No, it lets you see a narrow slice of people's real, dark opinions. There are a whole host of opinions you'll never see on Voat because the user base is antagonistic to the basic ideas which underpin them, so there's no point in trying to express them on that platform. For example, the notion that men are psychologically torturing women just by enacting common male body movement patterns in the workplace would never see the light of day on Voat. That's dark. It's my real opinion.

There's no such thing as a "bastion of free speech". One person's safe space is another person's hell of antagonism.

If that's an example of what's being referred to, it's really, really unfortunate, because it's a matter of one party acting totally innocently (most of the time), and the other party being conditioned to take it in a non-innocent way. That said, I could be totally off-base.

> Like, you didn't even wait for me to answer the question before deciding my answer was likely to be something bogus.

Is it that hard to assume I'm acting in good faith, and just trying to figure out what what you are talking about. It's obvious by this point that a statement like that caught a few people as odd. I don't think it's realistic to expect people not to speculate when you make statements that allude to behavior that many people take very seriously, and rightly so, without providing any sort of example. I wouldn't make a statement like "I believe my mayor is implicated in a murder" without providing at least some details, or at least some generic reasoning if I wanted to keep it fairly anonymous. Otherwise I would omit a statement like that. Expecting people not to speculate after something like that is unrealistic.

To be clear, I stressed the "If", and I followed up with "I could be really off-base". I'm trying to have a substantive discussion, and allowing for myself to be wrong. If you aren't prepared to do either, please don't post bait statements like that.

> Why bother when we know what the response is going to be?

Perhaps I should have refrained from getting out in front of a possible reply, but I'm really interested in what that statement is referring to, and beyond what I speculated, I'm completely clueless as to what it could be, and I would rather be aware of a way behavior of mine might negatively impact others. If it is what I speculated, I'm prepared to have what I consider a substantive discussion on about that topic.

No.

Men and women move in very different ways due to gender policing. Things like how much you are allowed to/required to move your hips side to side are different for men and women. Sometimes in the workplace women are put in positions of less influence and less pay. They experience repeated instances of being passed over, thwarted, harassed, etc, while men with less capabilities, less force of will, in many workplaces advance further on average. Something as small as the way someone moves their hips while they walk immediately signals their gender, which on a given day could trigger feelings of powerlessness.

Or consider a woman who was being harassed by a man at work, and the first man she told was skeptical it was meant in the way she thought it was. She went home and got support from a bunch of girlfriends. The next day you walk into her cube with your male movement, and she's thinking "is this one on his side too?" It's possible that a more female-typical mode of moving and entering would've been less triggering for her even on an otherwise male body.

I probably need to note that I am not suggesting that ONLY women experience things like this, or that ALL women experience things like this, just that it is something that happens.

I'm also an ally - I call out male coworkers who talk over or interrupt my female coworkers. And if a group of male coworkers get too "bro-y", even without women around, I'm the villain to say "yo dude, don't be sexist", and not back down from the "It's just a joke" defense. I'm a software engineer and I regularly introspect about how I can take active steps to make my environment more welcoming to women engineers.

I say all this to give you SOME of my beliefs before I say the next thing as un-insultingly as I possibly can.

The stuff you are talking about is a step too far, and it actively actively harms the cause of progressive feminism by making it seem frivolous, and immature. There is real harassment going on all around us, active/aggressive, and passive/insideous. But the way people WALK? Are you kidding me right now? I am an ally with my words and my actions. I will not change the way I walk because it signifies my maleness to a sensitive little wallflower who apparently feels powerless in front of 50% of the visible population?

I hate the "#notallmen" hashtag because it was reactionary and distracting from women who were at the time trying to speak real truth about their experiences. It misses just as much of the point as "All Lives matter".

But in the case of your example, a woman who is being harassed at work surely does not assume that all men in her workplace are against her by default, on account of their maleness. If she does, it has more to do with how they treat her, and not how they walk through the office.

> Things like how much you are allowed to/required to move your hips side to side are different for men and women. I had interpreted "common male body movement patterns" as movement patterns unique to males, which severely limits the possibilities of what they could be, which is why I had speculated on movements regarding adjusting the crotch area. Given how I had misinterpreted that statement to limit the possibilities, that's the only thing I could think of.

Okay, if you're talking about double standards, and how a woman that moves her hips more might be seen a different way than one that doesn't, and this may affect perception of her, I totally agree. That's a double standard issue, to a degree, and it's not okay.

> The next day you walk into her cube with your male movement, and she's thinking "is this one on his side too?" It's possible that a more female-typical mode of moving and entering would've been less triggering for her even on an otherwise male body.

I don't really understand this. How is your mode of walking, which is natural, or any other feature, such as facial hair or just the fact that you are indeed male, anything you can help? It may sound like victim blaming to say that I think in this instance, it's really the responsibility of her to make sure she's not projecting her feelings onto innocent people, but I don't think it is. I'm not sure how this situation is any different than a white man that feels threatened by a black man one day, and the next day a separate black man approaches him casually and he feels threatened.

That is, I accept that some women, and men, might have exactly these feelings, but I'm not sure that it's the responsibility of the other party to solve that problem. Is that the point you were making, that just accepting that this situation is possible is not allowed by the point of view of those forums, or is it a step farther, and it's the idea that this is the responsibility of the other party (the man in your example, the black man in my example) to somehow change their natural state to address this? I understand the former, even if I don't know enough about Voat to assess whether I agree about them, but I'm not sure the reasoning behind the latter, if that's something you are trying to express.

I'm not sure what you're suggesting. Do you want men to sway their hips? You think something like that would help? Or would that be a reasonable thing to ask since it sorta reduces to the structure of the body?

I don't know how it is on Voat, but on 8chan I'm a frequent user and poster of /leftypol/, titled "Leftist Politically Incorrect", which is basically the flip-side to the infamous /pol/ boards of {8,4}chan. On there people generally don't get banned for having "wrong" opinions (though it does sometimes happen). There are no votes, there are only threads on the board.

I like this a lot more. Taking 8chan as a whole, you get to see different sides. Recently there was something at 4chan's /pol/ where a janitor was removing posts of someone espousing left-wing opinions. The board moderator intervened and said that any political position is allowed on the board.

It really depends where you go, but you are right - the user base of a site is antagonistic to people with opposite views. But they can live side by side, even with an occasional 'raid'. I don't know if I can thank the founder of 8chan enough to have a place where people of my particular opinions (Marxism, socialism) can talk. I'm sure people across the spectrum say the same.

Take a look at /leftypol/ if you want and see that there are frequently debates between sides, and it's absolutely great. I wish I could say the same about /pol/. I posted a comment saying that no matter what position you are on, a vote re-count would be good for democracy. I was permanently banned for, and this is a direct quote: "defending jews". That was the reason.

Depends where you go. That's my 2c on the issue.

Someone could post a thread with an interesting premise, and the first response could be $racial_slur, and then the hivemind would repeat the process and spam $racial_slur indefinitely without any kind of real discussion going on. For the lulz.

Right now on /leftypol/ there aren't many threads of what you describe. They do exist, but they aren't numerous. What you describe is more similar to 4chan's /b/, but even 4chan's /g/ has "tightened up" and is being steered more toward discussion (still with racial slurs but not entirely focussed on them). A notable exception is the "DESIGNATED SHITTING STREETS"/ "POO IN LOO" meme, though.

I don't know if these are just my experiences.

/p/, /trv/ - slow boards that have their own shitposts.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/09/11/terrorist-t...

This guy got articles published as radical feminist as well beyond being a fake isis terrorist, fake white nationalist, fake jewish lawyer.

But I wouldn't say that chan culture is about this, or that there is an inextricable link between them. It's simply a common occurance by nature of being anonymous. More often than not, "bait" is called out as such, but even if you're being serious, you can ignore that.

A mixed bag, but certainly not representative. I know of many on the politics board who do sincerely hold nationalist or white supremacist views, and I have argued against them. I also know many on the left-politics board who will talk you through Marx's critique of capitalism.

There is some nuance in my opinion.

I don't think a forum full of edgy memes is a great place for political discussion, /pol/ or /leftypol/

Generally a thread is either a meme thread (with small discussion if any) or a serious thread with discussion.

Which is fine, I guess. That's why we have things like Reddit! Perhaps it's a variant of the Unix Way: have sites that provide a specific style of service, either in content management or filtering or whatnot. And appreciate them for that!

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

And in full fairness, when I made that comment, a whole bunch of stories were non-tech related, but interesting, so I probably should retract my comment =/. (One was about bread!)

For clarification, only the breakdown of up/downs was hidden, not the overall score, and it was hidden because when people saw posts with tons of downvotes, it invited more downvotes.

You tell me.

I'm in the same lab, but I don't work on the Reddit projects currently (although I am on the most recently submitted paper, which, due to it not being accepted yet, is not on the website, either).

Because I have oft floated the idea of starting just such a site.

Anyway, I somehow (as an avid Reddit user) missed the news that they lost their warrant canary (probably because I unsubbed from almost all the default subs due to low signal/noise ratio): https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/4ct1kz/reddit_de...

But in googling it, I did notice an interesting site related to warrant canaries: https://canarywatch.org/ EDIT: crap, no longer being updated: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/05/canary-watch-one-year-...

There's a ton of discussion sites. It's not "reddit or HN or nothing"; it's a question of which of the bajillion forums, blogs, link aggregators, email lists, or other things you're interested in joining. There's room for all kinds of more of them, too. There's so many choices it's more a discovery problem than an availability problem.

However, if you go into it with the hopes of being the next thing that is the size of Reddit, statistically, you're going to be disappointed.

It isn't even clear to me that this is a very good goal, either. Running a site the size of Reddit is an enormous, enormous hassle. The controversies currently associated with it at the moment are merely specific instantiations of the general fact that you can count on being vilified by a good 20%+ of the community once you reach that size, that every change will be met with a huge outpouring of hatred straight into your contact box, and so on. Goodness help the poor person trying to start The Next Reddit (TM) with the naive idea that it is a good idea to be very available to the community... all that does is add to the inevitable flames some fresh flames when you have to reneg on that promise too. Unless you've got a solid plan to monetize enough to make it worthwhile, fast enough for it to be worthwhile, while still somehow organically growing without that getting in the way, I'd suggest shooting for starting a community for $X, for some value of $X of interest to you, rather than trying to be The Next Reddit (TM).

What specifically would you like to differently? I'm interested in more good discussion sites.

Once upon a time I was subbed to /r/redpill, usually to counterpoint their many arguably-false conclusions. Naturally I was downvoted to oblivion most of the time, because Reddit does not do anything to prevent echo-chambers (in fact it probably outright encourages them... because engagement), and thus, echo-chambers are a natural result of subreddits and "comment percolation via upvoting in agreement and downvoting in disagreement" (the fact that Reddit TOS says you should only downvote on irrelevancy, NOT disagreement, doesn't matter, because people are assholes and critical-thinking skill is apparently an extremely precious commodity these days).

At the same time I was subbed to a number of, eh, feminist subs, like TwoXChromosomes. Sometimes, I disagreed with them too (and got downvoted), but most of the time (slightly most of the time), I got upvoted on those.

One day, I got banned from ALL feminist subs. ALL. OF. THEM. Simply because some mod with a god complex did a cross-reference of everyone subbed to /r/redpill, and mass-banned them. My entreaties to the mods ("just look at my fucking comments in there! I'm actually fighting for you guys!!) resulted in no reinstatement. (While this should not matter, it probably didn't help that my username at the time was "GSpotAssassin".)

Around that point, I kind of lost faith in Reddit as a thing not fatally-flawed. (While deciding to completely step out of the modern gender wars. It's a cesspool, anyway.)

I cannot emphasize how much I loathe echo-chambers. And it seems to be getting worse. I literally do not understand how people cannot tolerate the occasional discomfort of a dissimilar viewpoint, especially if it is well-argued. But I'm a rationalist, and we love a good debate, basically. Sadly, this does not at all account for most people, who I like to joke "prefer to belong than be right".

On top of that , there's the fact that the average user, simply doesn't care about all this freedoms or number of upvotes and stuff like that. They just want content and reddit right now has enough for everyone.

This was rolled back a couple years ago: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/16/youtube-t...

(Disclosure: I work for Google, on unrelated things.)

And consequently, Youtube comments now solely consist of civil dialogue and scholarly critiques of videos.