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Gab Wants To Add a Comments Section To Everything On the Internet (cnet.com)

Posted by msmash on from the tussle-continues dept.

Okian Warrior writes: Free speech social network Gab has launched a new comments platform, Dissenter, which allows users to make comments on every single website on the Internet without fear of censorship or banning. The Dissenter platform, which integrates with Gab as either a website or a browser extension, allows users to comment on any web page in the world, with the ability to upvote, downvote, and reply to other comments.

"A free, open-source utility that allows people to dissent from orthodoxy and express what they are really thinking, without fear of reprisal, is essential in order to wrest control of the Internet and public discourse from Silicon Valley tech giants," said Gab founder Andrew Torba. "Gab.com and dissenter.com lead the way in keeping the Internet free. All people are welcome to use our products to express themselves freely." One example of recent comment censorship was review website Rotten Tomatoes' removal of comments for unreleased movies this week, which the review website claimed was due to "trolling."

9 of 308 comments (clear)

  1. Good potential by onyxruby · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The interesting thing will be to compare the comments left via the extension and those left directly on the website. It could be a good way of exposing just how prevalent censorship has become in the modern town square.

    1. Re:Good potential by aitikin · · Score: 4, Interesting

      It could be a good way of exposing just how prevalent censorship has become in the modern town square.

      I don't think it would. As, based on my understanding of the tool, one would have to be using "Dissenter" in order to view the comments on it, while anyone can view the comments directly on the website, many people will never see the "Dissenter" comments.

      I foresee it being more of a situation where one side will primarily post publicly and then the other side would post on "Dissenter" and it turns into a twisted echo chamber...kind of like Facebook.

      --
      "Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
    2. Re:Good potential by Austerity+Empowers · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Possibly true, but not all things are political. I know of a particular situation on an old game (EverQuest) where the company is known for blatant, over the top censorship and sock-puppeting. An alternative, well known forum like this would be welcome. Just last week they did a mass ban and lockdown on anyone who disagreed with their particular "rebranding" of a long-awaited, but ultimately bizarrely out of touch pair of servers. After spending two weeks grappling with all the rants and negative feedback, they just started locking things down and banning, while issuing a very slight but inconsequential modification (and changing their words).

      It is quite welcome to have contrasting points of view as up front as possible, quite often companies take a giant shit on something you are paying good money for, and try to silence all opposition. Sure, it undoubtedly will involve a lot of racism, trolling, off-topic posts and namecalling, so some form of meta moderation will be needed to squelch people who just cannot control themselves.

  2. Truly history repeats itself by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Any of you old enough to remember VPlaces?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Places_Chat

    It was exactly as the summary describes, except a chatroom instead of a comment section.

  3. That's interesting... by Crash+Dummy+Redux · · Score: 3, Interesting

    YouTube wants to turn off the comment sections on children videos because they attract child predators. All those displaced child predators can now go to Gab to comment on those videos. Unless, of course, Gab's TOS doesn't allow child predators to do that.

    1. Re:That's interesting... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      news flash:
      bad people will do bad things by any means they can

  4. quality by doom · · Score: 1, Interesting

    "Not enough freedom" is not actually what comes to mind when most people think of internet commenting-- nearly everyone is interested in better quality and/or improving the tone or direction of on-line discussions.

    There's a certain kind of nerd that thinks the freedom to shout [censored epithets] is just what the world needs... most of us feel like we can live without it.

    (Slashdot's "lameness filter" prevented me from citing actual examples of epithets in the last paragraph-- ironic infinite loop detected, aborting

  5. We've seen this before... by Dwedit · · Score: 3, Interesting

    We've seen extensions letting you comment on any webpage before. The obvious downside is that you need to inform a third party of what URL you are visiting in order to fetch the comments.

    So it's basically spying on users, and it would be very hard to implement this in a way that does not spy.

  6. Re:What's old is new again! by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It's just Gab trying to be relevant. They were hoping a lot of people would migrate from Twitter, following people like Carl Benjamin and Milo Yiannopoulos who got booted. But it didn't really work, not least because much of those characters' appeal was the drama when interacting with other people on Twitter, and the other people had no interest in going to Gab just to get more abuse.

    In fact, Carl in particular tries to sneak back on to Twitter at least three or four times a year.

    Which gave Gab an idea. What if they could be on every popular site, and no-one could stop them?

    The flaw in this plan is that they will still be largely ignored, except by other people already in the echo chamber who bothered to install the add-on.

    --
    const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
    SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC