Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

Most of the original Voat groups were groups that has been kicked off of Reddit, but then people there made groups that corresponded to groups that were still on Reddit, like /v/science and /v/movies.

Reading those is quite an experience. On /v/science right now there is a submission about dark matter and MOND [1], which was also discussed today on HN [2].

The title of the Voat submission will give you a good idea of what the place is like: "Another Jew Science Lie to Fall? DARK MATTER not needed?! Evidence of "modified gravity" in 150 galaxies strengthens dark matter alternative. Gravity has >8 anomalies but this one is solvable."

That's actually a fairly tame discussion by Voat standards. Here's one that was a submission of a video on pilot wave theory from PBS Space Time [3] (or as it is referred to in the comments, (((PBS)))). Voat title: "Kikes have been shitting up science for over a century". See the comments for how the ether is the right theory and the Jews suppressed it.

Here's what a movie discussion is like over there [4], "Mandolorian - Season 2".

[1] https://voat.co/v/science/4169827

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25496725

[3] https://voat.co/v/science/4152241

[4] https://voat.co/v/movies/4164913

Holy fuck. That’s way worse than I expected.

I can’t imagine people actually think like that. They must be doing it for the shock value, or because of some echo chamber effect.

It's worse. They actually believe that.

Yes definitely (at least some? many? of them).

But how do you know they do? How did you learn this? If I may ask

Not for this, but for the "obviously crazy" Trump beliefs we have a useful proxy. PredictIt ran a large number of betting markets (far more than a traditional bookmaker) for the 2020 US Presidential Election.

Of course the markets about Trump have lots of people spouting outrageous nonsense. You could dismiss that as just "for shock value". But PredictIt is real money (albeit not the sums involved in the "real" international betting markets) and the actual bets placed reflect those same crazy beliefs.

About 24 hours ago the market for how many Electoral College votes Trump will get closed. The answer, as we've known for about a week now, was 232. In a normal healthy market, even if people are writing comments saying that the US military will force people to vote again at gun point, the price for Trump gets 232 votes would be $1 (the way PredictIt works you're getting one dollar for each correct prediction, so if you are absolutely certain of something it's worth precisely $1 and you wouldn't sell it for anything less).

The closing price, less than 24 hours ago, was 96¢. For 96¢ you could buy a dollar, just by being sure of a well known fact about Donald Trump's loss. Because the people "trolling" the comments really believe he didn't lose.

> For 96¢ you could buy a dollar

I'm skeptical of this because Withdrawals are subject to a 30-day holding period after your initial deposit and a 5% processing fee. (https://www.predictit.org/terms-and-conditions) If people have trouble getting in and out of trades those are the situations in which you expect market prices to be somewhat wrong. 5% is actually spectacularly high in most situations, imagine how much of an edge you need at predicting to beat that.

The price on predictit was ~85c for a very long time after the election. But it's not necessarily because people are unreasonable, there are limits of arbitrage as well. In order to make any profit at all you'd need to lock up a sizeable chunk of money, say $1000, for something like a month, pay 5% commission, plus I imagine the hassle of it all, and all you get is a few dollars. In economics literature things like this are described as limits of arbitrage, to explain situations (like deep out of money options) where it seems like an arbitrage opportunity exists but where everyone still thinks it's a bad trade.

You also have the non-zero risk of the site shutting down. Predict-It's been around a long time now, but I still wouldn't wire them more than I could afford to totally lose. 4% on what I can afford to lose really isn't worth the hassle.

I haven't checked for PredictIt since I am not an American and can't bet there. But the usual financial construction for a betting market where you can take both sides is the same as for a law firm, or a share dealer, all your money held by them is legally separate from their money so even if they get into horrible debt problems their creditors have no possible claim to your funds and you just get it all back in a few weeks after the paperwork is done.

It's clearly not as truly safe as government bonds or insured savings where the government is ultimately on the hook to make you square - but it's pretty safe. I wouldn't put next week's rent money (if I rented) on "Trump lost the election" at PredictIt. But money put aside for the new car, for next year's vacation or for a birthday gift in February? No sweat.

But predictit is not a usual financial construction. For example, the first thing it says is:

> PredictIt is intended and offered as an experimental research and educational facility of Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand (“Provider” or “We”), not as an investment market or a gambling facility. PredictIt is not regulated by, nor are its operators registered with, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) or any other regulatory authority.

I don't know precisely what that means for segregation of funds, but I don't want to just assume they work the way I would imagine them to work.

PredictIt, IIRC, also has limitations on total bettors on an issue, and amount an individual can bet in total and per issue.

Those constraints can produce odd results. Say, if the market was “full” of investors so no one new could enter, and also had reached a point where the people who weren't irrationally holding out expectations of Trump has already maxed out their positions, the only available trades would be between relative dead-enders.

Plus it costs money to withdraw funds from the market (5%, from another comment), so it looks like even if you could get in, you could actually only by 95¢ for 96¢.

Ideological homophily is a bitch. I actually tried arguing voaters out of their antisemitism for a while. As you might expect, it was a thankless task. I really think that examples like voat should make us skeptical of online communities in general. No one likes to be told they are wrong, or tell others they are wrong, so you get echo chambers.

I've seen it happen. Stew in that cesspool of "jokes" and humor long enough, and it becomes how you think. Your brain comes to anticipate the jokes and the comments so you're part of the in-crew. And you start to think "I mean, it's kind of true". A subset of those people go on to be truly hateful.

Don't be surprised that there are people who believe such things for real. There're organizations for the 1 in 50 or 1 in 1000 brightest people, but there's the other end of the spectrum too.

A friend/acquaintance of mine has Alex J and Info Wars as her primary (only?) news source, and she sounded proud about this, as if she's discovered something others didn't know about.

Jeez.. what a disgusting, hateful place. Good riddance.

If only reddit would follow it.

Why I suddenly felt like voat is a psychological science experiment?

In a way, it is. It's the perfect embodiment of "careful what you wish for", which is referencing people's inability to anticipate unintended consequences. Every HN post about Patreon or Youtube banning somebody leads to lengthy treatises about free speech.

Well, here's Voat. All free speech, all the time. What's that, bigots have taken over the platform and chased out all the non-bigots? Who could have seen this coming?

Well, voat was a community founded and populated by all the people banned or unwelcome by mainstream platforms. I don’t think it follows that Reddit would become as bad a voat if it was “all free speech all the time”.

I think the bigger issue is that somebody has to pay the bills. Very few are willing to pay to host those sorts of extremists views.

> I don’t think it follows that Reddit would become as bad a voat if it was “all free speech all the time”.

Do you remember r/uncensored_news, a sub that sprang up in the wake of the Miami Pulse nightclub shooting? Apparently its raison d'etre was to show people "the truth" because r/news moderators were not approving the numerous news posts about it fast enough. Unsurprsingly, that was considered censorship.

It took all of 3 months for that sub to become filled with racist and bigoted misinformation. Reddit's admin policy is very generous. On numerous occasions, they have allowed hate speech communities to grow, right up until the inevitable calls to violence occur. At which point Reddit kills the sub and pretends it never existed.

But the same issue applies for that sub. Because the mainstream place pushed them out, all the deplorables end up on the next best alternative.

That's a true -but incomplete- picture of what happened.

I never made an account there, but from what I read on reddit they modified some of the parts of their software so that you weren't able to do anything if you didn't get upvotes or whatever, and if you got too many downvotes you were basically shadow-banned.

The impression I had was that it's a more extreme version of what Reddit does.

Free speech would be "ok, here's my sub on anarcho communism", but that's not what happened -because you'd be effectively shadowbanned before you had the chance to create that sub.

I salute your visiting the site and creating this view.

Whatever drove you to wade into these waters? I’m greatful, But also curious.

Just look at the comment thread on his goodbye message. There's no shortage of commenters blaming jews, blacks and gays (with much less savory language). And they all have plenty of upvotes.

Question is where they will end up now that this forum is dead. They will find another one.

They already have Parler. Don't recommend going there, it's even more explicit in its toxicity... Also not public, for a reason I guess...

That's a rolling dumpster file.

And they just donated several million dollars to the operator:

https://www.walletexplorer.com/wallet/00000014ea8b260f

Wow. Clicked your last link. That is absolutely awful.

Same here. “It’s a silly sci fi western style brain dead fun tv show what could you hate?” Boy was I wrong. I’m not sad a site that tolerates that is closing.

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