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Gab Wants To Add a Comments Section To Everything On the Internet (cnet.com)
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."
"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."
Unless everyone is commenting using Gab or Dissenter ...
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.
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.
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.
To communicate, share, think, comment is always good.
Not having social media brands use censorship is great.
The freedom to write, comment, publish and the freedom to keep publishing on any topic.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Yeah we sure need to pay attention to them trying to put unfiltered comments on everything on the internet, what a great fucking {SLUR} {SLUR} {THREAT OF VIOLENCE} the fucking {SLUR} {CONSPIRACY THEORY} {SLUR}'s will have then!
You {SLUR} {SLUR} {EXPLITIVE} eater.
Gab has proven not to censor things so far and taken a lot of heat for it.
I seem to recall some browser add-on from 10-15 years ago which promised the ability to comment on any website.
#DeleteChrome
IE had something like this built-in. I've never seen it working, It was always an empty panel when I turned on.
The censorship going on right now is scary.
Genius tried to do the same, allowing you to use a browser extension to add annotations to any website text. Their extension was banned (for "interfering" with content?). As Gab expects, they will be banned as well.
Didn't we already have something like that in the late 90s? With the "page" running in n iframe or something similar....
bickerdyke
HuffPo, Vox, InfoWars, etc. could be hurt really badly by this if it takes off. Personally I would love to see that happen...could be a really good way to fight fake news.
"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
and put it in the hands of the trolls. Great idea! I can't wait to see the result...
No need to wait. Browse this site at -1 and you'll get the idea pretty quick.
What's old is new again! This is the 4th or 10th iteration of something like this.
Gab doesn't filter who registers there. It isn't a "Insert any description" platform. It is simply an OPEN platform.
...is Google, via a feature in Chrome to share comments across all Google users. I don't foresee that happening any time soon. As others have pointed out, there have been quite a few comment layers over arbitrary web pages, but none of them reached critical mass.
And you are using Vanity Fair as a news source?
While you're giving such a balanced, well though out opinion, what did Pop Sugar or Vox have to say? Sheesh!
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
A way to post comments to slashdot containing unicode characters
Can gab.com be use to comment on gab.com? And can that process continue to recurse?
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Come on, using an actual word? Real tech start-ups make creative (and trademarkable) misspellings by dropping vowels and stuff...I would take them much more seriously if they called it "Dissentr".
Be good for DRM, crypto, politics, faith sites. :)
What a nation can't/won't publish in any detail can be seen and commented on.
No comments allowed? Now people have the freedom to comment again
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
A previous idea.
AC comments get piped to
Can't say I've been drawn to Gab (or Twitter for that matter) but having the ability to comment on any site without having to worry about the site censoring it sounds rather awesome actually.
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.
This has been done before by a place called Third Voice. However, because they really didn't have any ability to make money from it, they wound up closing their doors.
How can Gab make money from something like this?
It's been cultivated as a free speech platform. They don't control who registers and posts except to ban people for committing actual crimes. People have been deplatformed due to speech off of the platforms they were kicked off of. There are many documented cases of this. What Gab attracts in the user base isn't directly influenced by anything Gab has said or done except to state that they are for free speech.
It is not clear if the comments are on a Website itself or are merely about the Website.
If the comments are not a physical part of the Website, I do not see how they could matter, since the owner(s) of the site are not responsible for them.
--- Andy West http://andywest.org
It's an open platform that largely gets used by right-wing nutjobs. I gave it a shot once. I gave up when I checked the "Popular" section and saw a post with the Fourteen Words in it.
(which CommentNow has superceded since plugin messed up its plugin system, but, yes, not a new idea at all)
Original NCSA XMosaic supported annotations, but was dropped on the way.
Here some discussions about this feature from 1993: http://1997.webhistory.org/www...
>Everyone I don't like is a Nazi and has violent tendencies >If you disagree "Insert threat" Pick one
So basically they want to be able to target any site on the internet. But it's the sites that are the problem, not them.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Or at least it will be. Unless the article on this just neglected to mention such an important fact, I'm going to assume this isn't decentralized and relies on some central infrastructure somewhere? If so, it will get pushed off host and provider after host and provider until it falls completely off the net entirely. If someone really wants to do this, it's got to be decentralized.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
I don't disagree with you. I'm simply stating that not all user on Gab fall into that category.
Have people learned NOTHING about the internet over the past 2 decades?
There is a reason a lot of the comment sections on website have been shuttered. They are abused. They become troll platforms, spam platforms, a place for the most disgruntled among us to make a whole lot of nonsense noises.
This is a monumentally foolish idea. We need more moderation of this stuff, not more free-wheeling comment sections for the worst of us to spew their nonsense.
It's basically like having comments filter set at -1. Who wants to do that, especially on Gab which advertises itself as "free speech" but is in effect a favorite of far-right or alt-right users who have been banned or suspended from other service.
Gab has proven to censor things, and isn't taking nearly enough heat for that.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Well, it claims to be an open platform, though I haven't checked it out. But it advertises itself as a haven for neo-nazi extremists. I think that if you wanted it to appeal to anyone who'd already heard of it, you'ld need to rename it, and give it a separate interface. It's not clear whether this "Dissenter" is such an attempt or not, though, on the face of it, not.
This is a problem, however, that all "free speech" mechanisms have. A lot of people will use them for socially unacceptable purposes, whether actively criminal (at the moment) or not. TOR has the same problem. The essence of the problem is that when you hand someone a megaphone, and say "anything you shout into this can't be blamed on you" the ones who want to use it are the ones who normally don't dare say what they want.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
This will degenerate to devastated torched landscape by never ending flame wars. Any one remember soc.men and soc.women in the good old usenet? That happened when usenet users had quaint notions of netiquette, and Bjorne Soustroup himself was participating in comp.lang.c++ . In this day and age? It will be trolled to death
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Got to love the hypocrisy. Let's be honest ... everyone is just trying to make a buck and neither the filtered niceties nor the unfiltered gutter trash is about anything more than getting people to join whatever shit heap social platform they're trying to flog.
This is like a proprietary, non-distributed version of the Annotea project (circa 2001): https://www.w3.org/2001/Annote...
Oh God Please No. How does that help anything?
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
Ugh. I can recall years back trolls, when they couldn't bug people directly on sites, would actually message people with 'hey, you should come over to XYZ instead and see all the horrible things they are saying about you!' and keep trying to taunt people into visiting forums they controlled. This strikes me as just a somewhat easier to use version of that... which given the company already courts the 'we are so oppressed!' white nationalists community, will probably just be more dumpster fire that they want other people to be able to see.
Any time a community or platform talks loudly about 'freedom', they usually have some specific set of speech in mind. In this case, alt-right content is what Gab had in mind. That is the community they courted, that is the safe space they have built for them, that is the "F"reedom they defend, and that is the target audience they bend over backwards to keep happy.
Cue lawsuits arguing they are infringing copyright of the displayed page.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
...where people would have to congregate in say, a church, or a town square, or a stadium to meet people of like inclinations and have discussions in civilized tones, a healthy ruckus of many voices speaking.
Imagine, then, that another group with opposing views invades the former's space and start yelling and using bullhorns to say things that the former group can't or won't tolerate.
What do you think would happen? I think the word "Riot" covers it fairly well.
I'm firmly convinced that because the internet allows loud-mouthed know-it-alls convinced of the righteousness and truthiness of their own opinions to invade and poison the others' discussions with naught but a downvote / downmod, we haven't taken that next step of Intolerance: Cracking skulls with baseball bats, hurling rocks and Molotov cocktails, and ultimately shooting at each other.
We are headed for Civil War in this country. An old boss of mine, a prepper, was convinced nearly 20 years ago this was the course of our next 50 years. I thought he was slightly off his rocker. He never could tell me why he thought this, he just strongly felt it was coming. An intuition.
I don't think that anymore. I think we're headed for war within ourselves. Not make-believe war, but actual shoot-you-in-the-face-before-you-do-me-in war. You know, like in the 1860's.
And somewhere, in Russia, China, Germany and England, and many other places, their leaders will be laughing like mad dogs watching us slit each other's throats.
That's what reading /. at -1 has taught me. We stopped listening to each other long, long ago. Today's utterly shambolic Cohen "hearing" or whatever that circus was supposed to be depressed me to no end. We're non-functional. Not just dysfunctional like the Simpsons or the Bundys, we're non-functional as a country. We don't make anything anymore, almost no one's making enough bank to survive on their own... and the few that do at the very very top are undoubtedly actively encouraging this split.
So, while I welcome the opportunity for discourse and dissent, the sheer amount of fuck you nazi faggot / fuck you liberal twat has gotten to the point where I don't think any kind of dialog is possible.
It's like the old joke: When you first get married, you have sex everywhere. As the marriage ages, you only have sex in the bedroom. As the marriage dies, you only have hallway sex: you yell Fuck You at the top of your lungs to the other, and they reply in kind.
So, fuck everyone's comment systems, none of them will work anymore because we, the users, are broken.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
It's impossible to actually monitor speech without turning the world into a 1984 esque hellhole.
But if its open, you can monitor it, and if you can monitor it, you can stop it.
Do you know what needs to happen to a nazi that plans to kill a jew? the same thing that should happen to anyone planning to kill someone.
Be arrested for attempted murder, and that should apply to you too if you attempt that, even if your target is a self proclaimed nazi, because you see, murder is a crime on any decent country.
Yeah, but I think it was more like 20 years ago. Called Gooey I think. IIRC, it was more like graffiti that you could put on any website, seen only by others using Gooey.
[...] which won't tell you anything aside from how the people who want to bring back the Holocaust need to start with themselves.
The first thing you need for a Holocaust is to make it socially and morally acceptable to point at racial or ethnic groups as the evil undeserving privileged oppressor, as all benefiting from the oppression of others, make it acceptable to dehumanise an entire racial or ethnic group over some arbitrary criteria of a few members.
Guess what AC, the right isn't the side that's pushing to make open hatred toward the "oppressive" entire-demographic-du-jour socially acceptable today.
And once this becomes the socially accepted "woke" value all it takes is one guy to point the acceptable hatred at some "privileged" ethnic group, say, with lots of bankers/Hollywood/business owners, kind of like the National Socialist party did.
They took advantage of the already accepted oppressor/oppressed relativistic morals and society "Punched up" toward a certain ethnic group.
Turn the entire internet into usenet or reddit or 4chan or 8chan.
What could go wrong?
Leftists who can't argue with facts resort to drowning out opponents by screaming, name-calling, and censorship. When they kick those people off "their" platforms, they think they've won. They can't stand it when those people find another ball and play their own game. They simply MUST try to shut that down as well, including more name-calling and dishonest labeling of the new platform.
I thought people grew out of this attitude after elementary school. Apparently not. The childish nonsense continues for a lifetime in some.
The usual formula applies: with a laissez-faire commenting policy, the trolls will proliferate to the point where the forum's content is too toxic and offensive for anyone else to dare to participate.
Then the trolls will eventually realize that the only people left to troll are each other, and they will abandon the platform for greener pastures.
Then the forum will be deserted, except for the occasional "is anybody still here lol" tumbleweed. Finally, the hosting company will realize that they are paying IT people to keep an empty forum running, and decide to shut it down.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Citation needed.
Gab didn't court anyone. Gab attracted people who were being deplatformed by indiscriminately calling them alt-right around election time.
Yes, because they are human beings?
Gab would have failed if it only courted racists. Its survival in the face of sustained attacks is proof how corrupt the left has become.
Ah, the old "anything that anyone says that I find highly offensive must be silenced because it's not real free speech. Only the speech I find "acceptable" is free speech. Everything else is hate speech."
The fact that you don't get why that mind-set is the problem IS THE FUCKING PROBLEM you asshole.
Believe me, if I was running things, I'd have you shot for your offensive words. You'd be dragged into the street and your stupid speech would be read to you as you were shot in the face.
{Unsolicited opinion on Israel?!?}
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
I value freedom of speech, but only if it is mine! I don't want to visit sites and find that it's covered in graffiti
go fuck yourselves somewhere else
not interested in your fucking comments
keep your fucking comments to yourselves
young fucking no brained fuckwits
or fucking grumpy old men
Go well
No, but only nazis are vocal about the freedom to push nazi rhetoric on whoever they find to harass.
Gab only succeed because it courted racists, otherwise it would just be yet another forum of no particular note. There was less and less tolerance for their rhetoric and harassment, so Gab saw an opportunity to snap up a community already angry at not being allowed to control everyone around them.
I totally agree with you. But you're slightly misconstruing what "insightful" means on slashdot.
It means "I think intersectionality sucks fetid donkey balls, but I'm typing on a damn phone so I can't actually manage to write 'intersectionality' and 'i15y' hasn't caught on yet among the Black Panther set."
[*] No argument here on i15y sucking fetid donkey balls.
Humans are flexible organisms. When one form of communication fails (typing articulately), there's always the mouse-driven moderation system to take up the slack.
Furthermore, you've misconstrued the word "white". There are two types of white people: people of many gifts, and people where whiteness is their only gift.
The ionized adjective "white" is rarely used to refer to the former, and always used to refer to the later. This later group does experience exclusionary prejudice on a routine basis, especially the incel subclique, who are so far from being endowed with many gifts, that they willingly wind their entire self-identity around their inability to wow any woman with their sense of humour, anywhere, ever.
All it takes is three incels with moderation points to boost any comment on slashdot into the lamelight.
[*] I see your "baitshit" and raise you a "lamelight".
The other problem, as any Usenet veteran knows, is that allowing completely free speech leads to the destruction of forums. The best rule is to allow people to create forums, and allow forums to regulate their use.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
The other problem, as any Usenet veteran knows, is that allowing completely free speech leads to the destruction of forums. The best rule is to allow people to create forums, and allow forums to regulate their use.
Mostly I agree with that. But, I am unsure how we deal with de-facto monopolies. Yes Facebook is a private company and yes people can go elsewhere.. But, they aren't... Acknowledging that things are rarely yes/no, black/white, or private/public is part of the issue.. We have shades of grey here... Facebook is private but it's got a massive amount of users.. More than any other social network has ever had... We have to address this.. If we're gonna kick off the Nazis (who are actually few and far between) then we need to give the boot to the extreme left too.. One company (Facebook) swaying the political opinions of billion(s) of people is not a good thing..
We know they're doing it.. Deliberate or not is besides the point... Social media is rapidly turning into an echo chamber... You have an idea, you meet others with the same idea, and all you get is positive reinforcement.. Doesn't matter how fucked up your ideas are, you're going to have a huge audience of like-minded people reinforcing your political/social bias.
Right now it's the left that has control of Facebook, I think that's pretty obvious.. But we know shit flip-flops in this country.. Do you want conservatives like me having all the power at some future date?
I don't like the idea of single party politics.. I go ultra conservative on some things and mildly liberal on others (pro gay marriage for example.. They should be as miserable as the rest of us :) ) I'm aware that having anyone influencing huge chunks of the population, with no opposite view, is a bad idea. It'd be just as bad if Facebook was leaning ultra conservative and was kicking off liberals..
I don't know how to fix it... Maybe we bust facebook up into two chunks... Or maybe 3...... We have to do something though.. I think one of the main issues is that the freaks (left and right) are given way too much voice, proportionally, at this moment in history..
It wasn't like this before.. Politics wasn't like this... Society wasn't like this...
Regardless of someone being pro-trans or anti-trans, how the fuck did 0.1% of the population get this loud of a voice? I can't go a day without hearing about trans people.. I don't hate them (honestly)... But how does 0.1% of the pop get a voice this loud? When have we EVER bent society to the demands of 0.1% of any people?
Even the anti-vaxxers have managed to form huge groups where they sit around all day telling each other how bad vaccines are.. Nobody to dissent.. They'll kick 'em out of the group... So all they hear from is other anti-vaxxers... That's not a good idea.. And don't even get me started on the Flat-Earth assholes...
Usenet was destroyed by the web, not by the trolls. I agree that trolls were annoying, but most newsreaders implemented black lists and filters to deal with those.
Calling people names only show your will to harass people. Supporting censorship only show your will to control everyone around you. Don't you realize you are what you claim to hate?
I just created an account on Gab because of Dissenter. The platform is surprisingly tame. I was expecting a lot of anti-Jew comments, as well as a lot of foul language, but the vast majority of posts were as civil as everywhere else. Of course, since I'm guessing you are extreme far left, I'm sure you would happily label three quarter of the population as extreme far right, but maybe you should realize that the problem is your own bigotry.
Here's what the "Explore" page gives me right now (I show only the first 10 posts) :
This is a post about an article showing that men are paid less than women for the same job in IT. This is obviously an anti-feminist post, which means it can be qualified as on the right, but it's not "alt-right".
This is some Christian guy preaching and quoting the Bible. Now I'm an atheist, I'm not a fan of religions, but I also believe that there should be some religious freedom. Again, right-wing, but this has nothing to do with the "alt-right".
This is a post about a picture of a woman showing a sign where it's written "we are coming to take away your guns. Personally I don't have guns (even if I know how to use a lot of weapons since I did my mandatory military service), also I'm not American, but the right to own firearms is part of the American constitution. I agree the post is right-wing, but not alt-right.
This is a post about Dissenter itself. It's neither on the right nor the left.
This is a post about people joining a "Gab group" called "Free Speech". I didn't check what this group is about, but simply by the name I can tell it's not about the alt-right ideology (both the far right and the far left are anti-free speech).
Ok, this one is from an idiotic alt-right who believes in his conspiracy theory about Jews.
This is about pedophilia. This has nothing to do with the alt-right.
This is a post about Katie Hopkins tweeting that Britain is tumbling inexorably into even darker times. Katie Hopkins is definitely on the right, but she's not alt-right at all.
This is a post about a Slate article asking if pedophiles are too sick for punishment. Again, this is about pedophilia. It's not about the alt-right ideology.
This is another post about the second amendment. Again, right-wing, but not alt-right.
So in summary, out of ten, only one could be qualified as alt-right.
Now about the articles you quoted, I remember the one saying that there is nothing wrong about white people being pro-white. When I posted my initial comment, it was already toward the middle of the page. This means that when you looked at the explore page, it was certainly not the first post. This means you are simply lying in order to push for your far left agenda.
You are a despicable person. More than that, since you want an authoritarian regime where people have no freedom, I'd even say you are a dangerous person.