[lliamander]

Voat is a pretty famous and obvious example, sure. But how many people who like to bring up voat actually visited the site or tried to use it? Did you?

For the record, I've never visited voat, so I don't know how accurate the reports are. I can say that I have visited other forums with very lax moderation, and the caricature of "screaming the N-word in everyone's face" doesn't seem accurate.

Generally the reason I avoid unmoderated platforms has little to do with "hate speech" (whatever that is) but more to do with the lack of interesting or original content.

The risk with moderated platforms is this: in whose interest is the moderation being performed? Is the moderation being performed to serve the interests of the platform's users, or is it to serve other interests?

[tzs]

I visited voat on occasion to see how it was working out, mostly checking out the groups that were not inherently political, such as /v/science and /v/movies.

Here is a description of such a visit shortly before they shut down [1].

I generally saw a lot more anti-Jew stuff than anti-Black stuff, but when a Black person came up there was a good chance someone would use the N word.

They could usually even make their anti-Black stuff be about Jews too. For example in /v/movies there was a discussion of the 2020 "Call of the Wild" movie. People were upset that one of the sled dog team drivers was played by a Black actor. They believed this was part of some nefarious plot by the Jews that control Hollywood.

I remember also seeing quite a bit of outrage over Asian and Black actors in The Mandalorian. I think I only saw one post that specifically complained about how absurd it was to have "<N-word>s in space" but a whole lot of agreement with the idea that all the actors in space shows should be white.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25502118

[lliamander]

I've now visited Voat, and I agree it's pretty terrible.

I still don't think the criticism of anti-censorship movement in general that I responded to is at all accurate, but that doesn't mean there won't be exceptions.

[spencerflem]

I used voat back when it was called whoaverse, and checked back on it occasionally for years. It was a little sketchy at the beginning but became full on antisemitic propaganda by the end when it closed.

I have some beef with Reddit and I legitimately wanted it to succeed, but I promise you as someone who cared a little about voat, it really was people screaming racial slurs.

Some of this probably has to do with voat getting most of their users when reddit banned fatpeoplehate. I can totally imagine other unmoderated places still being nice. But what happens when one outspoken racist makes their home there? Everyone has to either put up with it or leave.

imo, you have the million dollar question right there. Moderating is hard & thankless work. I hope that someone makes a good federated social media soon