
Introducing Gab.ai: The People First Social Network - type0
https://regated.com/2016/08/introducing-gab-ai-people-first-social-network/
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mmastrac
This has the same problem that voat does: does their definition of free speech
include stuff that they find distasteful, like terrorism or child love? I
would wager that they'll find themselves quickly having to censor their
network once people start showing up there and push the limits.

I'm reminded of the exodus of /r/fatpeoplehate from reddit to voat. If you
build a network where people can be assholes, you'll have a hard time growing
it beyond a small network of seed assholes.

~~~
smegel
Promotion of illegal activities, or content that is illegal in itself, is a
reasonable line to draw.

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Curnee
Hate speech is illegal. Does that get removed too?

~~~
pc86
If it's illegal in the chosen jurisdiction(s), yes.

The question to this argument is particular is almost always "What constitutes
hate speech?" Some people think it's literally anything that _could_ make
someone feel bad (whether it does or not). Some people think unless you are
actively advocating for murder or genocide it's not. Most reasonable people
are in the middle, but most reasonable people also disagree on whether or not
putting a picture of a fat person online and making fun of it meets the
standard.

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iuguy
The solution to the problems of echo chambers and walled gardens is not to
build another echo chamber or walled garden, but to build something that
returns control to the user.

In this respect, decentralization is the key. A decentralized network cannot
easily be censored, but people can choose not to view the content they don't
want to see on a decentralized network.

Gab just seems to me to be another walled garden. If it's anywhere near as
successful as other networks, it will encounter the same problems. If it's
not, then it won't matter.

~~~
AlwaysBCoding
Yup. Whatever replaces twitter will be an open-source decentralized system
that ends at the API layer with multiple competing client implementations. So,
not Gab.

But I do like to see a bit of momentum in the tech world against
neoliberalism, I think it's healthy for everyone. The "censor all competing
ideologies" cultural authoritarian nonsense has gotten out of hand.

~~~
iuguy
I do sometimes wonder how much of this is made worse by keeping competing
views in walled gardens. If you look at Twitter historically they've not been
great at censorship.

Consequently it's easy for views you may hold abhorrent to end up in your
feed, along with the typical OTT reactionary crap resulting from it being a
poor medium for nuanced conversation (ie the 140 character limit).

This leads to calls on the garden maintainer to censor content, which then
gets out of hand, resulting in people being banned rather than content being
taken out via say, downvoting.

Having an open, distributed and federated approach means that it's harder to
block content, but it's also harder for content you don't like to end up in
your feed, and easier for you to censor it, rather than relying on a central
authority to perform that task for you.

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panglott
The only thing I've heard about this is that a bunch of white nationalists
were talking about migrating here after being banned from Twitter for
harassment. If that's what their community is like, I'd have zero interest.

~~~
panglott
...but I did NOT know that their actual logo is a Pepe the Frog. Good grief.

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ronack
For context, the founder of this site was in the news recently for being
banned from YC:

[https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/12/pro-trump-ceo-gets-
booted-...](https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/12/pro-trump-ceo-gets-booted-from-
y-combinator/)

~~~
mmastrac
gab.ai's creator from the article:

> All of you: fuck off. Take your morally superior, elitist, virtue signaling
> bullshit and shove it. I call it like I see it, and I helped meme a
> President into office, cucks.

I have a hard time seeing how people like this can expect others to be
tolerant of behaviour like this. You don't get a free pass to be a dick for
"freedom of speech" issues. Even McDonald's has a basic "no shirt, no shoes,
no service" decency policy.

~~~
ff10
Being a bully was never acceptable, not recently or before the era of
political correctness. I don't envy their capability of moral distortion. For
the white grande superior nationalists it seems as if it's a time where
critiquing and calling them out for their bigotry and moral incoherence is
willingly confused with attempts of censorship and proto-fascism. When he says
"shove it", it's a bitter sign of relinquishment from someone who has nothing
to lose because he has no arguments anymore to fight the system that doesn't
seem to exclusively cater to him anymore.

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leggomuhgreggo
"Introducing social news aggregator based on cool tech that has instantly
become alt-right shithole"

~~~
gankshank
Is it based on "cool" tech? It's just Laravel and Vue.js...

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danpalmer
This website is known for being associated with white supremacist groups (the
so-called "alt-right").

~~~
curiousgal
I immediately logged off (forever) after just signing up and seeing the "news
feed".

It's like r/The_Donlad on steroids.

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apozem
You get the users you're willing to tolerate. If you advertise your site as an
uncensored paradise, don't be surprised when it becomes overrun with assholes.
Look no farther than Voat to see how poorly this will go.

That said, some of the fixes they are implementing would be nice to see in
mainstream networks. More transparency about how the products and algorithms
work would be wonderful, especially with regards to FB's News Feed and
Twitter's Trending.

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clarkenheim
ello 2.0

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elecpronic
Browsed for five minutes, saw 2 swastikas...

It's interesting how certain platforms sort of attract certain undesirable
elements from people.

I wonder if there's correlations to features that platforms have to what sort
of people end up using the platform?

