I don't want a bunch of Racists and White Supremecists to come here.
I know it's an unpopular opinion here, or at least it seems to be at times. But, you know, every time some site like YouTube or Reddit or something bans a bunch of fucking knobs, we all talk about how they should come here. Those centralized sites sometimes ban people for stupid reasons, or simply because they don't want them on their site.
As a centralized site, with ads, they kinda have to do at least a modicum of "censorship" or demonetization of certain videos or posts or whatever, because advertisers will complain otherwise when some idiot reports on it. "Oh my god! My advert has been next to a controversial video...for months...and suddenly I care because there's an article about it!" Since they're reliant on these advertisers, they kinda freak out when they pull their adverts. Of course, they often overreact and don't react intelligently.
Often it seems like they just don't have properly trained personnel or a proper structure to deal with policing their own site. They also don't communicate well and people are forced to guess what they did wrong, and can't necessarily appeal whatever decision that was seemingly made by a single untrained employee.
What am I talking about? Well, the latest Adpocalypse has just started. Apparently this is like the third one I think. I thought it was the second one at first, but I guess I forgot one in there. I almost want to say it's possibly the 4th though. Whatever. Basically they keep doing waves of banning people and demonetizing people and can't catch a clue that they're fucking morons in how they're doing it.
If you wanna see a video covering one of the major controversies involved in it and the whole situation, Philip DeFranco didn't do a horrible job.
He at least made it clear that it wasn't caused by someone throwing a shit fit due to being harassed on YouTube for literally years. I'm sorry, that's really not acceptable. I had to deal with that shit in school. It breaks you down.
He didn't cover the massive number of innocents that have been caught in the cross hairs though. This, of course, happens every time YouTube pulls this shit, because the idiots can't seem to fucking realize that they need to create a structure in their company for dealing with standard social media shit like moderation, demonetization, banning, etc. They also can't seem to realize they need to be fucking clear about what they are banning someone for, or demonetizing them for. All it would actually take in that regard is for them to write down the reasons, then have it go through some approval process, and then become their script for that particular reason. Or just copy paste their fucking TOS and clarify what part violates it with a timestamp or something.
But that's not really what this is about. They're fucking idiots. What this is about is the fact that this latest "Adpocalypse" includes white supremacists and racists and...a lot of people that we don't necessarily want here. Sure, the idiot that thinks he's funny making fun of some guy's lisp and selling "Socialism is for F*gs" shirt, with a little censorship thing that apparently refers to fig trees and I guess is a fucking joke of some sort, well, he's actually not too bad. He's an idiot, but he kinda has at least a modicum of free speech. Doesn't mean that he should be just allowed to insult and bully someone for years. He totally should be demonetized or flagged if he moves here. Just maybe not flagged to oblivion.
However, the people that this whole stupidity was actually about, the white supremacists and racists, I don't want them to come here. Yeah, sure, we have freedom of speech and are anti-censorship and shit...but we don't have to appeal to the worst of fucking society. Lets appeal to all the people caught in the crossfire, and the people that just like boobies when Tumblr bans adult blogs, and people with unpopular opinions that aren't racist and homophobic. They can spout their opinions...I guess...but lets just not appeal to them being able to spout them here. Why would we want a massive group of homophobic white supremacist racists to move here? Or, for that matter, people that believe it's their right to be attracted to fucking babies. Ironically, that's not using "fucking" for emphasis, there was a group that was banned from reddit a while ago because they believed that discrimination against pedophilia is tantamount to discrimination against LGBT people. They're trying to be recognized as another letter of LGBTQ...
There are all sorts of people in society that might be censored for their opinion...or in the case of YouTube, because they're so fucking stupid, just commenting on something that happened in regards to something that might be censored. Just because they might need a place that they won't be censored doesn't mean that we have to bring them here. At least not until we fucking grow a lot bigger, so they can mix in.
Do you know what would happen if a bunch of racist homophobic creators decided to move to Steem? We might double in active uses...and all of them would be racist homophobes.
Now, despite the news hosing Trump, because he's a fucking idiot, there are of course tons of normal regular people that might come with those people. They just hopefully wouldn't go to a rally with Nazis. Maybe they just don't like censorship...or are someone's racist grandma or some such.
But we don't want the truly awful people among them. We don't want a whole load of people invading, commenting horrible things on posts, and possibly even buying in and upvoting horrible shit to the top.
Not that we don't already have some horrible shit at the top. We don't need a bunch of racist shit in trending too though.
Of course, it's probably not likely that we'll get a whole bunch of people moving here. And even if we did, it probably wouldn't be a massive audience of some major white supremacist creator. Doesn't mean we should tempt them though. We probably don't want any extra creators like that coming here.
We don't want a bunch of homophobic pedophile bronies posting about how the jews took away their rainbow colored swastikas.
Lets appeal to actually good creators that are just afraid of YouTube fucking shit up, because they're morons, not the ones that maybe kinda sorta kinda possibly weren't really worth hearing. Sure, I guess they should be allowed to voice their opinion...but they don't have to voice it here...and YouTube doesn't have to pay them for it. If they wanna come here, let them find it on their own, or make their own website.
I hear what you're saying, but I see Steem as a place for all of humanity in the long run. I think it would be best if we didn't get a huge migration all at once because as you alluded to, that would brand us as "The Oasis for societies terribles"
One of the ways I think Steem can change the world is by making free speech absolute. The vast majority of people are not white supremacists and the longer we exist, the more the population on Steem will reflect the population of the world.
I think the good ideas will overpower the shitty ones, but everyone should have their freedom to say what they want and it should be absolute. That's just my opinion.
The biggest issue is our population size. They would overwhelm us if there was actually a major migration of a few creators and a hefty percentage of their audience. They could even buy in fairly easily if they wanted to, but I doubt most people would drop a few hundred dollars on a social media account.
Unless they were from the gaming community. Some of them will spend hundreds of dollars on a free-to-play game.
Most would just be minnows, and probably wouldn't buy in right away, so if they were problem users, it wouldn't be a big deal. If they make inappropriate comments, they will get flagged, and it might not be that bad. Though it perhaps could be emotionally distressing.
That's really what I'm worried about, not what some might view Steem as, though that's no good either. If we have a bunch of users flood in that are abusive and hateful, it could effect our current members. The guy that got in trouble, demonetized, is trying to hide behind free speech to protect multiple rants over years, making fun of someone for being a gay Mexican with a lisp. Verbal abuse has a real effect on people's psyche.
I would certainly consider flagging him if he were here, and that's kinda what demonetization is. It's the central platform deciding something isn't worthy of getting adverts, and therefore being paid. Being here we put the control in the hands of those that have bought in and earned Steem Power though, rather than faceless employees of a centralized corporation.
Society won't lose out if a few videos by someone making fun of someone else for their lisp are deleted. At least not much. But censorship has larger implications. And that idiot being abusive towards another person has historical significance. That is absolutely what happens all the time in schools all over. He just never grew out of being a bully, and is now defending it as comedy.
Our flagging system, while not perfect, can be used to discourage such behavior, if people are willing to spend their VP to flag, and invest in Steem to help maintain it. But, at the same time, they can buy in and use their own VP to abuse and discourage flags.
In 100 years, or even 50, videos like the ones that guy got demonetized for will be used for historical study into the conflicts and problems of the time, and we might lose out on that if YouTube demonetizes them all and the creators delete them...so...yeah...censorship is bad...but I think we need to be careful who we try to bring here until we grow a bit bigger, and fix our flagging system to be a bit better, as well as curation.
Freedom of speech is a very complicated issue, once you get into the cases where people really sort of cringe having to defend it.
Well put. I've thought about this before. People think it's cool and censorship is too much in general. However, if Steem becomes a gathering places for people with extreme opinions it will be harder to admit I use Steem.
If they want to use the infowars or conspiracy or nsfw tag, I'm generally cool with anything. However, if they don't tag extreme content as such, I think downvoting them for tag abuse will be an option.
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