Beyond the “deplorable” aspects of its content, Gab once had (until March 2017) an interesting technical aspect: fusing Twitter-style short-form microblogging with Reddit’s up/down-voting to popularly rank posts in page visibility.
I can only imagine how many problems Gab’s fusion of microblogging with up-downvotes created in terms of content moderation and user communication.
To reach its goal of diversifying its audience, the company has done only one thing: It removed the downvote button. Like on Reddit, users had the ability to vote a post higher or lower, determining its relevancy on the forum. Now items can only be voted up.
Sanduja is convinced the change will make the platform more positive and inclusive. In a phone call, he said Gab removed downvotes because trolls were doing it for entertainment and to harass women who were defending themselves. Also, “there were a lot of social justice warriors and members of the far left coming into our site essentially trying to start a brouhaha.”
Huh.
I’m guessing the ethics of downvoting as a moderation tool have not yet been perfected, even on a site which fused most of the Twitter microbloggimg experience with Reddit’s downvoting feature.
In fact, Gab had both up/down-voting AND reblogging. Which one was used for its promotion algorithm if there was one? We’re they competing with each other?
And the difference between microblogging sites and news/question sites is how the former are geared toward a tighter, personal expression which isn’t necessarily meant to invite a high level response and assessment compared to posts on the latter. To place the scrutinizing tool of public downvoting on all microblog posts seems like not only a tool for massive abuse, but also a great waste of such a tool.
It reminds me of that one Gumball episode in which the characters 1-5 star-rate each other on an app, resulting in the entire town becoming paralyzed from doing anything in their lives in fear of losing their stars (someone actually tried to do this in real life).
It’s a bit like the much-requested “dislike” button which will likely never appear on Facebook. Those who dislike the “dislike” button – including Mark Zuckerberg himself- criticize the potential for abuse of users through vote-brigading. Facebook, which operates with more hierarchy in their design of posts and comments, has went their own way in adding “reaction buttons” to posts and comments.
To date, YouTube, Reddit, Quora and Stack Exchange are the only prominent sites to use downvoting as a moderation tool (Quora only allows comments to be downvoted). None of these would be considered a microblogging site.
I could only see downvoting of microblogs as something better than a user-abusive tool if the downvoting were implemented in a different way than how it is implemented as thumbs up-thumbs down on Reddit or YouTube. There has to be more than that.
Reading how Rahm Emanuel helped pull together left-wing and right-wing Democrats in order to win the 2006 midterms, I’m seeing the criticism about how the minority of right-wing Democrats like Heath Shuler wasn’t much help when it came to passing progressive legislation, since so many of them voted against the ACA, the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Act, the Lilly Ledbetter Act, and so on.
So keeping a group of right-wing Democrats under the Democratic Caucus banner was a paper tiger.
There are many such obsessives throughout the world, including people like Victor Orban and Vladimir Putin and Marine Le Pen and Brian Brown of NOM. They hate the ideas of gay marriage and immigration because their countries may become less White, less Christian, less “safe” and less familiar to themselves.
It’s the same fear that helped animate apartheid.
Brian Brown can conveniently defend Orban’s policy as an “appreciation of diversity” until Hungary begins to come to blows against their neighbors in the name of nationalist expansionism and “Greater Hungary”.
The comments underneath this article, justifying cutting off “freeloaders” and “moochers”, give me pause.
I think we’re soon to be at the point of secession – internal or external – when the rage against government assistance becomes a conflict over our very values as a nation.
It is now a character flaw to be on public assistance. The able-bodied middle class suburbanite who loudly professes on the Internet to owe no debt (“because I saved money and worked hard!”) is now our ubermenschen over the lives of the lowly, “lazy” “freeloader”.
May these days and these sentiments pass quickly.
Thought:
urbanization in America is a catalyst for the growth of social liberalism, but social liberalism doesn’t scale well in rural and suburban areas. Economic justice has more unifying power across the urban-rural divide than social liberalism.
Redefine “taxpayer”.
Plutocrats have set taxpayer against taxpayer, taxpayer against beneficiary, taxpayer against public sector worker, taxpayer against climate and environment, taxpayer against government.
I wonder when the taxpayer will be turned against the military and police, just to complete the full number of demographics and institutions the “hard-working taxpayer” hates their “hard-earned money” going to, just so that we’ll get on with Civil War II.
I’m watching #Twilight for the first time. This movie is awkward!
My takeaway:
*Breathe…..*
Everyone was jumping out to help her! Everyone was a robot! Exposition overload! Edward had a hard time with words! Carlisle is a mannequin! Jasper is Justin Timberlake circa 1999! Waylon was a weird uncle dude! James barely had any eyebrows! Werewolf dude’s father spoke only in cliches and dad jokes! I don’t know if I want someone to look at me like Edward was looking at Bella in chemistry because his head was shifting wayyyyyyyyyy too much!
As non-electoral movements, Occupy and Indivisible may be years apart in age, but I think they compliment each other.
Occupy was (and in some areas, still is) the urban tent revival which sought revival in the face of persistent economic inequality. Indivisible is the direct district-by-district action against politicians (mostly at the federal level) who seek to further multiple inequalities.
Occupy was limited by being an urban movement which centered their actions in urban spaces and needs, but it also pushed mightily for income inequality to be considered a massive political crisis. Indivisible is still unfolding as a political force, but it is centered around influencing legislators and their often rural-spread districts.
Indivisible may go to places where Occupy largely could not.
Mitch Landrieu’s speech is the sort of conversation that more Southern White working class men need to have with each other, especially if they’re descendants of Confederate soldiers.
They need to question who this war benefitted, because it wasn’t their farmer ancestors who gained anything beyond death, destruction and deprivation. What class did the framers of the Confederate government come from? Why did these aristocrats prize their way of life as the “Southern” way of life, and not that of the majority of White men who didn’t own slaves?
Why did so many working class White men go along to war and not resist the Confederate draft? Why didn’t more men desert the ranks like Newton Knight did?
The severe class divide between the Dixie aristocracy and the soldiers sent to die in Gettysburg and Antietam is embarrassing. White men who are descended from those soldiers should ask themselves and each other if the fight was worth it or if they got played like an Appalachian fiddle.
