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Comment by nikau | Hacker News Reader

Sad news - only because the people there will move out of their lazaretto onto other sites.

this is likely good news. When reddit closed down hate subreddits people migrated to other subreddits and researchers studied their behavior. Turned out that individual users reduced their hateful behavior once they entered into more mixed communities.

I don't think there is much evidence for this 'Lich King' thesis that keeps coming up on HN. Destroying these platforms has likely positive effects.

I'm surprised people even find this intuitive. When you want to deprogram extremists in the real world you take them out of their radical communities, you don't put them into a nazi village or send them off to ISIS.

I'd prefer them to have full hateful behaviour in their own playpen rather than reduced hateful behaviour where I hang out.

That works for you short term, the other works for the majority over the longer-term.

That is fine until there are implications in the real world. Extremist echo chambers can convince someone to commit a physical atrocity such as a shooting or bombing.

The real question is whether or not the shooter who frequents 8chan/2chan/voat/etc would have committed the shooting if they didn’t frequent extremist sites?

I understand what you are saying but it cannot fall on existing communities to accept people who doesn't align with the communities goal.

And to your real question: its nothing different than saying movies and video games inspires a CRAZY PERSON to do harm. I can read 'Mein Kampf' without building gas chambers, and I'm sure you can too.

"Hateful" is subjective. Where you hang out simply has a different definition of hateful to where they hang out.

Utter nonsense. The community of Voat, as well as other far right/alt-right online communities, are hateful and wrong. If a group is intolerant of an unchangeable characteristic of another group (esp. race, socio-religious background, etc.), then it is hateful group to be opposed by free society.

Indeed - there is some leeway for dark humour and whatnot, but voat was just pure vitriolic racism

There are a lot of places that are intolerant of men, would you suggest they be banned too?

Who said anything about being banned?

So if I punch you, that’s just another way of patting you on the back?

It’s really ironic that given how much they bash it, the far right seem to be the ones who have taken postmodern nihilism the most seriously.

i mean, there are surely differences in what people consider hateful, but in the case of voat there were open calls to “complete” the shoah, so i am not sure this is the community on which to stake your claim.

4chan /pol, the original cesspool for this stuff, was created as a “containment board” to try to get the Nazi edgelord shit off other boards on the site. It didn’t work. Instead it grew there until it about took over the whole site.

A separate site like Voat may be a bit different though. That is more of a closed ghetto for it.

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