying immigrants should be shot on the border, that the holocaust simultaneously didn't happen and wasn't effective enough, and that racial minorities should be hanged? Even if you vehemently disagree with the three examples of left-leaning policies I used as an example, and any other examples I could've used, surely you can recognize that they are fundamentally different to the stuff that permeated every crevice of Voat? Saying Reddit and Voat both have a tinge completely ignores any context and nuance. EDIT: There's an example I'd like to bring. It's from a thread on the frontpage called "Voat, I could use a little life advice". It's from a person that is having trouble paying their bills, and can't do much doordash driving because they refuse to wear a mask. The most upvoted response is this: > "Was a really good programmer for years". Good, not many people are and it's a skill that's good for decades. n* * * * * * can't fake coding skills like they do everything else Another upvoted response from the thread says this: > Why don’t we create funds for fellow nationalists like the n* * * * * * and the ki* * *? Somewhere to pool resources to lift white brothers in need. Mind you, this is from the front page of both the AskReddit-equivalent and the global front page. And this is on a question that wasn't about anyone but the original poster and their money trouble.
- ALittleLight 6y ago
  I think it's very problematic to conflate "right wing" with "racist". There's nothing inherently right or left wing about being racist, and I suspect you'd find many racists who support government healthcare and strong social safety nets.
DrAwdeOccarim 6y ago
Eh, reddit is a big place. The subreddits I subscribe to have zero politics; I never found that on voat...
- cbozeman 6y ago
  There's a lot of subreddits that should be zero politics, where people are being banned because they're members of other subreddits, or they aren't even members, but posted in those other subreddits. You can find about a post a week in /r/WatchRedditDie of someone who posted an anti-Trump response to another person in a Donald Trump-friendly subreddit and they end up banned from other subreddits like /r/OffMyChest... for the crime of disagreeing with a Trump supporter, in a Trump subreddit. The very act of even associating, even in an antagonistic way, with a Trump supporter is ban worthy? Every moderator whose ever done that should be immediately stripped of all power and banned at the IP level. If Reddit admins weren't absolute cowards now, they would do it, but the site is sufficiently corporatized now.
honkycat 6y ago
I don't see this. There is right-wing content hitting front-page reddit constantly, and a lot of the most popular sub-reddits like "change my view" are just soap-boxes for right-wing talking points.
- gruez 6y ago
  >I don't see this. There is right-wing content hitting front-page reddit constantly front page as in "/r/all", or your front page? At least on /r/all there isn't much "right wing content", aside from some posts from /r/greentext and /r/PoliticalCompassMemes.
  - honkycat 6y ago
    I don't have an account. Your claims of a left-wing bias on reddit are also anecdotal.
    - gruez 6y ago
      >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.
      - creato 6y ago
        > 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.
        joepie91_ 6y ago
        Whether you accept a small inconvenience to save other people's lives is pretty political, yeah.
        gruez 6y ago
        >That's a pretty funny way to say "all but one or two posts out of 25 are not related to politics at all". That's not wrong, but it also has nothing to do with my previous comments, which were only talking political lean, not the presence/absence of politics.
devwastaken 6y ago
Reddit banned demonstrably fabricated extremist content. It just so happens the political party most associated with it continued to eat it up. /r/conservative is a gated community only for people they agree with. Reddit perfectly allows them to exist in their own created hypocritical bubble, along with lots of other subreddits.

superkuh 6y ago

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 tilda, ~, like at the start of every college account website URL everywhere. And it wasn't just tilda, it was a whole set of characters. And the devs, never, ever fixed it despite months then years of occasional notifications.

santoshalper 6y ago
I really don't think the problem with Voat was tech debt. I think it was humanity debt.
herbstein 6y ago
> But yeah, for every polite person in some isolated corner there were 50 screaming about politics on the front page. The problem with Voat wasn't that some people were "talking politics" on the front page. The problem was that the vast majority where anti-semites, racists, and otherwise horrible. That's beyond "talking politics" in any decent sense of the phrase.
- Threeve303 6y ago
  When the hardcore believers from /r/The_Donald moved to Voat, I was happy that it was still possible for anyone to read what they were saying. Similar to a honeypot or sting operation, we are probably worse off when they scatter back to the shadows.
  - faitswulff 6y ago
    I’m fairly sure both honeypots and sting operations were carried out on voat.
  - efwfwef 6y ago
    All in all, these people think as hard as us that they are right, that they are the better people, that they have the better ideologies. I just can't fathom it. I'm convinced at this point that the only way to think about it is to understand that the IQ average of that group must be pretty low.

Causality1 6y ago

That's sort of the question isn't it. Is it that there are so few of these neutral grounds that they collect the people unwelcome anywhere else, or that those ideas out-compete everything else unless there's a finger on the scale? Personally I think it's a hybrid. Extremism and outrage are memetically advantaged in all circumstances but the specific atmosphere is what chooses the flavor prevalent in a particular community. Voat was formed by far-right elements and so that became the culture.

AnthonyMouse 6y ago

> 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 where the same people could see it. Meanwhile in the 7% of cases when they actually had a legitimate point to make, they could make it, and the people who benefited from hearing it would actually hear it instead of continuing to be unawares and consequently continuing to be wrong about something. But it doesn't work to have one popular platform which allows nearly everyone except for Those Deplorables and another that allows "everyone" but the only people with the incentive to move are the people being forcibly ejected from the popular one. Because witch hunts are bad, but if there is a place that owes its existence solely to a policy of not having witch hunts, it's going to be full of witches. So the answer has to be to stop the witch hunts in the places where everybody else already is.

koheripbal 6y ago
I think part of the issue is that the average age of Reddit users plummeted. It was in the high 20s, but I've seen some research that puts it in the high teens these days / early 20s. That has a huge impact on the quality of conversations.
- 1_player 6y ago
  And politics have infected every single discussion. Nowadays it's cool to be partisans, decades ago a teenager talking about politics would be dismissed with a "get a hobby, nerd." It is an absolute disgrace how it's become normal. Or that mine is an unpopular opinion nowadays.
  - 0xy 6y ago
    Reddit stopped caring about political manipulation by organised bots and paid shills since before the 2016 election. In fact, PACs openly admitted to the practices during the election. Reddit absolutely doesn't care, they'd rather bombard you with ads and tracking garbage and pretend they're a viable platform through half-assed initiatives.

odessacubbage 6y ago

paradox of tolerance is just a meme and not even a very good one. 8chan, which was usually coded in the media as the most extreme platform managed to be host to both /pol/, /leftypol/, a myriad of queer & lgbt boards and /christian/ as well as boards for other religious denominations and multiple competing sects of gamergate and, of course the q boomers. at one point of polling, /v/ was something like 60% lgbt. on zeronet and the webring you see a similar plurality of views and usecases. there have been hundreds if not thousands of imageboard clones over the years with even less moderation than voat if for no other reason than incompetence. fatchan and chen2 were hardly festering havens of white nationalism. there is far more that leads to a website's culture than speech policies and administrator doctrine, the outright user revolts of SomethingAwful and Neogaf stand as a testament to this. this whole idea that free speech is a one way road to the fourth reich simply does not hold when weighed against the facts, especially considering that the 'sensible' platforms like facebook have been used as the rallying grounds for actual genocide and the livestreaming of murders & kidnappings.

ignoranceprior 6y ago
Yeah, it also annoys me when people assume that all of 4chan and 8chan is /pol/. 4chan has plenty of blue boards like /sci/, /g/, and /tg/ that are relatively decent if you can tolerate shitposting, trolling, and bants. When people write racist stuff, a common response is that they should go back to their "containment board". 8chan used to let users create their own boards, and there were plenty of inoffensive ones. On the other hand, I do think 8chan's /pol/ was just so terrible that it made 8chan overall a definite net-negative for humanity. Even the site's original founder has disavowed it at this point. I also agree with you that mainstream sites like Facebook have their own problems. But still, whenever I see free speech platforms, they tend to attract a majority of far-right users. I think it's because they're the ones who most often get banned from mainstream platforms and need to find alternatives.

zamalek 6y ago

> It was truly the culture that dominated the site. Voat is proof that we are not yet deserving of free speech. I find beauty in the principle of FoS: we would never have e.g. legalized same-sex marriages without it - and this is why we need it for future ethical advancements, possibly (as one hypothetical example), the right to die/destiny. Advancement of the moral zeitgeist is impossible without it. The utter impossibility of it in practice is unavoidable. There are few more willing to violate the rights of others than those who demand the right to speech.

weare138 6y ago
>Voat is proof that we are not yet deserving of free speech It's not the we the people are not deserving of free speech, it's the idea the right to 'free speech' supersedes other rights and should go unchecked at the expense of others that undermines the concept for so many. Besides, it wasn't free speech or lack thereof that's causing Voat to fold. Apparently no one wanted to pay to hear what they had to say. Everyone has a right to free speech but everyone else has an equal right not to listen to it if they don't want to.
- totony 6y ago
  >'free speech' supersedes other rights and should go unchecked at the expense of others Curious about this, what right does anti-Semite/racism rhetoric removes from others? How can words affect your rights as a person?
  - glouwbug 6y ago
    > How can words affect your rights as a person? Remember the holocaust
    - totony 6y ago
      >Remember the holocaust I'd posit the words weren't the things affecting people, but whatever actions they took

chrononaut 6y ago

This is something that's quite fascinating to me. The unfettered access to social platforms with few limitations on speech and content today, and available to such a large audience, would be unimaginable 70 years ago. Society and individuals are evermore connected to each other en masse than they ever have been in the past. An individual's discomfort now stems from everyone suddenly being aware of everyone else's opinion and now has to face it and interpret it. It would be next to impossible for someone 70 years ago to be able to collect that information at scale so readily, also making it far easier to ignore. Now all I have to do today is scroll through someone's SOCIAL_NETWORK profile to find out or to experience it. It begs an interesting question to me whether society is more "stable" with this strife of being hyperconnected, or less stable. The past was filled with far more silos of in-person clubs representing political ideals, making it hard for the common person to recognize their existence, at least to the extent of hearing about its minute details and ideals. There was also a great filter of the powerful individuals controlling the means of communication to limit the content that reached every single person. Despite the real acts or false claims of suppression, it is interesting that there was never a previous time in the past where each individual was more empowered to be heard than today.

cbozeman 6y ago

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 anyone to take responsibility for what they say, so they say anything they want. Combine with this an entire zeitgeist of people who feel disconnected and alone, and its a recipe for attention-seeking behavior. And on the converse, sometimes its taken too far, with people losing their jobs for things that clearly meant in jest (Justine Sacco) or for clumsily worded communication. Call-out culture needs to die. SJW culture needs to die. One-up culture needs to die. We have to start giving people the benefit of the doubt.

howlgarnish 6y ago
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." -Cardinal Richelieu, c. 1600 (attributed to, anyway) Given the political climate we're in and the complete intolerance to anything but the most milquetoast pablum in Silicon Valley these days, it's a brave or foolish person who posts anything online under their real name these days.
- base698 6y ago
  Seriously, all risk and no reward.
brayhite 6y ago
This may have been true at one time, but in the age of Youtube videos and live broadcasts being a popular vehicle for all of the above, I don't think folks care anymore about anonymity. It's a toxic race for attention and engagement to either a.) generate revenue, b.) acquire some taste of "fame", or c.) both. Being anonymous plays a role in some corners of the internet, but the ones that are contributing the most to the cultures you mention above don't depend on anonymity. They're being perpetuated and propped up by very knowable online identities, and I highly doubt the folks doing the propping think they're safely anonymous.

cable2600 6y ago

The alt-right needs to go somewhere to leave the rest of us alone. No matter what they will blame liberals for the loss of Voat and other sites. When you have no censorship it is like the Wild West and the biggest guns rule. Back when I worked as a CO-SYSOP for a College run BBS I had to delete posts that had cuss words in them or were hateful or porno. They had to keep the subboards clean because we had 13 year olds on there downloading info about the college and playing Tradewars, Stock Market, Food Fite, etc. One of the people I censored was Larry Kite, an alt-right troll. Who got mad and claimed he was going to the computer lab to meet the SYSOP and see his boyish face. My supervisor had a beard and met Mr. Kite and explained to him it was not personal we do that to everyone. Especially on networked subs where they have rules against it.

read_if_gay_ 6y ago
> The alt-right needs to go somewhere to leave the rest of us alone. Hmm, I wonder why the political divide has grown to become such a huge problem in the US...

deleted 6y ago

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PradeetPatel 6y ago

Sometimes hate speech must be limited in order for a greater freedom of speech to thrive. My heart goes out to the founder of voat, I'm sure his heart was in the right place when he founded the site. But perhaps he did not anticipate it to organically evolve into a haven for alt-right extremism. Perhaps this will serve as a lesson to many future platform providers.

sonotathrowaway 6y ago
To be clear, Voat was billed as the free speech alternative to Reddit, when Reddit banned subreddits with names like /r/shitniggerssay and /r/neofags. Nobody was under any pretenses as to the type of person voat was catering to.

janoc 6y ago

Well, the front page has literally "Holocaust didn't happen" plastered on it right now (crime in many EU countries) ... Not really going to miss this one. "Neutral" and "free-speech" have unfortunately become euphemisms for a license to spew hate that wouldn't be allowed elsewhere (i.e "censored").

austhrow743 6y ago

Linked post references red pilling and 4chan, celebrates being hated by people, talks about how great their terrible user base is, and mentions Christian shit multiple times. Gives me the impression that it was always intended to be populated by the types of people that populate it.

kace91 6y ago

For someone who has a bit of context: is this supposed to be real or tongue in cheek? It sounds like mental illness to me but maybe I'm just incredibly out of touch with the reality of the average voat user. > I will lay Voat upon the cross on December 25th 2020 at 12 noon PST. I have chosen Christmas as the day to do so in honor of the only True thing you will find in this world and that is Jesus Christ, the son of God, and the only way to the Father. I chose 12 noon in honor of the twelve disciples who spread the message of salvation to the world.

dwardu 6y ago
nothing bad about that. are you just annoyed jesus was mentioned?
- kace91 6y ago
  I'm not annoyed, I just wonder if it looks somewhat normal in other countries/cultures. It does not feel inappropriate, just completely coming out of nowhere. It's like having a regular interaction like "hey, at what time do we meet up?" "at 10:20, because 2010 is the year justin bieber relased his first big hit and justing bieber is the best artist I have loved in my life, he is the best among all." The way I read it it's out of place to the point where it sounds creepy/makes me wonder about the mental state of the person making that connection.
- millzlane 6y ago
  As a "born again christian" it came outta left field. I had no idea voat had anything to do with Christ. It's probably why they had the hottest girls there. It was gods gift to them.

vmchale 6y ago

Same with parler. It's now totally dominated by weenieheads.

chanfan 6y ago

>After alt-right extremists were booted off reddit, they found a new home there. The site was bombarded by /pol/ chan culture. Nah reddit users bring reddit culture. They aren't welcome anywhere.

commandlinefan 6y ago

> Voat was founded as a neutral free-speech platform. I was optimistic about Voat as I was about Parler: Reddit/Twitter, but without the left-wing censorship. But I found the same reality you did: the only people who bothered to migrate were complete lunatics.