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Comment by notafraudster | Hacker News Reader

BitChute is a YouTube replacement made for people who are "Very Worried About YouTube's Censorship". It uses WebTorrent for distribution to solve the upfront server costs of running a video service. Cute idea.

You might imagine that with how endemic some people allege YouTube's censorship is, there would be a variety of interesting and censored content on BitChute.

Which is why when you check the front page you get and click popular you get... FOX News clips for posting on Voat (a far-right reddit clone), conspiracy theories about the magnetic poles, conspiracy theories about the Mueller investigation, conspiracy theories about the Mexican border, a far-right news source complaining about Jeff Flake, neo-nazi videos, Brazilian spam, anti-semitism, people complaining about YouTube censorship, etc.

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That's the weird thing about free speech. Any community explicitly built upon it tends to exclusively attract those in _immediate_ need of it: conspiracy theorists and racists for the most part.

There's still a (naive?) liberal side to me that thinks free expression, even of profoundly stupid ideas, might be a net good for society, but I don't want to be a part of a community that is innundated with nasty weirdos who were kicked off of every other platform, so "free speech" is almost a red flag to me at this point. That's kinda sad.

That's why you want to participate under a different pseudonym. If you're OK with participating at all, that is.

I don't want to participate at all. What I'm saying is that I'm pro free speech and decentralization, but if all the content is just racist shit, then what draw does the community have for me in the first place?

Assuming the motivations behind them are genuine (a big assumption), then there's nothing inherently wrong with BitChute, Voat, Gab, etc. But the actual content on these platforms is the polar opposite of the "diversity of thought" they claim to promote. That may not necessarily even be the site owners' faults (again: a very generous assumption), but a set of circumstances that arises from who actually takes advantage of "free speech" in practice.

I don't have any good answer for how to address that contradiction.

I don't see why the "contradiction" needs to be addressed.

If you want to publish non-racist videos, you can publish them on BitChute without endorsing the racist videos.

I don't publish videos. I watch them. I'm not gonna bother flipping through 90% nonsense on the off chance there's something interesting available. There's nothing technical that prevents sane people from uploading videos on BitChute, but there's not as strong as an incentive for them to do so.

The platforms are fundamentally good ideas. There just needs to be a way to bootstrap a diverse community before they're killed in the cradle by angry nerds.

To observe the ideological flipside of this conundrum, I invite you to browse many Mastodon instances, where discourse is driven by the most unbearable carelords imaginable.

Yeah, it’s almost as if the decisions by YouTube, Patreon et al aren’t, like, the end of civilization as we know it.

Seen differently, you may also notice that liberal discourse can only thrive under censorship.

> There's still a (naive?) liberal side to me that thinks free expression, even of profoundly stupid ideas, might be a net good for society,

Perhaps because the videos that get censored are only shitty to people who aren't you?

You're right about that. It's easy to think in terms of broad morals when you're not a target. It's also why I don't buy liberalism even though I'm defending a liberal practice in this specific instance.

I want to say that it's rooted in practicality rather than idealism. I'm uncomfortable with for-profit entities being arbitrators of acceptable content, because various "divisive" or "extreme" viewpoints outside of racism are threatening to their bottom lines as well. A distributed, censorship-proof network would have the side effect of allowing racism to propogate, but it could also protect viewpoints that lie outside of the stifling pro-market center-right consensus that grips most mainstream media platforms. The problem is that these alternatives only attract assholes for the time being.

It's a definite tradeoff where I can't stand behind any one position definitively yet.

It seems reasonable to judge for-profit entities by what they allow on their platform. Certainly this has downsides - the "free the nipple" would agree with your position on this.

Nobody forces anybody to be part of that community. And, frankly, neither Youtube nor Patreon not any other giant platforms are any kind of "community" anyway. Youtube is not a community, it's just a communication medium by now. It's like talking about community of people speaking English and trying to ban bad people from using the language (fortunately not yet possible, but if it were?)

http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-centrali...

>free expression, even of profoundly stupid ideas, might be a net good for society

It totally is! Stupid ideas are very dangerous. You don't want to hear about them from people with pitchforks at your door.

I agree with this. I believe one of the biggest reasons public opinion switched to support gay marriage so quickly was because of public exposure of extremists like the Westboro Baptist Church. If ideas are that stupid and extreme, it helps people understand the real reality (sometimes at least)

>There's still a (naive?) liberal side to me that thinks free expression, even of profoundly stupid ideas, might be a net good for society,

I was thinking today about the high costs of the stupid idea of anti-vaccinations, in this case children that are not at fault will die because of this ideas, should we block them or we should put billions of dollars into educating this people instead of using this money for better things.

it is not a black or white problem but in this case I personally think is better to block this idea.

I would argue that the billions of dollars needing to be spent on education is indicative of just how badly underfunded education is in society. You see knock-on positive and negative effects of that at basically every level of analysis and observation.

Pretty much. If you think people believing and sharing false narratives is bad then you need to be speak out and support funding education. All other avenues are just going to be whack a mole, chasing the symptom not the cause.

Fixing education will not help people that are already out of school.

Instead of blaming the actual bad party you are trying to blame the schools and the idiots that belive the stupid thing, I am not arguing putting people in jail , I want to have a discussion of ways to keep the "expensive stupid ideas" down, it could be a solution that does not involve laws and governments.

There is a saying in Romanian I am not sure if there is an English equivalent:

"An idiot drops a stone in the lake and 10 geniuses are struggling to find a way to get it out"

It's a good point, although I think it's more about people waving the banner of free speech. As the variety of material available shows, we live in the best era in history for free speech. But it's not like people need to talk about that; they just talk about what they want.

Those banned from one distributor or another will of course wave the banner of free speech, because that sounds much nicer than, "Why won't people just leave me alone to organize purging society of all the Jews?" But it's not like the government is suppressing them; it's just that distributors have decided that they don't want to associate with a very small number of people. And that banner-waving has always struck me as a bit false; it's not like, e.g., Nazis are known for their tolerance of dissent, so I have to suspect that their fondness of "free speech" would evaporate the moment they had any real power.

> That's the weird thing about free speech. Any community explicitly built upon it tends to exclusively attract those in _immediate_ need of it: conspiracy theorists and racists for the most part.

Which is why it's better when giant platforms themselves allow free speech rather than relegating it to niche communities. Of course, good luck convincing them of that.

It's the same issue any service or platform dedicated to freedom of speech has. The people you find there are the types who get banned or blocked elsewhere for controversial views outside of the mainstream.

But hey, that's true of any right protecting service or platform. The initial adopters will usually be the people who need that protection earliest, which often translates to criminals, extremists and nutcases. See also most privacy focused tools and platforms (like Tor) which attract the exact same audiences.

It's one reason marketing a service or platform based on privacy or free speech is usually doomed to fail.

But it's not an unsurmountable obstacle. These services just need to attract average Joes with mundane topics as early as possible, and build up communities about non political, non controversial topics as their main priority. That way, while the nutcases will still join en masse, you'll attract enough 'normal' people that people's perceptions will be of you as a neutral provider rather than crazy fringe community.

> These services just need to attract average Joes with mundane topics as early as possible, and build up communities about non political, non controversial topics as their main priority.

That isn't possible unless you filter out the bullies and nutcases. If you don't filter out those folks, the place will eventually get taken over by them. The irony is, if you filter them out those very same people will cry about "censorship" and "FREE SPEECH".

You can't have Truly True Free Speech on the internet. It is too cheap for a few folks to spoil things for everybody else. In order to keep a good level of discourse, some people, some times, just have to get lose their right to access certain platforms.

I mean, what is spam filtering besides "censorship"? Everybody filters spam... Thriving communities with good, open content have to filter out bullies and troublemakers the same way.

Sounds like the early days of YouTube, Reddit and others. Fringe groups are always the first to seize on new platforms where they can get in front of new eyeballs and aren’t yet drowned out by quality or truthful content.

I don’t think it’s fair to compare the content on a startup platform to a well-established corporate behemoth.

That being said I checked out bitchute for videos on fringe chemistry demonstrations that wouldn’t survive on YouTube. Some pretty cool stuff in that category. But still haven’t been back there because the production values of most are just terrible and painful to watch.

Sounds like YouTube right now if my recommendations are to be believed.

I don’t know why YouTube thinks I want to watch nutcase conspiracy theorists and alt-right whackjobs and compilations of “SJWs getting owned” but it seems to have plenty of them to show me.

I'd argue that "early adopters" are not the same as fringe groups. There's an important distinction.

As an extreme example, it would be the same as saying 4chan and voat attracted the same type of users in the beginning (as much as 4chan involves some fringe groups)

Corollary: a known, named extremism will have an opposite extremism that can be as bad as the thing it purports to oppose, though it will operate in an orthogonal way and it might not be always have a specific name.

I won't evaluate whether or not your claim is true, but I waited 6 years to join reddit (and when I did, I immediately blocked and unsubscribed from all the main subreddits) and never made an account on YouTube. So I feel like I should be able to criticize platforms until they reach a stage that I want to use them, right?

One presumes that people are not in any way obligated to use garbage platforms they don't like to consume content they don't want in service of some higher commitment to a platform that does not exist but might emerge later under ideal circumstances. Rather it is typically the platform operator's job to manage the platform in a way that attracts content of interest, right?

And surely interesting content emerging is not a given. Voat is 4 years old (older than reddit and YouTube were when I started using them, at a point where most of their content was not fringe stuff). The front page is: Far-right politics, libertarian politics, some weird political thing about the french, a guy complaining about YouTube censorship, MAGA memes, MAGA memes, a picture of a cute cat cuddling with Nazis, an attempt to bandwagon someone who wrote a code of conduct, a meme about how George HW Bush is in hell because he doesn't support Trump, PewDiePie, Linux is over because of code of conduct, a meme about how there are only two genders, a meme about how liberals don't believe in fumigating ant hills because they're weak, a video about how George HW Bush is a piece of shit because he likes Israel, a post rhetorically asking why anyone is sad about George HW Bush dying, a Washington Times article about "illegal immigrants", a conservative article alleging Hollywood are all pedophiles, a nazi webcomic, an article about how Democrats stole all the California house seats, a post about how it would be good if someone lynched Emmanuel Macron and how that would be enjoyable, and a meme about how right-wingers should ironically wear burqas to own liberals while they are beating liberals up, a meme of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez saying she's a stupid idiot (this is a "parody" -- not actually clear what it's a parody of, but whatever).

There are a couple I didn't copy-paste here because the titles have racial slurs in them and I couldn't figure out a way to summarize the content without repeating them. So I hope you'll provisionally yield that Voat has not yet grown beyond what you call the "startup platform" phase.

I guess it's possible that Voat is just about to turn the corner, but if I had to guess...

> a far-right reddit clone

I was under the impression that voat was created due to censorship that reddit applied on all kinds of things, including anime porn for example. Not exclusively for far-right content.

I certainly do not doubt that most of bitchute's or voat's users are far-right however. It only makes sense that the groups that are censored from other platforms move to censorship-free* alternatives. That being said it would be great to see other creators who have suffered by youtube's content-id system move to decentralized and censorship-resistant alternatives.

* I do doubt that it is fully censorship free still. Chances are that they are willing to take down copyrighted content from their site for example, even if they can't affect the webtorrent distirbution.

Reddit only banned anime porn that depicted characters under the age of 18. Regular anime porn is very much still there.

There was a lot of scaremongering around the time that voat was launched, the "under 18" part was often left off when people were using that ban in an argument.

Actually it banned anime porn that depicts characters that look under the age of 18, that excludes characters like Oshino Shinobu and most Touhou characters for example. Only a very small minority of anime porn portraits characters that are and look over 18. Saying that Reddit banned anime porn is as correct as saying that a byte is 8 bits: while wrong in theory it is basically true for the vast majority of the CPUs.

Let us argue the point including the "under 18" part, then. If it was legally an issue I can understand the ban. Otherwise I see little justification in the decision.

Well, your impression was wrong. Goat was created by racists and sexists to be racist and sexist and anti-semitic. If they fooled you with a veneer of grandios cries of all-caps censorship than you are easily fooled, or willfully ignorant.

There were three major exoduses of reddit people to voat and similar sites, years apart. The first was when reddit cracked down on paedophilia, the second when it nuked fatpeoplehate and associated subreddits, the third when it banned and/or hid some of the more egregiously Nazi-oriented subreddits. The third was probably the largest and most influential, but yeah, there’s other horrible stuff on there.

Of course, all of this makes for a charming community.

If you build a new society where there will be no witch-hunts, you will attract a disproportionately high number of witches.

>conspiracy theories about the Mueller investigation

Surely you meant the actual conspiracy theory Mueller is investigating?

Regardless of what it is now you should be happy it exists, look at present day Turkey and 1960s Iran to see how fast freedoms can be stripped by changes in government. Tomorrow it could be leftists being censored. The Communist Control Act is still around in the US, just hasn't been enforced. There's effectively nothing to stop Trump from calling his enemies communists and throwing them in jail and with his stacked Supreme Court who knows if they would rule it unconstitutional?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Control_Act_of_1954

How exactly are goat and whatever bitchute is saving us from Trump turning totalitarian?

As opposed to, you know, the New York Times or even the Supreme Court.

First they came for the Gab, and... I was actually pretty pleased because I didn't think the sort of web host that would stand behind forums run by the sort of people that gloated about how many hits their association with a synagogue shooting brought them were actually potential allies in fighting fascism...

Bitchute isn't the home of people posting Trump critiques. It's the home of people explaining why all criticisms of Trump must be dismissed as conspiracies initiated by the real enemy: Jewish New World Order reptilians https://www.bitchute.com/hashtag/trump/

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that there's a inexaustable supply of blatantly evil assholes for oppressive laws to be first aimed at and establish precedent against; by the time they come for you, everyone is too desensitised to care.

It's ironic that you are alluding to the quote by pastor Martin Niemöller that was making a point completely opposite to yours. Free speech is not about protecting popular opinions. I cannot believe how many comments hostile to free speech are on this thread. It's almost like people are begging for oppression.

I have a sneaking suspicion that Niemöller was admonishing his past self and German intellectuals in general for thinking Naziism was something that could be accommodated and compromised with if it didn't affect them directly, not admonishing those corporations that declined to publish their propaganda...

> I cannot believe how many comments hostile to free speech are on this thread

It's almost like what is being discussed has nothing to do with free speech. BitChute didn't have its free speech rights harmed in any way. No jack booted government thugs pointed their guns at the owners faces and told them to unplug from the internet.

All that happened is their current payment provider determined that their business relationship wasn't profitable and terminated the business relationship. BitChute is free to find another way to seek payment.

> It's almost like what is being discussed has nothing to do with free speech. BitChute didn't have its free speech rights harmed in any way. No jack booted government thugs pointed their guns at the owners faces and told them to unplug from the internet.

Jack booted thugs most certainly will point guns at anyone who tries setting up a payment processing system to compete with the company that blocked them.

> All that happened is their current payment provider determined that their business relationship wasn't profitable and terminated the business relationship. BitChute is free to find another way to seek payment.

BitChute is NOT free to find another way to seek payment, because of a state-enforced monopoly on the payment market.

It would be like if your water company decided to cut off water to your house, to compel you to stop speaking, at the behest of activists. Sure, you're "free" to carry buckets of fresh water to your house, I suppose.

No, this is not some business decision, this is systematic economic pressure intended to coerce someone into silence. And frankly I think it is good grounds for a RICO case.

> Free speech is not about protecting popular opinions.

It's also not about protecting any opinions (popular or unpopular) from private refusal to assist in propagating them.

Free speech is not the same as anyone else being obligate to provide assistance with distributing your speech, in fact, such an entitlement would violate freedom of speech for those compelled to participate in speech they disagree with.

Is it the freedom of banks to not offer checking accounts to minorities? Why can't a bank express itself in the form of denying service to some people? Must they be compelled to?

Yes. If these platforms and payment processors want to continue to enjoy the state-enforced privileges they receive, then they must, within reason, offer their services to all.

Twitter enshrines the most vile antisemitism out there[1]. Right after the Pittsburgh shooting, Twitter reviewed Farrakhan's comments where he called Jews "termites", and gave him the all clear.

What makes Twitter far worse than Gab is that Twitter actually took the time to have a human review it, and gave it the green light. Gab at least is not attempting to police its content. That makes Twitter much worse.

This is all hypocrisy. The "outrage" of Gab is completely fake. There is no legitimate argument against Gab that does not include Twitter.

[1]: https://www.ajc.com/news/national/twitter-won-suspend-louis-...

I mean, I'm far from the biggest fan of Twitter's ludicrously inconsistent moderation policy, but their raison d'etre isn't signal-boosting the far right (actively from their own social media accounts as well as passively from running an unmoderated forum) and they don't gloat about how synagogue shootings affect their traffic.

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