My point was: there exists a platform that is banned by app stores, cloud services and financial processors. It’s demonstrates not just a theoretical possibility to survive without them, it survives and functions… and is shunned by the people.
So it does not censor the sort of thing that reasonable people do want censored on their social media, and does censor the sort of things that people don't want arbitrarily censored.
And in exchange for that, you get to deal with inconvenient access.
Yeah, of course it's shunned. Based on what you've said, it doesn't represent any kind of practical improvement over the status quo, so the question of whether or not it's associated with / frequented by distasteful people doesn't even factor into this.
Classic martyr. You're making it sound like Gab is "shunned by the people" because it's uncensored. In reality it's an issue of content. The people just aren't interested in Gab's content. And that will never change because that shit content also happens to be the reason for Gab's existence.
Gab created a shit platform for shit people to post shit content and you're blaming everyone else for its failure.
In contrast, Reddit was plenty successful long before they started censoring to appease their corpo-overlords. The difference was that A) shit wasn't the only content available and B) average users weren't automatically subjected to the shit content that they were hosting.
> Gab created a shit platform for shit people to post shit content
I absolutely loved your hate speech. I do not agree with it but will always defend your right to say it.
Let me clarify just a couple of points.
1. Here’s what Gab’s founder tells about the purpose of Gab: Gab’s mission is to be the home of free speech online. It seeks to export American values and freedom to the maximum extent permitted by American law to Internet users around the world. Gab concurs with the Committee’s view that these values protect offensive and unpopular speech, but not illegal speech, such as threats. Unlawful speech is not and has never been allowed on Gab.
2. I am pointing at Gab as an example of definite *success*. It survives and functions despite being no-platformed and banned by 25+ service providers over the years including both App Stores, multiple payment processors, and hosting providers. The example of *failure* in this context is another free-speech platform… forgot it’s name - it was deplatformed in 2020 and stopped functioning for a long period of time. Very unprofessional.
(Edit: Parler of cause. Parler was deplatformed by Amazon and both app stores - and immediately went down. That’s what failure looks like)
So, you may think that they are shit people. Ok. But you’ve failed to silence them, despite trying heavily. Doesn’t it provoke your professional interest - how they managed to do it?
Maybe I was a little too flowery with my speech. But I think my points are still valid. Regardless of what Gab's founder writes, Gab (like Parler) was created in direct response to the deplatforming of white supremacists. That kind of content is just not going to attract mainstream attention.
In that sense, that makes Gab a failed platform. But you're right; the fact that it is up and running, in spite of getting blacklisted by big corpo, could be seen as a sort of success. I'm all for technology that can't be taken down by overzealous governments.
You kinda got me wrong too. I'm not for silencing anyone. I'm just explaining why no one is using Gab. Again, its not because its uncensored (as you bemoan). It's because Gab doesn't offer anything people want. Time and time again its been proven that users simply don't care about privacy / censorship / decentralization / some-other-high-minded-ideal. They care about convenience and content.
Are you being sarcastic? Because that Buzzfeed article very much supports my statements about Gab and doesn't mention Parler at all. To quote sabergirl278 (the only commenter on that page), "So basically, its a platform for hate speech?"
The article used a picture of Pepe the frog as Captain America and says things like:
"...but Gab.ai is attracting conservatives as an alternate social platform."
"At the moment, Gab feels like a conservative chatroom..."
"It also appears that Milo Yiannopoulos, a conservative writer who was permanently suspended from Twitter in July after his attack on actress Leslie Jones, has joined Gab."
"... Gab’s early, ideologically-narrow success plays into a larger trend in social media..."
This was the point you made and I quoted in my response to you:
> Gab (like Parler) was created in direct response to the deplatforming of white supremacists.
and you say that the article backs that up. Now you have provided quotes, let's see.
> The article used a picture of Pepe the frog as Captain America
Not a good start, as this is utterly irrelevant, for many reasons which I would think are as blindingly obvious as why using a comment beneath the article is irrelevant.
> ...but Gab.ai is attracting conservatives as an alternate social platform.
conservative is not a synonym for white supremacist, hence, it does not support your claim.
> At the moment, Gab feels like a conservative chatroom...
conservative is not a synonym for white supremacist, hence, it does not support your claim.
> It also appears that Milo Yiannopoulos, a conservative writer who was permanently suspended from Twitter in July after his attack on actress Leslie Jones, has joined Gab.
- conservative is not a synonym for white supremacist, hence, it does not support your claim.
- Even if Yiannopoulos is or was a white supremacist, Gab was launched *before* he was kicked off of Twitter and was no doubt in development beforehand.
> ... Gab’s early, ideologically-narrow success plays into a larger trend in social media...
ideologically-narrow here meaning conservative. Drum roll, please…
conservative is not a synonym for white supremacist, hence, it does not support your claim.
What I'd like to see from you is something that evidences your claim. For example, one of the founders saying they set it up to help white supremacists, or they had a secret meeting with white supremacists about setting up Gab for them and it was leaked… not some specious nonsense that conflates conservative with white supremacist, or points to the choice of image that some sub-editor chose to go along with the article. Is that too much to ask? Just a crumb of factually accurate, relevant, evidence that isn't based on redefining basic terms or smearing entire groups of people - massive groups - as being something they are clearly not.
Can you manage that? Because this is HN, not Twitter, so I'd appreciate that you put in the effort.
> Doesn’t it provoke your professional interest - how they managed to do it?
No, because that's not the hard part. Anyone can host a niche community "off grid" and make it profitable. It being niche is what enables that. It's not hard to get 2000 dedicated people to fuck around with crypto and side loading apps. It's basically impossible to get a critical mass of average people to do it.
Visa and Apple control their platforms by "offering" usability to the average person (mostly by taking away other easy options or out competing them with a moat). The only way the current crop of sites can fail now is if it becomes so bad that the censorship itself is more inconvenient than the difficult steps to work around mainstream infrastructure.
If something like Gab got to like 20-30% the size of Reddit and 99% of it's userbase was normal people doing normal people stuff then I'd be interested. Because before that point we're not going to see any real effort from the incumbents to stop them.
>I am pointing at Gab as an example of definite success
As far as I can tell, Gab is still losing money and not gaining users (100,000 estimated active as of now, despite 6 years of existence), so it's hard to call it a success. It, like previous alt-right responses to mainstream platforms such as Parler, will likely die the same death for the same reasons: not enough money or users to be sustainable.
>I absolutely loved your hate speech.
It's the opinion shared by a significant part of the population, and the content is crap. I tried each of the "alternative" platforms, and on each one am bombarded by the stupidest scams, "buy gold" idiots, and such ignorance and stupidity I dropped each one.
The userbase trends far-right so most people will never join unless the userbase is more central, which will not happen. The CEO has engaged in the most nonsensical anti-semitic screeds on Twitter and elsewhere, having to repeatedly delete his own content. It's no wonder people don't like the platform or it's content.
Researchers, analyzing random samples of millions of posts on the site, find many multiples of hate speech more than other platforms, find the majority of posts are political (and right leaning), that people moving to this site after being banned elsewhere increase in toxicity because Gab lets them (as long as they have the "right" viewpoint), and on and on. The academic literature on the platform content and behaviors is spot on in my opinion. These are empirical reasons that most people will not join. Want some good reading on what the site actually has? Look no further than Google Scholar [1]
If most people did not share the opinion that the content is bad, more people would use those platforms.
