The problem with Voat wasn't that some people were "talking politics" on the front page. The problem was that the vast majority where anti-semites, racists, and otherwise horrible. That's beyond "talking politics" in any decent sense of the phrase.
One of the more interesting lessons was how important it is to use the radiant heat from a burning piece of wood to build and sustain heat in other pieces of wood. It works a bit like fuel rods in a fission reaction. When you keep the logs separate they will burn, but not vigorously. But if you bring two glowing logs close together, you can see them mutually heat each other and drive up the rate of combustion.
I think something like that happens with these concentrated communities.
https://www.thewrap.com/daily-stormer-founder-ironic-nazis-a...
The Rule of Goats: even if you say you're only fucking goats ironically, you're still a goatfucker
In the linked post you'll see references to "Angel", an anonymous individual that was funding Voat up until - apparently - March of this year. The comments refer to this individual, in a negative light, surrounded by both three parenthesis and the star of David.
In other words, the level of toxicity is on a completely different level.
4Chan basically requires you to prefix and postfix all your nouns with certain slurs.
People are mostly the same all over so I assume like 90% of the stupid crap you see on Voat or anywhere else is just people trying to virtue signal to each other and they don't honestly believe that garbage (even HN has its own brand of this) and only a minority of users honestly believe what they type. People are very good at fitting in.
Sure, it looks bad if Reddit is your frame of reference but if 4Chan is your frame of reference then it's just the same old layer of garbage on top of whatever content you're actually there for.
The way 4chan uses suffixes like "f*g" (which is mostly jocular/memey, even if in bad taste) is not the same as the kind of outright hate speech you'll find all over voat. Voat might be more comparable with /pol/ in particular.
We aren't, because unlike a criminal conspiracy, political ideas are viral. They don't spread well in the shadows. Like with an epidemic, if you even slightly lower the r factor, those ideas lose much of their power.
If you keep them in the light, if you normalize them, they spread like wildfire - as we have seen over the past few years.
Being on reddit anchored them to a wider community and gave them rules to abide by. This meant the true nastiness wasn't on display only hinted at. People drawn in by the memes from wider reddit weren't immediately repelled by the kind of nastiness that's on display in thedonald.win.
Now they're on their own platform they have no anchor and no real rules, they'll "muh free speech" themselves to destruction.
What I'm trying to say is that the idiots you see probably are dumb enough to think they're geniuses, but there's a huge invisible support base (on all sides) of non-radicals who are fairly rational. And I think experience is the biggest difference between the groups. If you've seen a neighboring store burned you feel one way, if you've seen a neighbor threatened you feel another. The problem then is sharing experiences honestly so we can construct a mutual view of reality and then discuss the same issues.
I think it's more complex than that all (or even most) republicans are racist.
Once they take large amounts of investment money they have to begin producing a return on it. From that point on users are the product and the brands are the real users.
Spelling it as "tilda" just reflects the fact that a reduced vowel in English may be spelled in any number of different ways (and "e" is particularly unlikely); we can assume that superkuh is more familiar with the word orally than in writing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilde
This includes lots of detailed discussion of the mark under the name "tilde", including names of Unicode characters that include this term. Wiktionary also views it as an English noun borrowed from Spanish.
Sure, but it's not live in the same way that most words are. It doesn't refer to anything in an English speaker's normal experience; you could easily go your whole life without ever using the word.
Regardless of the symbol's function in different domains, the symbol's name remains 'tilde'.
Maybe you don't use the word much but that really has nothing to do with the price of fish.
The word is in conventional English dictionaries, like Oxford, Cambridge, and Merriam-Webster. As those sources will tell you, it's also used to describe the mark "used when writing some languages".
As such, the idea that it's somehow not a word in English is just silly.
No, it definitely has a name. Tilde. Heck, it's even the name used for the ~ symbol in Unicode, which famously names all characters with upper-cased English words. Just because it's not used in English orthography doesn't mean that there isn't a name for it, even if it's merely a borrowing.
> If you were studying Greek, you'd call it a "circumflex".
I suppose I would. Somewhat off-topic, though.
> Spelling it as "tilda" just reflects the fact that a reduced vowel in English may be spelled in any number of different ways (and "e" is particularly unlikely)
Or, as GP explained, they just misspelt it.
Responding to a later comment:
> you could easily go your whole life without ever using the word
That doesn't invalidate the word's existence in the language.
I checked the front page, and they're still screaming, with only difference between now and 2016 being the lack of pro-Trump screams. Good riddance, but the total perceived amount of screaming did not change much for me.
But that wasn't the problem with Voat. The problem with Voat was the terrible code making the site non-functional.
You literally couldn't submit a URL which had a tilda in it. A tilda, ~, like at the start of every college account website URL everywhere. And it wasn't just tilda, it was a whole set of characters. And the devs, never, ever fixed it despite months then years of occasional notifications.