I think it is pretending to be a platform at all. Can't register, can't post, can't view. Not much of a platform.
I think it is pretending to be a platform at all. Can't register, can't post, can't view. Not much of a platform.
Firstly, in general:
I think some people are getting too fixated on the whole "censorship" thing.
It's funny - when it comes to countries, I'd think most sensible people would agree that some degree of border control is a necessary thing, and that unrestrained immigration (i.e. unrestricted entry of foreign influence) is a bad thing.
Yet as soon as a forum starts behaving the same way, the torches and pitchforks come out and a mob is quickly whipped into existence, because this great crime simply cannot be allowed to stand.
If the moderators, operators, and/or administrators of a given forum want to restrict the field of conversation they host then - as that forum is effectively the private property of its owner, and said people are empowered by the owner to fulfill management duties - railing against this is not only futile, but also just poor form in general.
Conversely, many manipulative motherfuckers online like to play the optics game, pretend that their forum/chatroom/mailing-list/etc. is an open and free platform for a given range of topics, and then selectively moderate to cultivate the appearance and/or existence of near-unanimous agreement (i.e. circlejerking). In that case, it's the moderator who's being a cunt - but it's still his forum to be a cunt with - so the right option is simply to go elsewhere and leave him to rule over his crowd of sycophants and yes-men.
Route around damage. Not into damage, with your face, repeatedly, in the hope that damage will yield.
Selective speech cultivation should be a path to irrelevancy, yes, but at the same time we must accept - if only for purely logistical reasons - that we can't go around demanding that every forum make itself a platform for every sort of conversation we want to have.
Secondly, in particular:
As I see it, Voat's problem really is twofold - putt is very hands-off when it comes to the actual management, and the site grew quickly due to waves of refugees coming over from communities that had been banned on reddit. This has basically reduced it to a very monotopic forum - which is not great, but not terrible.
The modern "platform-style" forums (reddit-likes, basically) typically present the actual site-management as being distant and uninvolved with the running of the actual forum which, in theory, is delegated entirely to the sub-forum moderators, who are supposedly the de-jure leaders of their respective sub-forums.
However, because those people do have power, and are in a position of authority, and will have some people kissing at their arse, they are going to play some part in shaping the culture of the forum they've created. The extreme hands-off and rule-of-law moderation creates a divide between moderators and users. Under this, moderators become shitposters with power, albeit a power they must wield connivingly - for by now the users have also come to see the distinction and see the moderators as their enemy, and moderation as hostile action.
So the forum undergoes a cultural collapse and seeks a lowest-common-denominator glue to try and hold itself together. This is why on reddit people re-post the same tired memes with the occasional thematic difference, and why voat is purely for the discussion of and anger at the decay of the west and the shenanigans of the heebs.
Avoiding this is a matter of the core staff being more than supposedly-detached centers of power, and balancing the overall growth of the forum against the strength of the community. The staff also being users allows them to foster the sort of forum culture they want through direct participation, and also connects the initial membership with said culture in a tangible way. As long as total growth doesn't overwhelm this mechanism, it can integrate new members at a rate dependant on its own size without undergoing collapse.
Of course, once you go north of ten thousand total users, then you will inevitably start seeing some degree of internal self-segregation in the forum structure, simply because human social networks have their own innate limitations. At this point, the model could be adjusted (replace "user" with "community"), but typically only observed indirectly.
And always: Speak softly and carry a large hammer.
Firstly, in general:
I think some people are getting too fixated on the whole "censorship" thing.
It's funny - when it comes to countries, I'd think most sensible people would agree that some degree of border control is a necessary thing, and that unrestrained immigration (i.e. unrestricted entry of foreign influence) is a bad thing.
Yet as soon as a forum starts behaving the same way, the torches and pitchforks come out and a mob is quickly whipped into existence, because this *great crime* simply ***cannot be allowed to stand***.
If the moderators, operators, and/or administrators of a given forum want to restrict the field of conversation they host then - as that forum is effectively the private property of its owner, and said people are empowered by the owner to fulfill management duties - railing against this is not only futile, but also just poor form in general.
Conversely, many manipulative motherfuckers online like to play the optics game, pretend that their forum/chatroom/mailing-list/etc. is an open and free platform for a given range of topics, and then selectively moderate to cultivate the appearance and/or existence of near-unanimous agreement (i.e. circlejerking). In that case, it's the moderator who's being a cunt - but it's still his forum to be a cunt with - so the right option is simply to go elsewhere and leave him to rule over his crowd of sycophants and yes-men.
Route *around* damage. Not *into damage*, with your face, repeatedly, in the hope that damage will yield.
Selective speech cultivation should be a path to irrelevancy, yes, but at the same time we must accept - if only for purely logistical reasons - that we can't go around demanding that every forum make itself a platform for every sort of conversation we want to have.
Secondly, in particular:
As I see it, Voat's problem really is twofold - putt is very hands-off when it comes to the actual management, and the site grew quickly due to waves of refugees coming over from communities that had been banned on reddit. This has basically reduced it to a very monotopic forum - which is not great, but not terrible.
The modern "platform-style" forums (reddit-likes, basically) typically present the actual site-management as being distant and uninvolved with the running of the actual forum which, in theory, is delegated entirely to the sub-forum moderators, who are supposedly the de-jure leaders of their respective sub-forums.
However, because those people *do* have power, and *are* in a position of authority, and *will* have some people kissing at their arse, they are going to play some part in shaping the culture of the forum they've created. The extreme hands-off and rule-of-law moderation creates a divide between moderators and users. Under this, moderators become shitposters with power, albeit a power they must wield connivingly - for by now the users have also come to see the distinction and see the moderators as their enemy, and moderation as hostile action.
So the forum undergoes a cultural collapse and seeks a lowest-common-denominator glue to try and hold itself together. This is why on reddit people re-post the same tired memes with the occasional thematic difference, and why voat is purely for the discussion of and anger at the decay of the west and the shenanigans of the heebs.
Avoiding this is a matter of the core staff being more than supposedly-detached centers of power, and balancing the overall growth of the forum against the strength of the community. The staff also being users allows them to foster the sort of forum culture they want through direct participation, and also connects the initial membership with said culture in a tangible way. As long as total growth doesn't overwhelm this mechanism, it can integrate new members at a rate dependant on its own size without undergoing collapse.
Of course, once you go north of ten thousand total users, then you will inevitably start seeing some degree of internal self-segregation in the forum structure, simply because human social networks have their own innate limitations. At this point, the model could be adjusted (replace "user" with "community"), but typically only observed indirectly.
And always: Speak softly and carry a large hammer.
You. I like you.
I'll give you a gift, then:
Decentralized Interweb
Also, I'm curious, extremely so, how in the fuck someone develops this perspective. Even the numbers you use are way too specific - ten thousand? Why specifically ten thousand?
You. I like you.
I'll give you a gift, then:
**Decentralized Interweb**
Also, I'm curious, extremely so, how in the fuck someone develops this perspective. Even the numbers you use are way too specific - ten thousand? Why specifically ten thousand?
Decentralized Interweb
Ah yes, the technological solution. Though it should be remembered that technology rarely solves problems, so much as it refactors them. The main benefit of decentralisation as far as the internet is concerned, is that it allows us to replace a decidedly non-trivial political/managerial issue (namely, "how to get good stewards for online communities, and keep them that way") with slightly more feasible engineering issues (such as "how to make this network function" and "how to resolve routing problems in a reasonable timeframe").
Though we should distinguish between network-end decentralisation (we all connect to a forum called poat, but we do so via a mesh-net or similar) and service-end decentralisation (we all run our own poat instances, which exchange posts and comments via some p2p-ish mechanism), since the challenges faced by each would be different.
It's also worth keeping in mind that many implementations of distributed networks will be suceptible to their own particular weaknesses - for example, in mesh-type networks, each node is dependant upon topologically adjacent nodes for connectivity, and is thus vulnerable to "cold shoulder" type attacks that could significantly limit or completely deny network access to the target. Retaliatory actions from there could quickly put overall network cohesion in jeopardy.
The problem comes back to the people in the end. Pushing it back into a lower OSI layer just makes it less visible.
how in the fuck someone develops this perspective
First, you've got to predate the world wide web. You've gotta spend several years on newsgroups, in the company of hackers, crackers, phreakers, and all the crowds of phonies, and through inertia and cocaine come to hold the position of a senior network administrator for a small to mid-sized IRC network, and then, with no particular attachment to any of this, you've got to watch that community run head-first into the problem and burn itself down as a result.
Though credit to my fellow operators - we kept the fucking lights on until the bitter end. The people broke before the network did.
the numbers you use are way too specific
They just look that way because, having ballparked them where I did, I stated them clearly and left any ambiguity either to the reader's interpretation, or - as you have done - for someone to just up and ask me about them.
First-hand experience gives me a number of ~7000 +- 2000 for when the situation becomes critical, though this has a sample size of one and other people might naturally have other observations or data that dispute it - if they do, then I'd welcome the sharing thereof, as it may shine further light on the true nature of the problem.
From there, consider the neurologically-determined maximum size of social networks - 250 +- 50 as a rough approximation of what I remember reading; also consider the typical size of most small villages and other likewise close-knit communities, which often stabilise at the low to mid thousands. There is a seperation of one order of magnitude between these two numbers, and I would conclude that, barring extreme cultural unity, there will not very easily be two.
We can, for some practical data, look at reddit, where a number of its subforums have grown to multiple tens of thousands of users, and these are always either very tightly focused on a single subject, thus obviating some of the requirements vis-a-vis cultural cohesion; or they've culturally degenerated to meaningless posturing and mass-signal-posting.
Why specifically ten thousand?
Wànsuì, wànsuì, wànwànsuì!
> Decentralized Interweb
Ah yes, the technological solution. Though it should be remembered that technology rarely *solves* problems, so much as it *refactors* them. The main benefit of decentralisation as far as the internet is concerned, is that it allows us to replace a decidedly non-trivial political/managerial issue (namely, "how to get good stewards for online communities, and keep them that way") with slightly more feasible engineering issues (such as "how to make this network function" and "how to resolve routing problems in a reasonable timeframe").
Though we should distinguish between network-end decentralisation (we all connect to a forum called poat, but we do so via a mesh-net or similar) and service-end decentralisation (we all run our own poat instances, which exchange posts and comments via some p2p-ish mechanism), since the challenges faced by each would be different.
It's also worth keeping in mind that many implementations of distributed networks will be suceptible to their own particular weaknesses - for example, in mesh-type networks, each node is dependant upon topologically adjacent nodes for connectivity, and is thus vulnerable to "cold shoulder" type attacks that could significantly limit or completely deny network access to the target. Retaliatory actions from there could quickly put overall network cohesion in jeopardy.
The problem comes back to the people in the end. Pushing it back into a lower OSI layer just makes it less visible.
> how in the fuck someone develops this perspective
First, you've got to predate the world wide web. You've gotta spend several years on newsgroups, in the company of hackers, crackers, phreakers, and all the crowds of phonies, and through inertia and cocaine come to hold the position of a senior network administrator for a small to mid-sized IRC network, and then, with no particular attachment to any of this, you've got to watch that community run head-first into the problem and burn itself down as a result.
Though credit to my fellow operators - we kept the fucking lights on until the bitter end. The people broke before the network did.
> the numbers you use are way too specific
They just look that way because, having ballparked them where I did, I stated them clearly and left any ambiguity either to the reader's interpretation, or - as you have done - for someone to just up and ask me about them.
First-hand experience gives me a number of ~7000 +- 2000 for when the situation becomes critical, though this has a sample size of one and other people might naturally have other observations or data that dispute it - if they do, then I'd welcome the sharing thereof, as it may shine further light on the true nature of the problem.
From there, consider the neurologically-determined maximum size of social networks - 250 +- 50 as a rough approximation of what I remember reading; also consider the typical size of most small villages and other likewise close-knit communities, which often stabilise at the low to mid thousands. There is a seperation of one order of magnitude between these two numbers, and I would conclude that, barring extreme cultural unity, there will not very easily be two.
We can, for some practical data, look at reddit, where a number of its subforums have grown to multiple tens of thousands of users, and these are always either very tightly focused on a single subject, thus obviating some of the requirements vis-a-vis cultural cohesion; or they've culturally degenerated to meaningless posturing and mass-signal-posting.
> Why specifically ten thousand?
*Wànsuì, wànsuì, wànwànsuì!*
I suppose you've satisfied my assumptions. I had a feeling of your age range, interests and even occupation. I think I sort of surprised myself, even.
Cool to read. Thanks, man.
I suppose you've satisfied my assumptions. I had a feeling of your age range, interests and even occupation. I think I sort of surprised myself, even.
Cool to read. Thanks, man.
How so?
How so?
Refer to the below answer to Titus, please.
Refer to the below answer to Titus, please.
Why?
Why?
Even though the management does not directly censor, various groups on Voat appear to do so on their own.
Censorship by sponsored proxy is still Censorship.
Even though the management does not directly censor, various groups on Voat appear to do so on their own.
Censorship by sponsored proxy is still Censorship.
It is the same as reddit, if you don't agree with the group think prepare to get downvoted.
It is understandable to a point that a forum is going to take on an identity, hopefully Poal will continue to be one where people can respectfully disagree.
It is the same as reddit, if you don't agree with the group think prepare to get downvoted.
It is understandable to a point that a forum is going to take on an identity, hopefully Poal will continue to be one where people can respectfully disagree.
I'll fight to keep it that way until there isn't any fight left in me.
I'll fight to keep it that way until there isn't any fight left in me.
I'm not going to lie, i kinda do miss the disrespectful aspect of disagreeing on Voat.
Not that I would ever advocate it here, I love this place and it's culture, but I do miss mindlessly yelling at people and calling them faggots.
I'm not going to lie, i kinda do miss the disrespectful aspect of disagreeing on Voat.
Not that I would ever advocate it here, I love this place and it's culture, but I do miss mindlessly yelling at people and calling them faggots.
That happens everywhere. I remember my first post into an Anime fanboi site. Got so many downs from the fans of the top-poster that I had to abandon the account.
That happens everywhere. I remember my first post into an Anime fanboi site. Got so many downs from the fans of the top-poster that I had to abandon the account.
This is an issue I've spent a great amount of time trying to address. Like at this points its multiple thousands of hours. I cannot even quantify the mental anguish I've spent on it. I still don't have a complete answer I try everyday to tread that line and its not as easy of one to tread as you would think. I started this thinking it would be easy and it fucking is not even close to easy.
The answer is when you see someone trying to use their voice to censor an opinion you can either let them shout them down or you can step in. When its right or wrong to do that is a hard call to make.
This is an issue I've spent a great amount of time trying to address. Like at this points its multiple thousands of hours. I cannot even quantify the mental anguish I've spent on it. I still don't have a complete answer I try everyday to tread that line and its not as easy of one to tread as you would think. I started this thinking it would be easy and it fucking is not even close to easy.
The answer is when you see someone trying to use their voice to censor an opinion you can either let them shout them down or you can step in. When its right or wrong to do that is a hard call to make.
I can understand the frustration. I'm unwilling to doxx myself but I have a reasonable amount of experience with this problem that spans a long period of time on the Internet.
The problem with Voat appears to be almost zero involvement from management directly, which allows various groups to organize and fill the proverbial "power vacuum". To the uninformed passer-by, this can be misconstrued in many ways - such as silent approval of their activities. It's certainly a unique catch-22, but one that I see going outright ignored by Voat.
At this point, it's pretty clear to me that Putt has gone Galt and moved onto other things, I can't say I blame him.
I can understand the frustration. I'm unwilling to doxx myself but I have a reasonable amount of experience with this problem that spans a long period of time on the Internet.
The problem with Voat appears to be almost zero involvement from management directly, which allows various groups to organize and fill the proverbial "power vacuum". To the uninformed passer-by, this can be misconstrued in many ways - such as silent approval of their activities. It's certainly a unique catch-22, but one that I see going outright ignored by Voat.
At this point, it's pretty clear to me that Putt has gone Galt and moved onto other things, I can't say I blame him.
What? Did you say "voat"?
What is a "voat"?
What? Did you say "voat"?
What is a "voat"?
Good place to hone jew hating skills. Sorry, they don't let you in the club.
Good place to hone jew hating skills. Sorry, they don't let you in the club.
Anti-censorship private club. Can't call them a platform if only account holders can access the site.
Anti-censorship private club. Can't call them a platform if only account holders can access the site.
Voat is trash, has been for almost 2 years now.
Voat is trash, has been for almost 2 years now.
Yes.
Yes.
(post is archived)