Hi Alpha Balls,
I wanted to speak about today’s particular trolls.
Earlier today after advertising our site to poal what can only be described as the taint, gooch of the internet. (Right below 4 chan the anus) A few trolls popped in to wolfballs to try and test the free speech aspects of the site.
As a site admin, it would be easy for me to just click ban, remove, and poof. Yeah they could make a new username but eventually getting banned enough will deter them from coming back.
Building up follower’s, communities, reputation is what makes these kinda sites fun.
But why would I do that?
Looking at this site, I start to feel like it’s a reflection of me. I am hosting it, contributing to it.
It really isn’t though. It’s a reflection of all the users. What one user does does not define what another user does.
And so it is dangerous to think that way.
I could say,
He isn’t participating in good faith. That is taking away from the other users.
But who defines how to participate? What line can we draw fairly?
Don’t say the Nword? That would be easy, i’m not black. What about Black Americans who use that as part of their normal Vernacular? What about White Americans who don’t like to hear words like cracker, kebler elf, pasty ect…
It’s not my responsibility to police what another human says from the comfort of his computer room.
And what benifit to the world would that be? If I banned bad speech that is just me telling people,
Look at me! look i’m not one of the bad guys. I’m a good person.
When no one really cares what my moral compass is. If they like that action it’s because they want the power to limit someone else’s expression to be less offending of their mindset. They want to hear speech friendly to their point of view. That is not how we learn new things. That is how you make echo chambers.
Thinking back to the mistakes of Reddit and Ruqqus.
Reddit completely betrayed the trust of around 70% of it’s user’s after Trump won his election. The site was overwhelmingly right of center until after that year. They Allow anti white racism while banning any criticism of woke culture. They effectively denied the voices of conservative black men and women, Pro Life women, religious Christians, and white and Asian people’s wanting a fair shot for their children applying to college.
Ruqqus decided that men who have been dealt a bad hand in life, either through failed marriage or genetic and or growth problems didn’t deserve to have a voice or a place to share advise. Unacceptable.
If I as an admin begin to ban user’s for their speech I am taking away their voice and if I do it when their post is in a community I don’t moderate I am also taking away the freedom of that moderator to moderate their space.
Neither of those things is acceptable for a democratic society to function.
Everyone needs a voice. Not everyone needs to agree to that voice.
Sometimes the loudest voice wins and not the smartest. But by giving everyone an equal upvote or downvote chance we are protecting man kind’s ability to self determination.
If we censor thoughts we take choice away. We take free will away.
I can’t do that. It is against my religious beliefs. Man kind is given free will. Your choices may be determined from a series of previous events so you can argue you don’t have any real free will, but I will not contribute to you losing your free will.
Wolfballs will keep it’s promise to promote free speech.
There are issues with protecting free speech.
It appears to me that there exist paid trolls (Possibly paid by reddit, facebook, feds) to purposefully post inflammatory content to get sites taken down. That is why I made the one rule you could say is against free speech.
That rule is to limit racial slurs on community names. Even that is up for debate btw.
Just by giving a reason why you would want the name is evidence that you probably aren’t a false flag attack.
I will not ban trolls from other people’s communities. I don’t want to site ban almost anyone.
Illegal content will of course end in a permanent ban. Speech will be allowed.
If anyone does not like a particular post, tell them why. Thats how a free society works.
-MasterofBalls-
Im not reading all that.
As long as you dont remove MY shitposts, I dont care what you do
In my view, Reddit screwed up by choosing viewpoint discrimination instead of just eliminating “methods,” like slurs.
Ruqqus screwed up by having a little cabal of Discord whiners who agreed they were goodthinkers and their problem wasn’t that they weren’t getting in enough users, it was that some users were horribly slur-heavy and repetitive, even as the community handled that.
Gab took a middle path and now is less of what it once was. It’s less like Voat became, and more like the old internet.
The real issue here is that users took it lying down on all these sites. Step up, mute the idiots, speak back, and say something blatantly offensive to trigger them real bad actors – basically whiners who want to vandalize, like most lazy people – so that they scurry back to wherever they can have a circle-jerk of angry racial scapegoating.
Gab is the only alternative that really found a sustainable path forward. They have a shop and earn enough to keep their family and business afloat with mild year over year growth. Which is why i’m not in a hurry to grow wolf balls. I will work on making sure it wins the long game by slowly adding good features, and just keeping it running as long as possible. Unfortunately the owner is not not able to travel Europe because his site is illegal there and he will get arrested.
The quality of the content is pretty decent if you pick the right people to follow too.
I can’t go to Germany for something we posted on ANUS.com two decades ago. Sort of a bummer.
I think there’s a gap for a Digg/Reddit-style site, and Gab can’t fill it. People need that old school forum with voting on links.
Interesting; yeah it’s Germany sending Andrew letters. I thought anus.com would look different lol.
