Help! Keep Voat useful. We have to prepare for the attacks which we know will come. Is this just a bad idea or a pipe dream? (Conspiracy)

submitted ago by ParrhesiaJoe

Been around the block once or twice?

Done some Digg? Gone to Reddit?

You're here now. You're here because you know the trend. Here's how it happens.

  1. Site says, "WE ARE FOR FREE SPEECH! WE CENSOR NOTHING!!!"
  2. CoIntel makes a FatPeopleHate, Ni**erHaters, and ILoveKiddyPorn subgroup.
  3. Media SHRIEKS!!! KIDDY PORN? OMG!

How about this? ONLY political speech. No racial categorizations. Say, as a group, "WE DO NOT BELIEVE THAT THE MAJOR COMPONENT IN ANY WORLD PROBLEM IS RACE. WE BELIEVE THAT ORGANIZATIONS AND THEIR ACTIONS MUST BE TAKEN CONSIDERED APART FROM ANY RACIAL COMPONENT. We will debate the actions of the NAACP or State of Israel. We will say nothing of Blacks or Jews because only the simple minded look at serious issues with such trivial insight. It is a great lesson of history that the organization does not necessarily serve the interests of its members, and further, that the actions of an organization do not necessarily reflect the will of the members. Americans did not want the Iraq War. The US Government went to war in Iraq, in defiance of the popular will, and based on fabricated evidence. You can go discuss the racial characteristics of Jews, Blacks, Americans, Southerners and Gays... over on Reddit."

I would LIKE a place for political speech AND cat pictures... but Reddit is FINE for cat pictures and I'm not interested in hating on fat people.

Discuss GamerGate on Reddit. That's all about broad generalizations of specific groups... Go Discuss Jews on Reddit. We'll talk about Aipac here... and Henry Kissinger and Bibi. Go talk about what southerners "really" think about the confederate flag... on Reddit.... We'll be discussing the SPLC.

Reddit is a playground for the fallacy of composition and confirmation bias. FoC * CB = Bigotry.

Voat should be a political platform... a research platform... not just a replacement for Reddit, or it will be conquered like Reddit.

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errihu ago

Is it possible to create a shill-proof venue? I'm no math wizard. A lot of thought has gone into Voat and I'd like to see it succeed. Hopefully it can be tweaked in a way that allows us to leverage against those trying to control the social discourse.

Like you said reddit is great for things of no consequence like car photos and taking part in the popular shaped narrative. When any venue starts to gain enough traction there will be attempts to take it down or control it - steer it down less dangerous lines or paths that are easily marginalized. That's what happened on r/conspiracy - we got flooded with the accounts designed to be highly inflammatory and highly visible so that people could point at r/conspiracy and say 'look, there go a bunch of antisemites and bigots, there is nothing of value there'. Those who might me making the beginning steps to wake up are thus scared off by the blatant socially unacceptable trolls there to scare off anyone thinking of investigating further.

Like I said in another post, Voat is limited. It cannot grow beyond a certain size without participating in the machine somehow. That's what got reddit. In some ways it's a victim of its own success. Once you have to start paying big bucks for hosting and start acting like a real business to survive, things change. Go publicly traded and that's it, you're done for, you are now under the control of the machine. Don't go publicly traded, and you're going to have a hard time paying the bills every month. It's a real catch-22 and it's done that way precisely to ensure anything that gets big enough can always be controlled.

ParrhesiaJoe ago

Growing a BI system and thwarting gaming of the system is a mature science. The theoretical guys at SharePoint are a decade ahead of the software. I'm just stealing their ideas, but I'm convinced that a system can be secured against manipulation.

Consider IMDB. It is hard to manipulate IMDB because they expose a large amount of granular data. I recently uncovered a manipulation of the voting for the Movie, "Soaked In Bleach". If I had access to the IP's, I could pinpoint the military base or PR firm that initiated the hit... without IMDB even being involved. Every thing like this that we do makes it more difficult to manipulate.

The DOWN vote being shown is a KEY indicator I used to use on Reddit to detect manipulation... so they took it away.

I'm glad Voat has that... but I want more countermeasure tools.