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Comment by skrowl | Hacker News Reader

In an age where everything other than hard left speech is quickly labeled 'hate speech', I think that any censorship-free areas will quickly be judged as having a 'bad community'.

Have you ever actually tried Dissenter or Gab, or are you basing the 'bad community' off of what you've heard elsewhere?

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I have tried it. The public feed given to me had something about "killing all trannies", putting <n-word> back in Africa by force, climate change denial, and questioning why America doesn't yet arm everyone who isn't Muslim so the Muslim people can be shot on demand.

And I seriously wish I made this all up. This place is a violent cesspool.

That was my experience as well. In the first six posts I saw were two by _literal_ Nazis, so I left and never came back.

I've browsed both. They are filled with hate. In fact, I just took a look on Gab's public explore page:

https://gab.com/popular

within a couple of scrolls found a rant about "Corey Booker's tranny abortions", and a reference to a "lispy Mexican faggot". Most other posts are either pro-Trump memes or anti-immigration rants, and there are plenty of those on Facebook and Twitter.

I get it: the sales pitch here is that you come to Gab to hear interesting thoughts are are censored by mainstream sites. But I'm not seeing a single post that made me stop and think about anything. It's mindless, hateful garbage. Even if you disagree with that and don't think it's a "bad" community I still question what would ever make it an interesting or worthwhile community. Because I'm seeing nothing.

I don't know gab too well, but the chans and voat DO contain worthwhile discussions as well as news/facts that are removed from HN/reddit etc.

I've been to Voat a number of times out of curiosity, and not once have I seen anything resembling meaningful discussion. It was a bunch a comments promoting drivel about white supremacy, lizard-people, LGBT+ lynching, Anti-Semitism, and Fascism. In fact, I distinctly remember every single thread having at least one comment regarding white supremacy.

The Chans are a different entity, as there's no voting function to complete the attention seeker feedback loop. I'd even argue they're one of the few places on the internet that doesn't bubble much, as it's completely anonymous with little reward function. Voat on the other hand is probably the one of the foulest places on the internet when it comes to discussing disgusting and dangerous ideology.

Right now, these are the top posts on voat:

- A post about Vimeos removal of the Google/Veritas Video

- A Post that criticized that r/the_donald removed 83000 posts in the last month (implying that relative to voat, T_D is too heavily censored)

- A Post about Eric Schmidts visit to a Hillary Clinton Rally during the last election where he wore a Staff Badge

- A Post about the recent murder of a German politician that was most likely murdered because of his anti-German remarks in the past

- An anti-jewish gif in /funny

- An informative post about a high number of NYPT suicides

- A post about Mexican Migrants

- A post about Muslims faking to be American Cops

Followed by some making fun of reddit and AOC, pointing out double standards of Israel vs US walls, cop power abuse, complaining about a low sentence for a child rapist, A post about Merkels Health status etc etc.

I think adults can stomach that, and from time to time learn something new.

I just looked. About one-third is drivel, one-third is pro-Trump, and one-third is just normal stuff (there's a picture of a 1930's vintage dress, and a pretty picture some one took of Cork, Ireland). Show me the social network which is clean. It's probably a similar breakdown on many others, just biased to the right rather than the left. Also, I think Gab doesn't do the kind of algorithmic filtering, promotion, and demotion of twitter/fb/etc.

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