(MOB cancelled himself and thereby wolfballs)

Thank you everyone for participating in wolfballs 1.

This has been a wild ride.

When wolfballs first started there was basically no free speech sites up.

Ruqqus was shutting down, scored doesn’t allow community creation, saidit was always off and there was basically no where you could post people dying of vaccines.

It was a hard time for me. My job was threatened with a vaccine requirement. A threat I successfully fought off with a religious accommodation request.

I was scared, I felt powerless, and I wanted a place everyone could come and talk about all the crazy stuff that was going on without being threatened with weird censorship. Like doctors post being deleted.

Times have changed.

Twitter is a much better place. As we’ve seen from Elon there is still abuse. But the fedivserse is better too with new great instances like Nazi.st

Scotch has a lot of censorship but it is still better than reddit and you can actually get more than 20 upvotes on c/gaming.

Discord is now a viable competitor to youtube. Publics is ok, catgirl.gay has cemented itself as the king of say anything within American legal boundaries. (But no tities) , Vivaldi social is a thing and when people want to talk about election problems or vaccines killing there are now mainstream places to do that. There was not before.

There was a lot about moderation I did not understand though.

For one there are a lot of real nazi’s on the internet. I thought most of them were fake trolls just shit posting for lulz.

When I thought free speech I thought that doctors, lawyers should be able to give their professional opinions without fear of censorship.

That people should be able to give opinions on trials that are not popular but are supported by evidence.

Things get much more complicated though. There appear to be government actors and company actors who try to prevent sites from growing by posting purposefully provocative content.

Also the reddit format is really a relic from the early 2010’s and modern bots don’t allow it to function the way it was intended.

Up/down votes are meaningless when I can deploy a thousand bots to make content what ever score I want.

That is why reddit is full of weird products on the front page and they use so much shadow banning to try to keep that sort of behavior at bay.

In order for a categorical social media to work it must involve curation which is just another word for selective censorship. So the format isn’t really good for freespeech anyways.

I will explore more decentralized social media but it will look different and I will be under a different name.

It’s time to hang up the mask. Masterofballs unfortunately will die. Due to vaccine induced myocarditis i’m sure. However it is not the end for Mr balls because he will one day be reborn into something else. Maybe something better.

wolfballs will stay up for a few days for people to clean house, grab any memes you left and I’ll try to keep a backup somewhere and leave a way for people to contact me if they forgot something.

I hope everyone can check out Mike Hawk or other cool instances.

Thank you everyone

MOB

  • Gaywallet (they/it)@beehaw.org
    4·
    2 years ago

    For one there are a lot of real nazi’s on the internet. I thought most of them were fake trolls just shit posting for lulz.

    I can see how someone might fall into this trap, but scholars of speech and social phenomenon have been warning of this for quite some time. When an entire scientific field starts to emerge around events happening in real time, it can help to pay attention to what the experts think, even if you disagree, as they can often provide context or insight.

    Also you say this after plugging a website with literally nazi in the url? odd

    When I thought free speech I thought that doctors, lawyers should be able to give their professional opinions without fear of censorship.

    What an interesting take. I’ve never heard of anyone complaining about this. I happen to work in medicine and not law, so I can’t comment on the latter, but I’ve never heard a clinician of any sort (not just doctors but PAs, NPs, etc.) talk about this fear. In fact most medical schools have spent a lot more effort focusing on how to talk with patients in the last 10-20 years because a lack of censorship has caused fractured clinician patient relationships, especially among minorities.

    Things get much more complicated though. There appear to be government actors and company actors who try to prevent sites from growing by posting purposefully provocative content.

    While I’m sure this is true on a certain level, I doubt anywhere on lemmy warrants the size for this to truly be happening. I would love to see instances of this happening on this platform, however, to understand better how to defend against this kind of behavior.