A related post from the voat admins:
- In the last few days Voat has come under all sorts of attacks. First, our servers were DDoSed. Then, our servers were shut down and our hosting contracts cancelled, without prior notification. Today, PayPal froze our donation money. As a cherry on top, the media wrote all kinds of negative things about Voat, cherry picking the content that serves their attacks best. What a happy week for us!
When I wrote the first few lines of code for Voat, I never anticipated Voat would become such an in-demand platform for discussion. In fact, I just shared it with a few of my classmates at first and look what happened! People started using it and asking for new features, sending support… Others digged in and helped by writing code and fixing bugs. We were doing fine, in our little community, until Voat got major attention from the media. Overnight, Voat became a target or even a threat.
Voat is currently operated by me and /u/PuttItOut. We both work for free and we have both invested thousands of hours into Voat in order to make it what it is today. We have pretty damn good plans for the future and we may be on the verge on creating something unique, something that hasn’t been done before. Unfortunately, there are people and institutions that “just want to see the world burn” and they will do anything they can to make our journey harder.
I wanted Voat to be a bastion of free speech where anyone could say anything and open discussion could prevail. This is still something I believe Voat can be, but we need your help. To make things worse, we may be personally liable for the content you guys submit to Voat. I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel like going to jail just because someone chose to anonymously post a link to an illegal image hosted somewhere on a third party server. Because Voat is being used by so many people, the two of us simply cannot review everything that is being posted. For this reason, as a temporary measure, we have decided to ban any subverses which we discover or which are reported to us, where links to illegal content is being shared. We can’t judge if the content is illegal or not, but we have no choice but to take precautions in order to protect Voat’s future at this very fragile stage.
In addition, to further dissuade individuals from posting questionable content, we will store all records about users who submit such content and we will forward these records to authorities upon request.
These are the subverses we banned: /v/doxbin, /v/jailbait, /v/truejailbait and /v/thefappening.
If you can’t donate, you can help us out by reporting any questionable subverses to abuse@voat.co.
Voat as reddit free from censorship lasted 13 days – impressive!
Regarding them removing entire subs because of potentially illegal content, is it me or have we just seen the same trajectory and evolution of what happened to reddit now occur at voat, only on a far more accelerated level. It seems to me that if you are going to make a near clone of something, you ought not be surprised when you suffer from similar problems. Regarding PayPal, well that's fucked up. My guess is that PayPal is servicing far more nefarious organizations than voat. Regarding the DDOS, my guess is that they simply were not ready for the traffic.
PayPal is actually notorious for shutting down accounts for anyone doing anything slightly illicit. Cam girls. Donations on sexy wallpaper sites. Forums not entirely on the up and up. Donations to wiki leaks. Donations to proton mail. Etc. Google search it. It's crazy how clean you have to be to keep a PayPal account open. They don't touch controversy with 100ft stick. No one... And I mean no one... In their right mind uses PayPal if they aren't a 100% clean business because of their tendencies to randomly shut accounts down. I don't keep any sum of money in there even though all my international clients pay me via PayPal and I pay my international employees via PayPal. People told voat not to use PayPal the second they started using PayPal. It's odd that they didn't head the warnings. All and all, this is just another sign confirming my initial thoughts about voat. Honestly, I wanted them to succeed. They had big, albeit naive, ideals. Plus they took all the people who "just want to watch the world burn" and sent the good users for us. ;) . But the more I hear and see, the more announcement posts that are made, the quick flip flopping, make the entire thing seem like no one is really thought this thing out. You know that you are attracting people who DDOS. Be prepared for that. And I don't mean some massive code to prevent ddosing - I mean a couple lines allowing your site to fail fast under those circumstances. Don't use paypal. Don't make promises you can't keep. You know saying "anything goes" is impossible. You have numerous case studies of sites (4chan,8chan) who tried to do the same thing and had the same exact things happen. No one wants to host your child porn, even if it's technically on a 3rd parties server. No one wants to fund that. No one wants to touch that. I understand that the owners are quite literally kids with high hopes, but when your user base skyrockets and you're getting media attention every single day from every tech blog, it's time to get real. At least hire a lawyer or two. Just cause you read the Pirate Bay blog and decided Switzerland is the shit, doesn't make your any more prepared for the 8000 issues you're going to encounter for linking to nefarious sites and taking the notorious user base from reddit. If I were them, I would start by spending every single cent of the donations on a well recommended lawyer, consults with any people who have dealt with sites like 4chan,8chan,tpb etc in the past. Then I would write out a 1 month, 1 year, and 5 year plan as to what I would the site to be. Then I would write out the steps, tone, marketing, ideas, etc that I would need to do to get there. Then I would get really fucking real and do the same exercise for what the site realistically is going to be based on the current user base, the current media attention, the promises I've made, the tone of responses to announcement posts and so forth. The reality is, voat wants to make a site where anything goes. That's about it. They want to please their users. Based on the actions they've taken, where they are right now is entirely expected. You could see this coming from 1000 miles away. If you want to be something different, then do it. But you better start having real thoughts and wants for your site that are fucking SOLID. Not hopes. Not ideals. Instead of trying to please your users, be realistic about the balance between pleasing your users and making a sustainable site that fulfills your goals and attracts the users you want to fulfill those goals. The one thing I can say about mk is that he knows, at his core, what he wants hubski to be and to represent. There are no doubts about it. Anything that makes him uneasy or doesn't move towards that goal is shut down. It's a hard trait to have and one that I don't think I've seen in such a pure form before. If you look at the features and the things we do and don't do, you can start seeing how mk thinks. Even the features that were removed or didn't work out for one reason or another work toward the greater hubski goal. If mk does something, I know it's because it fits into what hubski should be. I know mk has debated it internally for days if not weeks and gotten feedback from external sources. I know this without a doubt. If voat does something, it's because someone came up with the idea and thought it was cool and managed to implement it before the "what are the consequences, however unintended?" question even came up.
"Social media is hard! let's go shopping!" The thing that puzzles me is that when you say "let's build a Reddit clone" how do you not see that you will clone Reddit's problems? Alexis and Steve certainly didn't get into the social media game because they wanted to freeze peaches, they wanted to grow a lot of traffic quickly and then skeedaddle the minute it got tough. And since you can only sell Reddit once (especially when the ROI is so low), you better have an alternative plan in mind. I keep returning to SomethingAwful. Got a noxious community? charge them. Need to pay legal fees? Pay them from membership fees. Assholes in need of banning? Make them pay again if they want to rejoin the community. My favorite article talking about how horrible SomethingAwful is ran seven years ago and they're still going strong because Rich padded his wallet with the necessary operating expenses to steam-clean the carpet on a regular basis. RedditGifts was stood up in a weekend. Webtoid took a couple days. Voat probably took less. I think when your experiment goes that crazy, the best thing you can do is write a journal of the inevitable crash and try to sell it to Salon.
SomethingAwful could do what it did because they're a single community with a shared culture. People talk about the reddit community, but it doesn't really exist. There's not much overlap between /r/aww and /r/coontown. Reddit is more like Usenet, except that Usenet could be what it was because it really was just a platform. There was no Usenet, Inc to turn the screws on.
Very true. Reddit, then, is the ugly middle ground: something that isn't a community, with a central authority to take the blame, pretending that it's a community... with a mascot, meetups, gift exchanges, the whole nine yards. Reddit had a community once but it's been on the decline since the Saydrah witch hunt.
Even clean clients get frozen pretty regularly. There's speculation that this lets them make a profit by investing those funds and keeping the interest after accounts are re-opened. See PayPal freezes 600k € in Minecraft Dev's accountNo one... And I mean no one... In their right mind uses PayPal if they aren't a 100% clean business because of their tendencies to randomly shut accounts down. I don't keep any sum of money in there even though all my international clients pay me via PayPal and I pay my international employees via PayPal.
Thank you. I knew that PayPal was notorious for holding or delaying funds, but I didn't realize that they did so based on whether or not they thought your business met their moral standards. Edit: and for the record, I can confirm that you literally did "call" all this.
It's not even as noble as failing to meet moral codes. It's more "do we think someone, for any reason could/has become upset with something tangentially related to your site and complains to us." Recently they shut down the account of someone who put up code that could be used as a torrent search engine on GitHub. He wasn't running a search enging, just facilitating it was enough for them to freeze him out.
This is why i never looked into Voat as a legit alternative to Reddit. It's literally the same thing as Reddit but with different admins - same voting system, same "subreddit" model, etc. - so why would it end up being any better than reddit? It just has less content and fewer users to vote on things.It seems to me that if you are going to make a near clone of something, you ought not be surprised when you suffer from similar problems.
Yes, they should have expected it. Even so, PayPal might have done them a favor in this case. The owners seem a bit naive about the consequences of hosting child porn, and they are better off pulling that content in response to PayPal before being prosecuted for it.
They did. I saw it because I didn't believe it at first, and a misunderstanding of the term jailbait. I wouldn't exactly call it CP. What I saw was a bunch of thumbnails of what looked to be later teenage years half naked selfies, not blatantly preteen child molestation. That said, I left reddit hoping voat was better. If left because I just couldn't accept visiting a site allowing and defending content like jailbait and animaltortureporn. Hoping this place is better.