you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]magnora7[S] 52 insightful - 8 fun52 insightful - 7 fun53 insightful - 8 fun -  (2 children)

Then sane comments that call out the nonsense are downvoted:

https://voat.co/v/whatever/3099068/17411620

https://voat.co/v/whatever/3099068/17411920

Voat is overrun with shills, and white supremacists who can't tell they're surrounded by shills. Voat has a lot of free speech, but very little moral backbone despite all the grandstanding they do. I guess that's what happens when you let white supremecist neo-nazis literally take over your site and run it for their own benefit. They'll cheer on murder as long as the people killed have the skin color and religion they don't like.

Disgusting.

This is why voat can't be the next reddit. This is why we had to build saidit, to give people a 3rd option, because one didn't really exist. Free information for those who aren't completely lost to extremist ideology. Which is why this site used to be called antiextremes.com back in the day

[–]iufewal 20 insightful - 2 fun20 insightful - 1 fun21 insightful - 2 fun -  (1 child)

As one of the extremists, I'm not sure if I agree with the analysis of Voat as being a place taken over by Neo-Nazis. I would argue that Voat was a place where a normal, decent userbase grew from shared experiences into what they are now.

Voat was certainly not in its original form full of white supremacists; in fact, I would argue that the majority of its userbase actually came from fairly tame places; /r/fatpeoplehate, and so on. For a long period of time, Voat contained a userbase much like Reddit's, with the distinction being that they held a deepseated suspicion of everything and anything which smacked of censorship. Anything which was "censored" was automatically viewed as "one of us", a fellow victim of an injustice they all suffered, and someone to be welcomed with open arms.

It was in this climate that Reddit began to crack down upon what you call "extremists"; but the Voat userbase didn't see it that way. They saw themselves in these "extremists", not necessarily because they saw a connection in political ideology, but because they saw a shared experience. The treatment which these "extremists" had suffered at the hands of the administration was sufficient penance for any wrongheaded views they might hold, and Voat, the ever-compassionate, would be willing to lend an ear and a voice to what they had to say.

You can almost see why this idea would be appealing even to people who care little for political ideology; it was a chance to demonstrate their superiority over their erstwhile tormentors, while at the same time a chance to spite the very same people by giving a platform to those they sought to deplatform. Had Reddit banned /r/chapotraphouse or any sort of communist subreddit, Voat would have just as eagerly jumped at the chance to the support of the far left. That ship has probably sailed by now, but still, the claim that Voat was / is an extremist site doesn't sit right with me at all. It has always been what it still is: A free-speech fundamentalist site where censorship on the grounds of political opinions (no matter how vile or repulsive) is the first enemy, even before anything else.

[–]Bompf 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

In any structure where free debate and discussion is permitted, extremist right-wing ideologies will naturally evolve as a result of all available evidence. The best arguments tend to win.