Voat Is Shutting Down

Re:Voat Is Shutting Down by yibg on Tuesday December 22, 2020 @01:43AM (#25503642)

Plus there is an asymmetry here. Wild “theories” and purposefully inflammatory content is easy to post, and also easy to believe for those that align with them ideologically. Countering them, especially to a degree that can be convincing, takes a lot more work. End result, a lot more of the former and less of the latter.

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Re:Voat Is Shutting Down by birdsbirdsbirds on Tuesday December 22, 2020 @02:30AM (#25503877)

How come moderators don't fall for those 'theories'?

Or more precisely: Why is there a majority of people who upvote those theories but moderators can identify them as what they are and remove them? What has happened to moderators that they can handle the 'theories' that hasn't happened to regular forum members?

Whatever that is, can't this be handed out to new members before they are allowed to vote?

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Re:Voat Is Shutting Down by XorNot on Tuesday December 22, 2020 @02:57AM (#25504027)

Moderators are there to ensure the community thrives, not to respond to 50 restatements a day of "COVID-19 is a hoax" by people "just asking questions".

Part of that is very much ensuring that the front page is not wall to wall conspiracy theories, and members don't have every thread inundated with the same junk.

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Re:Voat Is Shutting Down by dotancohen on Tuesday December 22, 2020 @05:15AM (#25504766)

So each time a post "just asking questions" is posted, close it with a link to the explanation of why the idea has already been debunked. Just like a Bugzilla dupe or a StackOverflow dupe.

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Re:Voat Is Shutting Down by GrantSolar on Tuesday December 22, 2020 @06:31AM (#25505236)

For a long time, Reddit moderators did not have the tools to do this. Regardless, whenever bad-faith argumentation is removed, the person whose comment was removed paints the event as censorship which just backs up their conspiracy argument more

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Re:Voat Is Shutting Down by UncleMeat on Tuesday December 22, 2020 @09:04AM (#25506350)

Now do this 1,000 times. Now 10,000 times. It is trivial to suck all the air out of a forum by repeatedly posting this.

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Re:Voat Is Shutting Down by dotancohen on Tuesday December 22, 2020 @09:24AM (#25506502)

Spam detection has been a feature of email clients for a long time. I'm sure even a rudimentary automated detection mechanism could prevent a significant portion of the dupes.

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Re:Voat Is Shutting Down by UncleMeat on Tuesday December 22, 2020 @10:33AM (#25507178)

Is that not censorship then?

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Re:Voat Is Shutting Down by cercatrova on Tuesday December 22, 2020 @11:52AM (#25508283)

In order to have a good community, you need a form of censorship, whether through moderation, spam detection, voting systems, and so on. Otherwise, the community as a whole becomes a mess.

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Re:Voat Is Shutting Down by dotancohen on Tuesday December 22, 2020 @02:43PM (#25510280)

Somebody "just asking a question" is not being censored. Somebody "just asking a question" will be happy for the quick response.

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Re:Voat Is Shutting Down by triceratops on Tuesday December 22, 2020 @03:21AM (#25504155)

(Good) moderators consider it their job to keep nonsense off their boards. They spend the commensurate time and effort to do so. Normal forum members aren't there for that.

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Re:Voat Is Shutting Down by pjc50 on Tuesday December 22, 2020 @03:07AM (#25504080)

Time and effort. The two things that cannot be handed out.

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Re:Voat Is Shutting Down by intended on Tuesday December 22, 2020 @06:42AM (#25505321)

What makes you think mods don’t suffer ?

From the evidence of outsourced moderation, they started being influenced by conspiracy theories and suffering from PTSD

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Re:Voat Is Shutting Down by no-dr-onboard on Tuesday December 22, 2020 @08:25AM (#25505991)

The thing is, simply repeating a common tract, belief, thought, or “fact” to refute and drown out “wild theories” is just as effortless.

There is a serious logical hazard in believing that any of this is asymmetrical.

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Re:Voat Is Shutting Down by yibg on Tuesday December 22, 2020 @01:00PM (#25509146)

I don't think it is effortless to refute. Wild theories are effortless to construct since they can be devote of facts, and variants are also effortless to create. Refuting requires gathering facts and evidence. Additionally presenting them in a way that's relatively easy to digest for the audience is also difficult.

Take the recent US election for example. Very effortless to claim fraud and stolen election; just a couple of tweets in fact. Debunking them rather more difficult. Then there are the more specific claims, such as:

- China and Venezuela worked together to do this - Voting machines flipped votes - There were vote dumps at midnight - Dead people voted for Biden

All very easy claims to make, all rather more difficult to debunk sufficiently. Then, when one is debunked, another one easily pops up. Don't get me wrong, I think it's well worth the effort and we should fight disinformation, but effort it does take.

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Re:Voat Is Shutting Down by concordDance on Tuesday December 22, 2020 @05:43AM (#25504930)

People can just go ctrl+c the response someone else made on the subject.

Bookmark links and have your list of links publicly accessible.

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Re:Voat Is Shutting Down by yibg on Tuesday December 22, 2020 @01:01PM (#25509154)

And what do we do with a new variant that pops up? We've debunked dead people voting, now the claim is voting data is being sent to Germany for processing.

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Re:Voat Is Shutting Down by Thorrez on Tuesday December 22, 2020 @04:50PM (#25511689)

A low effort response like "Do you have firm evidence of this?"

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Re:Voat Is Shutting Down by yibg on Tuesday December 22, 2020 @05:05PM (#25511852)

I wish that was sufficient to counter disinformation.

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