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> 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 pe

> 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.
  - DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
    EQ, not IQ. So much of right-wing politics is predicated in lacking empathy for others.
    - blargmaster42_8 6y ago
      EQ is not a thing.
    - flukus 6y ago
      Or both in the case of places like The_Donald and voat, there's very little intelligent discussion going on and the enemy is always the "elites". The elites aren't the 1%, they're experts like doctors and people with enough education to move to big cities.
    - efwfwef 6y ago
      I think it's both, it's not just an empathy thing because they do have empathy: but only for their family, their neighbors of colors, etc. It's more selective sure, but it's still empathy.
      - HexagonalKitten 6y ago
        I've seen conservatives say they feel (have empathy) for the women in Jacob Blake's life, and the children, but not for Jacob himself. Or at least not since he became an adult and chose to perpetuate the cycle. I think it's more complex than that all (or even most) republicans are racist.
  - HexagonalKitten 6y ago
    I imagine that when you think yourself better than "them", you're thinking about mask-refusers, literal nazis, and (((dog whistlers))). And when they think of "you" they think of antifa druggies living in a park and burning down stores. We can't really demonize someone if they aren't a bit radical so we have to focus on the radicals. What I'm trying to say is that the idiots you see probably are dumb enough to think they're geniuses, but there's a huge invisible support base (on all sides) of non-radicals who are fairly rational. And I think experience is the biggest difference between the groups. If you've seen a neighboring store burned you feel one way, if you've seen a neighbor threatened you feel another. The problem then is sharing experiences honestly so we can construct a mutual view of reality and then discuss the same issues.
- d3nj4l 6y ago
  The hardcore believers from /r/The_Donald are on thedonald.win now. The place is as full of anti-semitism, racism and misogyny as you'd expect. It's a good place for a laugh every now and then, if you can stomach the hate.
  - optimalsolver 6y ago
    How did they take the election loss?
    - sim0n 6y ago
      They haven't.
    - mrguyorama 6y ago
      Well seeing that even r/conservative still thinks Trump won and the democrats stole the election, I'm sure you can figure out the answer.
  - dageshi 6y ago
    It'll get worse. Being on reddit anchored them to a wider community and gave them rules to abide by. This meant the true nastiness wasn't on display only hinted at. People drawn in by the memes from wider reddit weren't immediately repelled by the kind of nastiness that's on display in thedonald.win. Now they're on their own platform they have no anchor and no real rules, they'll "muh free speech" themselves to destruction.
- vkou 6y ago
  > we are probably worse off when they scatter back to the shadows. We aren't, because unlike a criminal conspiracy, political ideas are viral. They don't spread well in the shadows. Like with an epidemic, if you even slightly lower the r factor, those ideas lose much of their power. If you keep them in the light, if you normalize them, they spread like wildfire - as we have seen over the past few years.
stavros 6y ago
I visited once out of curiosity, and was just shocked to see how overtly racist people were. It wasn't just "immigrants should stay in their countries" (which I was expecting), it was full on "I don't see why I shouldn't be able to kill me a n*gger if I feel like it" speech (censorship mine). Truly disgusting.
- jcims 6y ago
  Same. It was so on-the-nose I wasn't entirely convinced that everything I was reading was authentic. Obviously that type of person exists but some of the conversations seemed performative.
  - duskwuff 6y ago
    A lot of it probably started out as performative, but later became sincere -- either as users on the site became further radicalized, or as the site became a magnet for users who actually believed the awful things they were saying.
    - jcims 6y ago
      When I first moved to my current home I installed a big wood stove in the basement to help keep the home warm. Over the next few years I learned a lot empirically about how fire works. One of the more interesting lessons was how important it is to use the radiant heat from a burning piece of wood to build and sustain heat in other pieces of wood. It works a bit like fuel rods in a fission reaction. When you keep the logs separate they will burn, but not vigorously. But if you bring two glowing logs close together, you can see them mutually heat each other and drive up the rate of combustion. I think something like that happens with these concentrated communities.
      - QuesnayJr 6y ago
        That's a really striking analogy.
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
throwaway0a5e 6y ago
The default advice for Reddit is "just unsubscribe from all the defaults because they're full of toxic assholes" so I don't see why the same measure wouldn't apply to Voat or 4Chan.
- sonotathrowaway 6y ago
  What about 8chan? The culture of idolizing white mass murderers has produced several who have posted their manifestos shortly before going on killing sprees, and the 8chan culture is largely the same as voat and 4chan.
- herbstein 6y ago
  There's the toxicity on Reddit on one hand, and then there's the "Hitler was right", casual usage of racial slurs, and insinuations that "jews are trying to stifle Voat" on the other hand. In the linked post you'll see references to "Angel", an anonymous individual that was funding Voat up until - apparently - March of this year. The comments refer to this individual, in a negative light, surrounded by both three parenthesis and the star of David. In other words, the level of toxicity is on a completely different level.
  - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
    Reddit attacks people if they don't have just the right amount of left leaning beliefs for the occasion. 4Chan basically requires you to prefix and postfix all your nouns with certain slurs. People are mostly the same all over so I assume like 90% of the stupid crap you see on Voat or anywhere else is just people trying to virtue signal to each other and they don't honestly believe that garbage (even HN has its own brand of this) and only a minority of users honestly believe what they type. People are very good at fitting in. Sure, it looks bad if Reddit is your frame of reference but if 4Chan is your frame of reference then it's just the same old layer of garbage on top of whatever content you're actually there for.
    - ignoranceprior 6y ago
      I used to lurk 4chan regularly (granted, not /pol/), and the amount of viciousness and toxicity on voat.co still seems high in comparison IMO. The way 4chan uses suffixes like "f*g" (which is mostly jocular/memey, even if in bad taste) is not the same as the kind of outright hate speech you'll find all over voat. Voat might be more comparable with /pol/ in particular.
superkuh 6y ago
It sounds like you only started visiting voat pretty late. I mostly hung around from when it was still WhoaVerse till the big exodus from reddit when politics took over in 2015/16. That's the lifecycle of these things. They're great at the start then they either gentrify or are overloaded by unpleasant fellows escaping gentrification elsewhere.
- eropple 6y ago
  Antiracism is not "gentrification".
  - jcims 6y ago
    Neither is cleaning up graffiti or opening coffee shops. Gentrification is a second-order effect of 'cleaning up' a community.
  - superkuh 6y ago
    But banning entire subreddits because they share links to good deals on firearms and accessories is. That's because it doesn't have to do with ethics, morality, or even politeness. It's how controversial it is and if it will hurt ad profits. Gentrification in this context is making a site palatable to brands and advertisers. Once they take large amounts of investment money they have to begin producing a return on it. From that point on users are the product and the brands are the real users.

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.
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
  EQ, not IQ. So much of right-wing politics is predicated in lacking empathy for others.
  - blargmaster42_8 6y ago
    EQ is not a thing.
  - flukus 6y ago
    Or both in the case of places like The_Donald and voat, there's very little intelligent discussion going on and the enemy is always the "elites". The elites aren't the 1%, they're experts like doctors and people with enough education to move to big cities.
  - efwfwef 6y ago
    I think it's both, it's not just an empathy thing because they do have empathy: but only for their family, their neighbors of colors, etc. It's more selective sure, but it's still empathy.
    - HexagonalKitten 6y ago
      I've seen conservatives say they feel (have empathy) for the women in Jacob Blake's life, and the children, but not for Jacob himself. Or at least not since he became an adult and chose to perpetuate the cycle. I think it's more complex than that all (or even most) republicans are racist.
- HexagonalKitten 6y ago
  I imagine that when you think yourself better than "them", you're thinking about mask-refusers, literal nazis, and (((dog whistlers))). And when they think of "you" they think of antifa druggies living in a park and burning down stores. We can't really demonize someone if they aren't a bit radical so we have to focus on the radicals. What I'm trying to say is that the idiots you see probably are dumb enough to think they're geniuses, but there's a huge invisible support base (on all sides) of non-radicals who are fairly rational. And I think experience is the biggest difference between the groups. If you've seen a neighboring store burned you feel one way, if you've seen a neighbor threatened you feel another. The problem then is sharing experiences honestly so we can construct a mutual view of reality and then discuss the same issues.
d3nj4l 6y ago
The hardcore believers from /r/The_Donald are on thedonald.win now. The place is as full of anti-semitism, racism and misogyny as you'd expect. It's a good place for a laugh every now and then, if you can stomach the hate.
- optimalsolver 6y ago
  How did they take the election loss?
  - sim0n 6y ago
    They haven't.
  - mrguyorama 6y ago
    Well seeing that even r/conservative still thinks Trump won and the democrats stole the election, I'm sure you can figure out the answer.
- dageshi 6y ago
  It'll get worse. Being on reddit anchored them to a wider community and gave them rules to abide by. This meant the true nastiness wasn't on display only hinted at. People drawn in by the memes from wider reddit weren't immediately repelled by the kind of nastiness that's on display in thedonald.win. Now they're on their own platform they have no anchor and no real rules, they'll "muh free speech" themselves to destruction.
vkou 6y ago
> we are probably worse off when they scatter back to the shadows. We aren't, because unlike a criminal conspiracy, political ideas are viral. They don't spread well in the shadows. Like with an epidemic, if you even slightly lower the r factor, those ideas lose much of their power. If you keep them in the light, if you normalize them, they spread like wildfire - as we have seen over the past few years.

stavros 6y ago

I visited once out of curiosity, and was just shocked to see how overtly racist people were. It wasn't just "immigrants should stay in their countries" (which I was expecting), it was full on "I don't see why I shouldn't be able to kill me a n*gger if I feel like it" speech (censorship mine). Truly disgusting.

jcims 6y ago
Same. It was so on-the-nose I wasn't entirely convinced that everything I was reading was authentic. Obviously that type of person exists but some of the conversations seemed performative.
- duskwuff 6y ago
  A lot of it probably started out as performative, but later became sincere -- either as users on the site became further radicalized, or as the site became a magnet for users who actually believed the awful things they were saying.
  - jcims 6y ago
    When I first moved to my current home I installed a big wood stove in the basement to help keep the home warm. Over the next few years I learned a lot empirically about how fire works. One of the more interesting lessons was how important it is to use the radiant heat from a burning piece of wood to build and sustain heat in other pieces of wood. It works a bit like fuel rods in a fission reaction. When you keep the logs separate they will burn, but not vigorously. But if you bring two glowing logs close together, you can see them mutually heat each other and drive up the rate of combustion. I think something like that happens with these concentrated communities.
    - QuesnayJr 6y ago
      That's a really striking analogy.
- ashtonkem 6y ago

throwaway0a5e 6y ago

The default advice for Reddit is "just unsubscribe from all the defaults because they're full of toxic assholes" so I don't see why the same measure wouldn't apply to Voat or 4Chan.

sonotathrowaway 6y ago
What about 8chan? The culture of idolizing white mass murderers has produced several who have posted their manifestos shortly before going on killing sprees, and the 8chan culture is largely the same as voat and 4chan.
herbstein 6y ago
There's the toxicity on Reddit on one hand, and then there's the "Hitler was right", casual usage of racial slurs, and insinuations that "jews are trying to stifle Voat" on the other hand. In the linked post you'll see references to "Angel", an anonymous individual that was funding Voat up until - apparently - March of this year. The comments refer to this individual, in a negative light, surrounded by both three parenthesis and the star of David. In other words, the level of toxicity is on a completely different level.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  Reddit attacks people if they don't have just the right amount of left leaning beliefs for the occasion. 4Chan basically requires you to prefix and postfix all your nouns with certain slurs. People are mostly the same all over so I assume like 90% of the stupid crap you see on Voat or anywhere else is just people trying to virtue signal to each other and they don't honestly believe that garbage (even HN has its own brand of this) and only a minority of users honestly believe what they type. People are very good at fitting in. Sure, it looks bad if Reddit is your frame of reference but if 4Chan is your frame of reference then it's just the same old layer of garbage on top of whatever content you're actually there for.
  - ignoranceprior 6y ago
    I used to lurk 4chan regularly (granted, not /pol/), and the amount of viciousness and toxicity on voat.co still seems high in comparison IMO. The way 4chan uses suffixes like "f*g" (which is mostly jocular/memey, even if in bad taste) is not the same as the kind of outright hate speech you'll find all over voat. Voat might be more comparable with /pol/ in particular.

superkuh 6y ago

It sounds like you only started visiting voat pretty late. I mostly hung around from when it was still WhoaVerse till the big exodus from reddit when politics took over in 2015/16. That's the lifecycle of these things. They're great at the start then they either gentrify or are overloaded by unpleasant fellows escaping gentrification elsewhere.

eropple 6y ago
Antiracism is not "gentrification".
- jcims 6y ago
  Neither is cleaning up graffiti or opening coffee shops. Gentrification is a second-order effect of 'cleaning up' a community.
- superkuh 6y ago
  But banning entire subreddits because they share links to good deals on firearms and accessories is. That's because it doesn't have to do with ethics, morality, or even politeness. It's how controversial it is and if it will hurt ad profits. Gentrification in this context is making a site palatable to brands and advertisers. Once they take large amounts of investment money they have to begin producing a return on it. From that point on users are the product and the brands are the real users.