Sign into an existing account

I remember the anger at Voat back in 2015-2016. It was still angry in 2018, in 2019, and remained angry when Voat closed its doors. New Voat was angry 8 months ago, and I see - after a time away - that it is still angry now. New posts, identical patterns of reaction/response. "My anger at the Jew grows by the day." "Fuck, I'm so mad." "The only solution is final." Year after fucking year.

I find myself reading the same comments today as I did six years ago. The world has been fundamentally altered even in just the past 1.5-2 years, irrevocably. Most people didn't know it while it was happening, and they didn't want to know. The world changed irrevocably in 2 years, but the same pattern has existed within this community for three times as long (and longer, since I was not around for the earliest period of Voat).

If what I have said is true, then can you answer what this place represents besides a place to merely vent? Perhaps you say, "Yeah, maybe it is. But it is doing myself and others some good to be able to interact with likeminded individuals."

I ask only because, if the activity of gathering and 'spreading' this information has not stopped the world from changing negatively, and you repeat the same patterns over and over again, finding yourself angered each time you enter this space, consuming content that will only increase your anger and develop an addictive cycle of requiring that magnitude of stimulus just to meet the emotional agitation which tells you that you're properly informed...would you not be objectively better off to simply stop? I mean, if it's all going to be what it is anyway (and our 'effectiveness' in the world has supported the fact that it will), hanging around forums like this feels like filming your foot being cut off with a saw so that you can watch the re-run of your foot being cut off while it's being cut off - rather than just looking at anything else. It's as if you want to say that seeing your foot being cut off in place where others can also see it and complain about it with you (along with their own leg amputation) is somehow doing something to stop the ongoing severance of your actual foot. It's either that, or you say it makes the pain slightly more bearable to share it with others.

Now, what if you found out that the emotional states you realize from watching the recording of this were connected by some interface to a machine, the very machine that was pulling the saw through your leg? In other words, that your psycho-physical changes were fueling the sawing machine.

Your experience of all of this, as despair, fear, fury...is the point. The same thing is happening on the other side of the so-called fence. We're cutting off our own feet. As you become angry according to one value-framework, that becomes the very substrate for angering the other side, which then feeds back to anger the first side more, as they both push each other right across the line that had been planned for them initially. Only, when anybody realizes, after a time, how far they've been displaced, the explanation can only be that politicians/elites/activism of the opposite persuasion were/are/is the explanation.

Am I wrong? If I'm wrong, tell me why. I'm not even giving advice here; I'm making an observation. If this place has value other than your self-perceived "privilege" to vent, then what is it? And if you were to realize that your ability to vent in this echo chamber was part of what caused a phenomenon of radically bad communication to spill out from here (the point of concentration) into other more public forms of social media, taking forms that will only add fuel to the fire on the other side of the fence, do you think you'd stop? You see, this follows the principles of physical pressure. At a space like Voat or others like it, you have a gas - we're all gassed up. But the volume is bigger; the walls here aren't as close. At the same time, there's less people looking at it. As we feel more and more isolated the pressure starts to build, the walls start to compress the gas, until we finally are forced out to other places to release the pressure. But we know such processes are violent, and if directed they can cause things to take the form of a projectile (this has nothing to do with bullet; it's a metaphor for a kind of communication). This is like the pressure release by which we take our agitation to other places, where character counts are smaller, everything is lower resolution, and so our points spew out like pepper spray. They can't help but inflame the very people we'd be better off to communicate properly with.

And yet it feels as if that ideal communication is made impossible by the very platforms that market themselves as services for connection.

I don't know what the answer is, but it simply occurs to me that the more we even participate in the digital landscape where this is taking place, it actually advances whatever the third party's agenda is, unavoidably. So does our need to cope in this place, while serving us individually, actually worsen the group situation? Again, if I'm wrong tell me why.