this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2023
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No Stupid Questions

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I don't remember what caused the Voat's origin, except it involved Reddit HQ. And then it went under in 2020.

What's different about this time and with Lemmy to make it a feasible alternative to Reddit? Is it random chance?

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[–] lynny@lemmy.world 72 points 1 year ago (34 children)

Voat died because they took a max free speech approach, even allowing racism and stuff. Lemmy does not have a central administration that can make decisions like that, as each instance gets to decide if they federate with another instance or not.

There's no doubt going to be a banlist that gets shared amongst the biggest, most popular instances to get rid of the trolls.

[–] Earthwormjim91@lemmy.world 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It wasn’t “even allowing racism and stuff”. It was created pretty much solely to be a safe space for assholes.

Turns out that doesn’t keep the lights running.

[–] kroy@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The first big migration happened to Voat when fatpeoplehate was banned.

[–] Earthwormjim91@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah, assholes.

Anyone that left Reddit just because they couldn’t belittle and demean people online is an asshole.

[–] yukichigai@lemmy.world 16 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Voat died because they took a max free speech approach, even allowing racism and stuff.

It cannot be stressed enough how core this was to Voat's identity, and also how much it poisoned the entire platform. When even objecting to bigotry is against the ethos of the site then there's no way to build a healthy community, much less an inclusive one.

Also if anyone is curious how much of a cesspool Voat became, here's the most "upvoated" for the month just six months before the site shut down. Warning: lots of bigotry.

[–] VoxAdActa@kbin.social 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

If that showed up on some Lemmy instance, you'd still have people saying "Defederation is bad! Marketplace of ideas! Just block them and move on! It's just one person!" :sigh:

[–] yukichigai@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Chances are they'd be screaming it into the void with how fast their instance would get defederated though. :P

[–] oessessnex@programming.dev 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

IIRC Voat also added the option to block communities, which prevented the hateful ones from showing up on the front page.

That obviously didn't help...

[–] yukichigai@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Well yeah their front page was empty.

[–] Donjuanme@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I need to take warnings a lot more seriously on this site. That's the second time I disregarded a warning and hate myself for it.

I remember when voat happened, I only wish it took more of Reddit (and maybe a ceo) with it.

[–] michaelfone@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I only had to read the post title before noping out. Jfc that’s bad.

[–] alaphic@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Same. I don't even understand how you can hold such comically evil fucking viewpoints... Like, Disney villains aren't that atrocious.

[–] Aux@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

That's not bigotry. That's flat out lunacy at this stage.

[–] Rob@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Holy shit, that’s bad. Who would want to be liable for hosting deplorable stuff like that?

[–] Kovari@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

Huh. That archive looks just like I'm looking at /pol.

What a cesspool. I can't help but laugh.

[–] TThor@kbin.social 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

On top of that, Voat got their main population-spike around the time reddit was cracking down on racist and extremist subreddits, so those are the type of users who shaped the culture of Voat. Lemmy, on the other hand, is getting their population spike from enthusiast users, I.E. the 10% of people most responsible for voting, commenting, posting, and just in general contributing to the site. Therefore, those are the people shaping the growing culture of Lemmy, doing so in a mostly positive way.

There is a phenomenon known as the "Eternal September". In the earliest internet, the vast majority of internet users were college student. Therefore, every September when freshmen started school, the online communities would get a massive influx of new users; These new users were often poorly behaved or ill-fitted to the culture of the communities, but over time they would acclimate to the local culture and become just more normal users. This was known as the "September Effect".

And then one year the internet started gaining small mainstream attention, and suddenly these chatrooms were being constantly flooded with new, ill-behaved users all the time; And because this "September" never ended, the culture of these communities ended up being washed away by the new people, and irreversibly changed forever; hence the "Eternal September".

The moral of the story, too many new people to a community too fast can overrun the existing cultural dynamic, and so either you need to be very restrained in how quickly you let new people join so they can gradually assimilate, or you need the people joining to already share the same culture you desire.

[–] Gigan@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That sounds like an argument against immigration too

[–] postmateDumbass@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Just replace culture with labor market.

[–] CoderKat@kbin.social 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Plus the kinds of people that migrated to Voat were... Not good people. IIRC, it was particularly the banning of FatPeopleHate that got many to move to Voat. The kind of people who'd quit a website because they said to stop harassing people for being fat are not good people. By comparison, this time, we're migrating because Reddit is being disrespectful towards frankly all their users, but also particularly mods and the visibility impaired.

[–] CIA_chatbot@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I migrated to Voat over the AMA stuff, and noped the fuck out about 4 days later.

[–] lazylion_ca@lemmy.ca 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Voat was also competing with reddit during a period of growth by appealing to the more toxic elements of the communities. There wasn't enough of them to sustain an entire service and remain solvent, and they didn't bring anything new to the experience. It was just a reddit clone.

The big difference now is that reddit corp has decided to alienate a severe chunk of their userbase.

I also suspect there were a lot of people who wanted to be part of certain communities, but weren't thrilled with the reddit format. There just wasn't anything else.

Those users are now open to alternatives like Lemmy, or Discord or another federated service. Reminds of IRC in the 90s. If you got bored of efnet, connect to another network.

[–] 2pt_perversion@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago

And a lot of the users Reddit decided to alienate are mods...Aka the ones who put in the effort to grow their subs in the first place...

Voat was the worst of Reddit while this exodus has the chance to be the best of Reddit.

[–] exohuman@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, I see people advocating for that here, but the truth is that most people don’t want to deal with constant hate and trolls. People want to feel welcome in a community.

[–] Skepticpunk@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

It turns out that people stop valuing things like "free speech" and "tolerance" when people try to use those values to force them to tolerate assholes.

[–] bumbly@readit.buzz 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The strength of the fediverse is that there can be a right wing fediverse, a left wing fediverse, a centralist fediverse, yada yada yada. Entire networks of different, unconnected instances can exist. There will probably be instances in between that act as bridges or for gathering stats.

It will be interesting to watch, but at least people will be able to join the instances with communities they like. The problem of course is that echo chambers are more likely to evolve, but it's not like that isn't the case right now.

And once we get instance bridged with the dark web, it could allow content from countries like China, North Korea, Iran, and other places that don't want information getting out.

[–] HelixDab@kbin.social 8 points 1 year ago

I think we're already seeing that a lot of the groups are going to be left-leaning, and since the system is decentralized by design, it's not going to be attractive to people that are right-wing and have authoritarian views. E.g., they won't be able to force other people to see what they say. (Remember the shitstorm of whining when TheDonald was removed from the front page so that 99% of people didn't see it anymore?)

[–] AMDIsOurLord@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

I'm Iranian. Lemmy isn't even filtered in Iran, it's readily accessible

[–] goat@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 year ago

Oh it certainly wasn't free speech. Tons of users trolling neo-nazis got banned.

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