ban him

i am unbananable

I am a banana

Plenty of opportunity to express free speech on the internet (for almost any opinion there's a forum, imageboard or subreddit where that opinion will be popular), but ESR has the rare quality that it's reasonably active, has mostly decently substantive posts but doesn't seem to require lots of moderation or some psychological fuckery like reddit karma (it's very good that there's no [ - ] and that plusses are reserved mostly for people delivering dank memes or being awesome).

It's a pretty good and unique format for a site like this. If I were to make a community-focused website thing, I would draw heavy inspiration from ESR (and small niche imageboards).

Anything that is within Reddit, or works like Reddit (Hacker News, Voat for example) is not a free speech website. This is because of the upvoting and downvoting system. I got shadow-banned from Hacker News after three posts..

Forums are nicer except the mods will ban you so hard, I got banned from rockpapershotgun.com for telling them that I was stockpiling boats after Al Gore told me the world was going to flood, I mean I didnt get banned but they deleted every post I made which was even worse. Also on Quake Champions Official forums I have had my posts deleted five times, which means that the next time I express myself I am banned ;[

Now, the point is that lets say that, you want to express an unpopular opinion... That's what makes a website a free speech site. So, just going around not-free-speech sites that agree with you doesn't make them free speech sites :0

The voting system does in no way hinder you from expressing your views. It influences you psychologically to be conformist, but ultimately you still can say what you want without meaningful punishment. It's just that you end up at the bottom of threads if you go against the jerk. Individual subreddits are of course dictatorships and you can be banned at will of their moderators, and there's little excuse for that in my opinion (moderators should be elected democratically by long-time contributors of their subreddits, and their actions should be nullifiable by popular vote by that same electorate).
Thinking about this free speech thing has led me to believe that it is actually not a helpful way to think about this problem (probably because websites are public and private space at the same time), and that things are actually okay the way they are. Everybody should just go to the places where their moronic ideas are going to be celebrated by fellow morons, and that's the problem solved. ESR's probation is also pretty good. Limit people's ability post in such a way that anybody can choose to ignore them (i.e. they only get to post and comment their own journals, and other people can auto-hide these topics).

the punishment is if you get down voted enough the comment isn't visible to people

yep

Yes it does. If people downvote your comment, its invisible/at the bottom. That's censorship and it encourages people to stop posting because they are effectively banned. ESR's probation is so rarely used that I don't complain about it.

By your logic, anyone who comments rather late in an ESR thread is censored because their comments are at the bottom of the thread and therefore invisible (lol).

It's not the same, esr comments are sequential and you know to read it all the way if you want, Reddit is designed for only reading the comments on the top and ignoring the ones on the bottom, that's why they even hide those comments.

Have you ever read more than few top posts on leddit?

The communities are not without its faults, but the treatment you receive is mostly because you indulge in pure demagogy.

Do you think that I "indulge in pure demagogy" any more than anyone else on those forums? What is that supposed to even mean?

The way how you present your opinion doesn't have to be as provocative as it's used to be here. Think of other forums and communities as different cultures, ESR is quite brute in comparison to how sensitive everyone else has gotten nowadays. If you'd just try to be more impartial and neutral whenever posting something, without the gimmicks and borderline offensive, creative humor that stirs up compassion, controversy and without challenging the perspective of people in such a direct fashion, then you'd be seen more serious and less offensive.

You are right about the freedom of speech being "censored" and impacted by the moderation more than it should, but some borders of behaviour are necessary that shouldn't be crossed in order for everyone to have a constructive competition of ideas and the possibility of a well ordered discussion.

That's fair, that its more sensitive. I'm just used to websites like ESR.

The answer is:
YES

I am banned from most other websites, and it is only a matter of time before I am banned from nearly all of them ;0

Meanwhile only ESR gets to witness my quality posting , because it is the better website

many boards on 4chan or other related anonymous sites are pretty much unfiltered unless you post cheese pizza

4chan has been no good for years now, yes its free speech but the posters are stupid because of reddit immigrants

you know 4chan is shit when sexy beautiful women only contains the woman part

hey man, /shc/ is pretty good.

Actually, you'll be lucky that the woman part is actual woman. Not one with a donger.

Not that I have anything against that but yea that's not my cup of tea.

fair enough

ESR MASTERACE, LOVE YOU ALL, HATERS TOO

*hits tha blunt*

*plusses blunt*

where do you see free speach? some subject are more than just taboo, tey are not authorized and criminalized even.

oy vey

the only thing that is crimnalized is my brother av3k

Yep, you're right. Ever since they shut down stormfront in my country my daily digest consists of ESR exclusively.

Glad you're back on board Fiz'. Would toke a blunt but I quit a while ago.

You can say anything you want on Reddit, but the downvote\ hiding system makes it inconveniet to have a proper debate.. pushing a button is not an argument pro con. Also if an admin is ban happy then you are fried. A big meh

You can say anything you want on Reddit

not even close to being true

what will get you banned site-wide that isn't cp or doxxing?

Anything that isn't politically correct or not in the direction of people with 'power' in reddit will get you downvoted into oblivion at best, and banned most of the time. I stopped bothering with this site after like 6 accounts. Tried many subs.

edit: when I think about it I think ESR is probably the only site I browse left where you can say pretty much anything yeah. Unless you go full fizzle but that doesn't even get you banned, just heavily filtered

what should I say there? I really wanna know, should I write nigger or something?

The fact that: https://www.reddit.com/r/ShadowBan/ exists should explain to you that sonic is right. If you write nigger enough you probably will end up shadowbanned, but really getting banned anywhere is all about how the mods are feeling that day. Just be persistent in your attempts and it will happen in a matter of time.

I got banned somewhere on reddit but after quite some time, I stand by my statement, which is strengthened by your "wrtite n enough"

How? I've already proven you wrong by example.

That example was the same I said, except the shadow ban, which is altough new info, works similarly than the normal ban.

"Also if an admin is ban happy then you are fried."

I dont get what you dont understand here honestly.

I terrorized the whole subredditdrama, it was a really big topic about women's intelligence. I made a point to answer to everyone, more than a hundred posts, it could be 2 300 even I don't give a fuck,of course I was under - 20 -30 "karma" constantly. It is not like I don't speak from experience. I haven't got banned. I guess mods were sleeping for 2 days. In a way you can get your point across, but the community polices you and the mods enter later, thats my experience and in fact tested it better than the average.

Alright, you've convinced me you're correct. I don't have the same amount of experience you do with reddit.

You show way too much respect on the internet but hats off to you sir. Even if you wrote that because you wanted dre off your back, I respect it anyhow.

No, I really meant it lol

Btw "probably will end up " dosent sound like a big Earth shattering proof. I said the same. Downvotes and ban. Otherwise it can be done. Save the vile shit which I dont inted to post , I don't know what happens if you attack the jews blacks etc vulgarly but I don't want to do that. If you want however some good ol holocaust denying, that can be done for some time imo. I also don't wanna do that I'm not a retard. Dont know if we talk about "anything you want to say " type USA style freedom of speech or the european stuff, "anything but hate speech".

No other forums tickle my pickle like ESR

Freedom of speech is slowly being taking away all over the world. Like you can't even google anything conspiracy theory related or anything anti-government anymore. You can't have an opinion against a lot of things now without the being attacked for it in many forums or discussions. Civility is losing. Just saw this morning a fathers day ad was banned off tv in australia because it could infulence the gay marriage vote when it was showing love between a dad and his baby. What about all the pro gay shit that's allowed on TV lol.

Since when can't you google anything anti government? I agree the vast majority are all programmed idiots but nothing much has changed imo. All that pro gay stuff has been around for a long time now, since the sixties.

Google started unlisting things related to hate speech which includes things they consider anti government so if I typed in something like "australian electricity conspiracy" all the listings are from mainstream news even if I add words like "forums" or "-news"

But it's like that with many other searches related to conspiracies, that was just one I could remember. I started using www.duckduckgo.com now since it actually gives relavent results. They [google] are sutbly shaping the information we get and since most use google these days it feels like we're heading towards a 1984 scenario. Even on youtube they have blocked comments and disabling many features for videos they consider hate speech and in some cases out right removed the video.

It's gonna come to a point where even searching such things will be policed.

i'm reminded of the video of hillary clinton fainting and being propped up by an assistant. this video wasn't on youtube's trending page. the next day, a video 'explaining' of what happened was near the top of the trending page...

Or like how ISIS militants took over a major city in the Philippines and there was a huge seige for weeks with many people dead. There were tons of reddit articles with hundreds of posts none of which made it to front page and no news articles on the google news pages. Like how many people even know this happened?

Edit: I've read articles saying it's not ISIS but other "extreme muslim factions" but they must be allied with ISIS anyway.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2n2a3nH8jEI&t=2m11s
&
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1cZ0PyZy9U

Follow Paul Watson on youtube for the truth.

You can't even go to good ol daily stormer for some gg hitlers.

Not that free expression for hobbies isn't important, but real free speech is primarily important and is critical for political discussions, especially for opinions that are silenced. There's not that much of it here, and frankly it isn't of a high level, so equating free speech with gaming forums is, sorry to say it, a bit laughable if we have the original idea of free speech in mind.

IMO almost any opinion can find a place on the internet, however what tends to be difficult is not finding a space to express it, but finding places where it won't be overwhelmed by shitty bants, shitposting and and other kinds of rhetoric. It's also difficult to find those spaces where everybody else already hangs out, rather than some rare corner of the internet nobody else cares about. These issues can make it difficult to express complicated, nuanced points and have them properly read; as opposed to expressing sometimes even relatively complicated points, but having no clear distinction between that and rhetoric, and other tactics for shutting people down.

That's why it's important to see not what kind of stuff is allowed by the moderators, but what kind of stuff is likely to be read, comprehended and properly responded to. Shitposts kingdoms like 4chan may be very permissible in the former, but they're extremely restrictive in the latter sense.

Another issue that restricts opinions has to do with privacy - mass dragnet surveillance is slowly but surely reaching all of the corners of the internet, and it's chilling speech in those and even private conversations. That's the part I'd worry about if I just wanted to say what I like, regardless if I have an audience to read it and properly respond to it or not.

Well, maybe it's a good thing freedom of speech is taken away from us.
I mean, look at the North Korean people for example... They have no freedom of speech at all, but they are quite some happy clapping folks in the available footage from there I've seen so far.

I don't find myself in a happy clapping state very often.

Mostly I'm ranting 'bout stuff like i want to have more money and a big boobed 20 yr old 55 kg blonde and better internet connection and better game rig and slow motion folks in front of me on the road to get out of my way to die a horrific death and an even bigger penis than I already have 'n stuff.
Always ranting.

These folks aren't. They're happy.

Maybe we could all be happy clapping people.
I say freedom of speech sucks.

Edit: also, without freedom of speech you don't need to worry about annoying mods and nasty bans 'n stuff.

They're so, so happy in NK!

Can't get happier than that.

Maybe you should consider moving to Best Korea. You will be told what to do and wont have time for self pity.

Living in Best Korea must be like playing Runescape IRL.

TP, next time you should make it a little more clear that you're being sarcastic in yer useless wall of text, otherwise people might think you're being serious, you dumb **** for brains.

Edit: Oh, and don't ever make fun of millions of people suffering under a dictator's rule.

Sorry.

:)

Nice post, we need to start our test for ESR.

I'm expect that that no one admin here can go through it

Freedom of speech isn't being taken away in the USA. Private companies can do whatever they want to do,which doesn't violate your freedom of speech.

ESR is british, everything that is outlawed in the USA, britain will legalize just to boost the economy

that's not free speech, that's the first amendment.

first amendment is protection of suppression of freedom of speech from the government.

what's the difference if corporates can suppress any circulation of ideas and speech? Oh, it's not the government, so it's okay!

ESReality is a man.

A RED man.

Jesus christ how can anyone argue that freedom of speech isnt harmed when monopolies(-y) that encompass one of the most important platform regulate what can you say in a fucking eula and give out your personal information faster than light if a government agency tells them to. What the hell?
You can own your platform as a company however you like it, or almost, certainly in a worrisome manner. If you have the market you make the rules. There are enough precedents for questionable decisions tactics by corporations , especially in areas where the law is murky and million dollar attorneys can debate it well above our head.

Guess people are forgetting Slasher & Co were deleting negative comments regarding QC not a long time ago and the Teen Queen drama that ensued it. It even made Brandan log in and pwn everyone before returning to his dusty coffin.

Free speech is a myth, even on ESR.

that was todo with the non disclosure, and ESR is the main quake ES site so they have to suck on some ass sometime

they won't get a VIP pass for dreamhack and quakecon in the future for interviews etc

Then they shouldve deleted a whole range of comments, not only the negative ones.

everyone is banned from bethesda forum's and syncerror would'nt get any feedback

[Img1]

what teen queen do

He decided to step off of mod status after the travesty of censoring iirc.

alright

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ha68yokXaeU

on topic

I always believe I could be wrong, even if I'm sure I'm right. That's why I hate the idea of censorship. Sometimes everyone else is wrong and they simply don't know it.

Having said that, there's always a line to be drawn. I can't remember exactly what went on around the time of QC under NDA, but it's a tricky thing to manage.

Free speech isnt a danger, danger is free speech and free media.

S U J O Y
U
J
O
Y

*passes blunt*