This has the same problem that voat does: does their definition of free speech include stuff that they find distasteful, like terrorism or child love? I would wager that they'll find themselves quickly having to censor their network once people start showing up there and push the limits.

I'm reminded of the exodus of /r/fatpeoplehate from reddit to voat. If you build a network where people can be assholes, you'll have a hard time growing it beyond a small network of seed assholes.

Wow, I've never heard it called "child love" before. That's...distastefully oblique.

Anyway, moderation is always a consequence for centralized social networks. I wonder if there will ever be a reasonable decentralized option.

Re: oblique. That was exactly the point I was trying to make - a line where the content is not illegal per se, but is distasteful to reasonable people.

Promotion of illegal activities, or content that is illegal in itself, is a reasonable line to draw.

So then it depends on hosting country and viewpoint - since mention of Taiwan as an independent country is illegal in China, for example.

My issue is that I see no reason why they need to grab geolocation data from my mobile GPS device (in the TOS).

Plus, they openly acknowledge that they provide any/all info in the event of what they consider 'legally actionable' activity. Which is SUPER vague. So - there's no point in yet another online network that's just like all the other ones.

We cooperate with government and law enforcement officials or private parties to enforce and comply with the law. We may disclose any information about you to government or law enforcement officials or private parties as we, in our sole discretion, believe necessary or appropriate: (i) to respond to claims, legal process (including subpoenas); (ii) to protect our property, rights and safety and the property, rights and safety of a third party or the public in general; and (iii) to stop any activity that we consider illegal or legally actionable activity.

Hate speech is illegal. Does that get removed too?

If it's illegal in the chosen jurisdiction(s), yes.

The question to this argument is particular is almost always "What constitutes hate speech?" Some people think it's literally anything that could make someone feel bad (whether it does or not). Some people think unless you are actively advocating for murder or genocide it's not. Most reasonable people are in the middle, but most reasonable people also disagree on whether or not putting a picture of a fat person online and making fun of it meets the standard.

The solution to the problems of echo chambers and walled gardens is not to build another echo chamber or walled garden, but to build something that returns control to the user.

In this respect, decentralization is the key. A decentralized network cannot easily be censored, but people can choose not to view the content they don't want to see on a decentralized network.

Gab just seems to me to be another walled garden. If it's anywhere near as successful as other networks, it will encounter the same problems. If it's not, then it won't matter.

Yup. Whatever replaces twitter will be an open-source decentralized system that ends at the API layer with multiple competing client implementations. So, not Gab.

But I do like to see a bit of momentum in the tech world against neoliberalism, I think it's healthy for everyone. The "censor all competing ideologies" cultural authoritarian nonsense has gotten out of hand.

I do sometimes wonder how much of this is made worse by keeping competing views in walled gardens. If you look at Twitter historically they've not been great at censorship.

Consequently it's easy for views you may hold abhorrent to end up in your feed, along with the typical OTT reactionary crap resulting from it being a poor medium for nuanced conversation (ie the 140 character limit).

This leads to calls on the garden maintainer to censor content, which then gets out of hand, resulting in people being banned rather than content being taken out via say, downvoting.

Having an open, distributed and federated approach means that it's harder to block content, but it's also harder for content you don't like to end up in your feed, and easier for you to censor it, rather than relying on a central authority to perform that task for you.

The only thing I've heard about this is that a bunch of white nationalists were talking about migrating here after being banned from Twitter for harassment. If that's what their community is like, I'd have zero interest.

...but I did NOT know that their actual logo is a Pepe the Frog. Good grief.

For context, the founder of this site was in the news recently for being banned from YC:

https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/12/pro-trump-ceo-gets-booted-...

gab.ai's creator from the article:

> All of you: fuck off. Take your morally superior, elitist, virtue signaling bullshit and shove it. I call it like I see it, and I helped meme a President into office, cucks.

I have a hard time seeing how people like this can expect others to be tolerant of behaviour like this. You don't get a free pass to be a dick for "freedom of speech" issues. Even McDonald's has a basic "no shirt, no shoes, no service" decency policy.

Being a bully was never acceptable, not recently or before the era of political correctness. I don't envy their capability of moral distortion. For the white grande superior nationalists it seems as if it's a time where critiquing and calling them out for their bigotry and moral incoherence is willingly confused with attempts of censorship and proto-fascism. When he says "shove it", it's a bitter sign of relinquishment from someone who has nothing to lose because he has no arguments anymore to fight the system that doesn't seem to exclusively cater to him anymore.

"Introducing social news aggregator based on cool tech that has instantly become alt-right shithole"

Is it based on "cool" tech? It's just Laravel and Vue.js...

This website is known for being associated with white supremacist groups (the so-called "alt-right").

I immediately logged off (forever) after just signing up and seeing the "news feed".

It's like r/The_Donlad on steroids.

You get the users you're willing to tolerate. If you advertise your site as an uncensored paradise, don't be surprised when it becomes overrun with assholes. Look no farther than Voat to see how poorly this will go.

That said, some of the fixes they are implementing would be nice to see in mainstream networks. More transparency about how the products and algorithms work would be wonderful, especially with regards to FB's News Feed and Twitter's Trending.

ello 2.0

Browsed for five minutes, saw 2 swastikas...

It's interesting how certain platforms sort of attract certain undesirable elements from people.

I wonder if there's correlations to features that platforms have to what sort of people end up using the platform?