Voat Is Shutting Down

https://voat.co/v/announcements/4169936

by xyzzy667 • 6 years ago

363 584 6 years ago

voat.co

MuffinFlavored• 6 years ago

How much was he/she paying a month to keep it up? Why not ask for donations/people to subscribe?

I mean, I don't personally use and I don't know anybody who does but...

236dev• 6 years ago

I think they would be kicked off whatever fund raising platform they use pretty quickly.

29083011397778• 6 years ago

At which point wouldn't they switch to BTC? Agree or disagree with who Voat is and what they say, but I can only assume at least one coin exchange would be willing to do business with them.

tootie6• 6 years ago

Anyone who backed them financially would be instantly blacklisted. They'd be better off asking to be sent cash via snail mail.

Can_Not2• 6 years ago

Definitely want to know more about the monthly cost breakdown, view stats, etc., plus information about the technical details of the software it was running.

I heard a story once about a "1000 year civ2 game save" where the OP thought it was unwinnable but civ2 veterans got a copy of the game save then had no trouble winning. Would love another story like that.

deppr• 6 years ago

My guess is that that was a phony reason to mask some other one. I run a reddit clone with as much activity as voat gets, and I do it from the smallest server DigitalOcean offers for $5/month. That includes running it, the Postgres server, etc. It has near instant load times.

Either something with their software is really messed up (Lemmy is a great example of a reddit clone that requires an order of magnitude more server power than it should) or there's a more insidious reason and the admin just wants the whole thing to go away without giving a reason that will incite the mob against them. You can see them in there already calling for the doxx of the angel investor who stopped paying.

Joseph-Stalin3• 6 years ago

are you running the literal reddit codebase or a clone codebase, and if so, is it open source?

Lemmy is written in rust, so that is surprising, but it also a react SPA so feels heavy to me when I tried it.

flukus2• 6 years ago

At the time of posting the front page of voat has the following threads:

A moment of silence for all the FBI glowniggers that just got laid off. - https://voat.co/v/funny/4170215

If you go back to Reddit, you're a double niggerkike - https://voat.co/v/whatever/4170129

Plus a whole lot of misinformation and other crazy mixed in with comments that make youtube look like a bastion of intellectualism. It doesn't look like anything of value has been lost.

Kequc2• 6 years ago

Banning people from speaking doesn't change their mind. Every single tech site baffled.

PurpleFoxy• 6 years ago

Banning them stops them spreading this content on mainstream platforms and stops normal people falling in to the trap. It also makes the site tolerable.

x86_64Ubuntu• 6 years ago

And this is why the right-wing is so up in arms about private sites booting them off their platforms. Because if they have to start their own i.e Voat, Parlor, they will find that they don't have the necessary tech and financial structures to run such a site. So by fighting to stay on Reddit and Facebook, they can freeload off of the other parts of the sites that provide value and can support the marginal cost of their white supremacist subreddit/videos.

eropple9• 6 years ago

That's only part of it, though it is part of it.

Fascists--and Voat is populated largely by fascists and by those for whom fascism is not a dealbreaker--need to seem normal in order to get their hooks into credulous people. When you don't eighty-six the fascists, 1) they bring their friends, and 2) they make new friends, because the garbage they spew is emotionally effective and requires an overwhelming amount of calm and coherent deprogramming to unwind and there's not enough labor available to do that forever.

For a related story, I am always reminded of this. https://twitter.com/IamRageSparkle/status/128089153745134387...

ignoranceprior4• 6 years ago

Voat was founded as a neutral free-speech platform. After alt-right extremists were booted off reddit, they found a new home there. The site was bombarded by /pol/ chan culture, and after that nobody else of other political persuasions really wanted to join. Kind of like that "paradox of intolerance" meme. Free speech platforms usually end up becoming extremist platforms.

I remember going on voat a couple years ago and the front page was filled with anti-Semitic and white nationalist propaganda, and racial slurs were everywhere. Even non-political subverses had an alt-right tinge. It was truly the culture that dominated the site.

Thorentis• 6 years ago

As opposed to Reddit where every subreddit aside from those dedicated to alt-right topics has a left-leaning tinge. Every platform has biases. It's just that Reddit chose to ban a specific group, so it's logical that group alone would dominate alternatives.

santoshalper2• 6 years ago

Society has a left-leaning tinge. Especially society in the age range that reddit caters to. There's no grand conspiracy. Right politics are wildly unpopular with young to middle-age people.

herbstein3• 6 years ago

I'm not entirely sure I understand this point. Even if I were to concede the point that all of Reddit has a left-leaning (in a US sense of the word) tinge, is that at all comparable to the right-leaning tinge of Voat?

Is advocating for e.g. defunding the police, medicare for all, and free college comparable to saying immigrants should be shot on the border, that the holocaust simultaneously didn't happen and wasn't effective enough, and that racial minorities should be hanged?

Even if you vehemently disagree with the three examples of left-leaning policies I used as an example, and any other examples I could've used, surely you can recognize that they are fundamentally different to the stuff that permeated every crevice of Voat? Saying Reddit and Voat both have a tinge completely ignores any context and nuance.

EDIT:

There's an example I'd like to bring. It's from a thread on the frontpage called "Voat, I could use a little life advice". It's from a person that is having trouble paying their bills, and can't do much doordash driving because they refuse to wear a mask. The most upvoted response is this:

"Was a really good programmer for years". Good, not many people are and it's a skill that's good for decades. n* * * * * * can't fake coding skills like they do everything else

Another upvoted response from the thread says this:

Why don’t we create funds for fellow nationalists like the n* * * * * * and the ki* * *? Somewhere to pool resources to lift white brothers in need.

Mind you, this is from the front page of both the AskReddit-equivalent and the global front page. And this is on a question that wasn't about anyone but the original poster and their money trouble.

DrAwdeOccarim• 6 years ago

Eh, reddit is a big place. The subreddits I subscribe to have zero politics; I never found that on voat...

honkycat2• 6 years ago

I don't see this. There is right-wing content hitting front-page reddit constantly, and a lot of the most popular sub-reddits like "change my view" are just soap-boxes for right-wing talking points.

devwastaken• 6 years ago

Reddit banned demonstrably fabricated extremist content. It just so happens the political party most associated with it continued to eat it up.

/r/conservative is a gated community only for people they agree with. Reddit perfectly allows them to exist in their own created hypocritical bubble, along with lots of other subreddits.

superkuh4• 6 years ago

There were corners of it that were decent in terms of content and tone. Particularly v/justgrowit which was about gardening. But yeah, for every polite person in some isolated corner there were 50 screaming about politics on the front page.

But that wasn't the problem with Voat. The problem with Voat was the terrible code making the site non-functional.

You literally couldn't submit a URL which had a tilda in it. A tilda, ~, like at the start of every college account website URL everywhere. And it wasn't just tilda, it was a whole set of characters. And the devs, never, ever fixed it despite months then years of occasional notifications.

santoshalper2• 6 years ago

I really don't think the problem with Voat was tech debt. I think it was humanity debt.

herbstein3• 6 years ago

But yeah, for every polite person in some isolated corner there were 50 screaming about politics on the front page.

The problem with Voat wasn't that some people were "talking politics" on the front page. The problem was that the vast majority where anti-semites, racists, and otherwise horrible. That's beyond "talking politics" in any decent sense of the phrase.

zapzupnz3• 6 years ago

Not really a reply to the whole tech debt bit, but the ~ symbol is called a tilde in English. I suspect spelling it with an a at the end comes from another language?

judge20204• 6 years ago

I thought Voat was based on reddit's code, but apparently it's a asp.net application?

https://github.com/voat/voat

https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit

yakireev9• 6 years ago

But yeah, for every polite person in some isolated corner there were 50 screaming about politics on the front page.

I checked the front page, and they're still screaming, with only difference between now and 2016 being the lack of pro-Trump screams. Good riddance, but the total perceived amount of screaming did not change much for me.

Causality1• 6 years ago

That's sort of the question isn't it. Is it that there are so few of these neutral grounds that they collect the people unwelcome anywhere else, or that those ideas out-compete everything else unless there's a finger on the scale?

Personally I think it's a hybrid. Extremism and outrage are memetically advantaged in all circumstances but the specific atmosphere is what chooses the flavor prevalent in a particular community. Voat was formed by far-right elements and so that became the culture.

AnthonyMouse6• 6 years ago

Free speech platforms usually end up being extremist platforms.

...when the popular platforms stop being free speech platforms.

Reddit, in its earlier days, was never dominated by the Voat contingent. They were there, but they were far less extreme there than they were on Voat. And then whenever they would post rank inaccuracies, there were clearer-minded people to point out why they were wrong, in the same place where the same people could see it. Meanwhile in the 7% of cases when they actually had a legitimate point to make, they could make it, and the people who benefited from hearing it would actually hear it instead of continuing to be unawares and consequently continuing to be wrong about something.

But it doesn't work to have one popular platform which allows nearly everyone except for Those Deplorables and another that allows "everyone" but the only people with the incentive to move are the people being forcibly ejected from the popular one. Because witch hunts are bad, but if there is a place that owes its existence solely to a policy of not having witch hunts, it's going to be full of witches.

So the answer has to be to stop the witch hunts in the places where everybody else already is.

koheripbal• 6 years ago

I think part of the issue is that the average age of Reddit users plummeted. It was in the high 20s, but I've seen some research that puts it in the high teens these days / early 20s.

That has a huge impact on the quality of conversations.

ignoranceprior4• 6 years ago

Then the question is whether it's better to allow people with unsavory views a minority platform on mainstream sites where they'll try to convert others, or force them to their own niche echo chambers that will inevitably be extremely toxic.

It's basically a tradeoff between visibility to the public and density of toxic content.

intended8• 6 years ago

Those days ended fast. I saw it happen. On my forum, that very question was asked, and it wasn’t a philosophical debate. It was an operational one - how do we balance free speech ideals vs actual forum evidence.

The framework that fits the evidence and the ideals was

1) we want a market place of ideas to function

2) there is content that easily dominates and sidelines all other ideas.

3) there are Maliciously engineered arguments that need complex rebuttals to Massive emotional payloads, which will never be accepted.

4) cat videos, pictures and memes will out perform everything else

We let things be for a long time. Very light touch approaches. It doesn’t work. The good ideas will become irrelevant before theY are even read, and that is long after bad ideas redefine reality.

The underlying nexus is that our ideals on free speech do not take into account human wetware bandwidth.

If reality must be perceived, and the perception system is flooded, then it doesn’t matter how good our science or reason is. The system is still blind.

tootie6• 6 years ago

The problems on reddit started the second it became commercially successful. First came paid promotions, then came the propaganda. Too much of the "free speech" was totally insincere attempts at manipulation.

heavyset_go2• 6 years ago

Reddit, in its earlier days, was never dominated by the Voat contingent.

One of Reddit's most visited subreddits in the early days, between 2007 and 2011, was one dedicated to sharing suggestive pictures of minors[1]. It was chosen as "subreddit of the year" in 2008 and the subreddit was the second most searched term on Reddit[2].

There was definitely a core of users with questionable characters on Reddit for whom "free speech" meant sharing extremist, or at least perverse, content. The Reddit CEO even issued a "memo on free speech" to address the situation[1].

[1] https://venturebeat.com/2012/10/17/reddit-ceo-issues-interna...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...

vkou2• 6 years ago

...when the popular platforms stop being free speech platforms.

No, this always happens, any time you get more than two people in one room together. Eventually, intolerable assholes drive either everyone else away, or they get driven away.

Meanwhile, people who aren't bothered by that particular intolerable asshole shrug their shoulders, and ask 'What's the big deal?', and 'Can't we all just be rational robots who get along?', and 'This is purely an intellectual conversation, the outcome of which has absolutely no material bearing on my life, why are people getting so worked up over this?'

specialist• 6 years ago

What would a witch hunt free reddit look like?

phire• 6 years ago

Reddit, in its earlier days, was never dominated by the Voat contingent.

Reddit never had free speech as a key attracting point. People came to reddit not because it was free speech, but because there was good conversations and content there.

Reddit's early "free speech attitude" came about mostly because they had a staff of 4 people who spend all their time trying to keep the site from crashing as it scaled. It was a stance of convenience which they kept as long as possible.

Vote explictly advertised it as a "free speech alternative to reddit". Free speech was it's number one advertising point. It's really not surprising it instantly attracted the wrong type of users and drove away everyone else.

ashtonkem7• 6 years ago

Any sufficiently large forum will eventually attract edgelord types from 4chan or wherever. Even if your rose-tinted view of early days Reddit is true, which I very much doubt, you still have to plan what to do once the trolls show up.

ianmcgowan• 6 years ago

One person's witch hunt is another's "defense of tolerance". There's definitely a line where free speech runs into ideas and positions that are not compatible with free speech, e.g. how can you have a reasoned discussion with a Nazi if they believe certain groups are literally subhuman, and you happen to be part of (or even have normal human empathy for) one of those groups.

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

renewiltord5• 6 years ago

So the answer has to be to stop the witch hunts in the places where everybody else already is.

Got to be honest, bro, I don't really care to sacrifice for "the good of society" or whatever. If you make a website where some dude is going to post anti-Semitic shit everywhere and someone else is going to have to politely explain that Jewish lizard people are not conspiring to elect a Black woman as President then sure, you can have it.

But that's not a sacrifice I want to make. I'll go to the website where I don't have to do that. And the website will come to me.

Like, I don't see you moving to the ghetto and putting your kids in shitty schools so that you can even things out. This ain't different. I don't like those people at the party, so I'm not gonna go if you invite them. So you pick: them or me?

Either choice is fine. Reddit picked me. Voat picked them. And we are where we are.

pjc504• 6 years ago

Meanwhile in the 7% of cases when they actually had a legitimate point to make, they could make it

Reddit bans posts and accounts, but cannot ban individuals. If you have something useful to say you can make a non troll account for it.

croon2• 6 years ago

I just have to say I strongly disagree, and I've been on the internet for a while (multiple decades).

The only reason reddit wasn't overrun by asshats even before more subreddits were banned were due to moderation. The same has been true for all forums and BBS:es since the beginning of time.

Truth and sensibility doesn't win out. The loudest voices with the least filtered speech does, because the least amount of filter produces the most amount of output.

With risk of making too broad of a generalization, everything dies without moderation.

romwell2• 6 years ago

Reddit, in its earlier days, was never dominated by the Voat contingent

It has less to do with fReE sPeEcH and more to do with reddit being a niche platform for nerds in the early days (and as far as 2008).

They were there, but they were far less extreme there than they were on Voat.

Until reddit became mainstream. Then the front page got taken over by /r/The_Donald crowd. There is a reason that subrredit is no more.

And then whenever they would post rank inaccuracies, there were clearer-minded people to point out why they were wrong, in the same place where the same people could see it.

And there flowed rivers of milk and honey.... Wait, no, you'd get banned from /r/The_Donald faster than you can blink after you post something that didn't align. And it wasn't even the worst subreddit.

Meanwhile in the 7% of cases when they actually had a legitimate point to make, they could make it, and the people who benefited from hearing it would actually hear it instead of continuing to be unawares and consequently continuing to be wrong about something.

Cry me a river about losing the educational value neo-nazis provide. You don't eat an apple that's 93% rotten, you throw it into the compost pile. This post shows that the compost pile couldn't even sustain itself.

But it doesn't work to have one popular platform which allows nearly everyone except for Those Deplorables

To the contrary, the platform that works for these "deplorables" (your words) doesn't work for literally everyone else.

As a proof, we see this very post. Nobody is interested in having these people around.

Reddit wasn't a popular platform when it started out. It gained a huge amount of users because Digg messed up. If kicking the Voat contingent out were a mistake, Voat would bethe new reddit (it has the same features platform-wise, after all).

Because witch hunts are bad...

Straw man argument. These people were kicked out for their hostile and toxic behavior, not for their ideas.

Kicking out people who poop in public places is not a "witch hunt", because it's not based on identity, but on bad behavior.

There are plenty of alt-right and neo-nazis on reddit still. They are just behaving a little better.

And again, I'm sorry, but I have little interest in attending venues where throwing poop around is OK. This post is an indication that I am in the majority.

eertami• 6 years ago

And then whenever they would post rank inaccuracies, there were clearer-minded people to point out why they were wrong, in the same place where the same people could see it.

I don't think this works on reddit either, since subreddit moderators can simply delete such comments.

starfallg2• 6 years ago

So the answer has to be to stop the witch hunts in the places where everybody else already is.

No, the system is working as it should. If a platform is so full of fringe extremists that the vast majority of people want to have nothing to do with, then they have to bear the commercial and social consequences of that.

Your right to free speech doesn't take priority over my right to have nothing to do with it. Go find your own little patch of land to shout your opinions from.

Free speech doesn't mean you have to right to make me hear you. It just means that government is not allowed to restrict it (for the fear of political suppression). That's it.

odessacubbage• 6 years ago

paradox of tolerance is just a meme and not even a very good one.

8chan, which was usually coded in the media as the most extreme platform managed to be host to both /pol/, /leftypol/, a myriad of queer & lgbt boards and /christian/ as well as boards for other religious denominations and multiple competing sects of gamergate and, of course the q boomers. at one point of polling, /v/ was something like 60% lgbt. on zeronet and the webring you see a similar plurality of views and usecases. there have been hundreds if not thousands of imageboard clones over the years with even less moderation than voat if for no other reason than incompetence. fatchan and chen2 were hardly festering havens of white nationalism. there is far more that leads to a website's culture than speech policies and administrator doctrine, the outright user revolts of SomethingAwful and Neogaf stand as a testament to this. this whole idea that free speech is a one way road to the fourth reich simply does not hold when weighed against the facts, especially considering that the 'sensible' platforms like facebook have been used as the rallying grounds for actual genocide and the livestreaming of murders & kidnappings.

ignoranceprior4• 6 years ago

Yeah, it also annoys me when people assume that all of 4chan and 8chan is /pol/. 4chan has plenty of blue boards like /sci/, /g/, and /tg/ that are relatively decent if you can tolerate shitposting, trolling, and bants. When people write racist stuff, a common response is that they should go back to their "containment board". 8chan used to let users create their own boards, and there were plenty of inoffensive ones. On the other hand, I do think 8chan's /pol/ was just so terrible that it made 8chan overall a definite net-negative for humanity. Even the site's original founder has disavowed it at this point. I also agree with you that mainstream sites like Facebook have their own problems.

But still, whenever I see free speech platforms, they tend to attract a majority of far-right users. I think it's because they're the ones who most often get banned from mainstream platforms and need to find alternatives.

zamalek• 6 years ago

It was truly the culture that dominated the site.

Voat is proof that we are not yet deserving of free speech.

I find beauty in the principle of FoS: we would never have e.g. legalized same-sex marriages without it - and this is why we need it for future ethical advancements, possibly (as one hypothetical example), the right to die/destiny. Advancement of the moral zeitgeist is impossible without it.

The utter impossibility of it in practice is unavoidable. There are few more willing to violate the rights of others than those who demand the right to speech.

weare138• 6 years ago

Voat is proof that we are not yet deserving of free speech

It's not the we the people are not deserving of free speech, it's the idea the right to 'free speech' supersedes other rights and should go unchecked at the expense of others that undermines the concept for so many. Besides, it wasn't free speech or lack thereof that's causing Voat to fold. Apparently no one wanted to pay to hear what they had to say. Everyone has a right to free speech but everyone else has an equal right not to listen to it if they don't want to.

concordDance11• 6 years ago

Voat is proof that we are not yet deserving of free speech.

Try and avoid generalizing from one example. Free speech forums worked pretty well from 1995 to 2010.

chrononaut• 6 years ago

This is something that's quite fascinating to me. The unfettered access to social platforms with few limitations on speech and content today, and available to such a large audience, would be unimaginable 70 years ago. Society and individuals are evermore connected to each other en masse than they ever have been in the past. An individual's discomfort now stems from everyone suddenly being aware of everyone else's opinion and now has to face it and interpret it. It would be next to impossible for someone 70 years ago to be able to collect that information at scale so readily, also making it far easier to ignore. Now all I have to do today is scroll through someone's SOCIAL_NETWORK profile to find out or to experience it.

It begs an interesting question to me whether society is more "stable" with this strife of being hyperconnected, or less stable. The past was filled with far more silos of in-person clubs representing political ideals, making it hard for the common person to recognize their existence, at least to the extent of hearing about its minute details and ideals. There was also a great filter of the powerful individuals controlling the means of communication to limit the content that reached every single person.

Despite the real acts or false claims of suppression, it is interesting that there was never a previous time in the past where each individual was more empowered to be heard than today.

cbozeman2• 6 years ago

Its not that free speech platforms are destined to fail, its anonymity. You're not responsible for your words. That's why these fail.

Notice I use my real name here on this website. Not a pseudonym. Whatever I say here, I would say to you in front of your face. Same as I do on Facebook and Twitter and Reddit and the other areas I post. I've always used my real name. I'll always use my real name.

We don't require anyone to take responsibility for what they say, so they say anything they want. Combine with this an entire zeitgeist of people who feel disconnected and alone, and its a recipe for attention-seeking behavior.

And on the converse, sometimes its taken too far, with people losing their jobs for things that clearly meant in jest (Justine Sacco) or for clumsily worded communication. Call-out culture needs to die. SJW culture needs to die. One-up culture needs to die. We have to start giving people the benefit of the doubt.

howlgarnish• 6 years ago

"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." -Cardinal Richelieu, c. 1600 (attributed to, anyway)

Given the political climate we're in and the complete intolerance to anything but the most milquetoast pablum in Silicon Valley these days, it's a brave or foolish person who posts anything online under their real name these days.

brayhite• 6 years ago

This may have been true at one time, but in the age of Youtube videos and live broadcasts being a popular vehicle for all of the above, I don't think folks care anymore about anonymity.

It's a toxic race for attention and engagement to either a.) generate revenue, b.) acquire some taste of "fame", or c.) both. Being anonymous plays a role in some corners of the internet, but the ones that are contributing the most to the cultures you mention above don't depend on anonymity. They're being perpetuated and propped up by very knowable online identities, and I highly doubt the folks doing the propping think they're safely anonymous.

TheTrotters• 6 years ago

"Taking responsibility for what you say" often equals being attacked or ostracized for deviating from the Correct Opinion. Anonymity is often required for freedom of expression.

Give a person a mask and he'll tell you the truth, and all that.

6nf• 6 years ago

4chan though

guerrilla• 6 years ago

I don't think its only anonymity, distance plays a big role too. There are virtually no consequences to disrespecting and/or harassing somone in some far away jursidiction.

pjc504• 6 years ago

Some of the worst material is published in newspapers under a byline and a photo. Editorial demanding the murder of refugees, that kind of thing.

dmje• 6 years ago

100% nodding

concordDance11• 6 years ago

SJW culture needs to die.

Having this attached to your name may cost you a job one day.

mrtksn• 6 years ago

Agree, we simulated the real world communities but left out the safeguards that real world communities have against bad behaviour. All turned in a simulation where you can do whatever you want without consequences to you but with consequences to others. It's bizarre.

meheleventyone2• 6 years ago

Actually as far as anyone else is concerned you're still using a pseudonym. We can't verify your real name nor do we actually know it since you use an abbreviation.

base6983• 6 years ago

you being encouraged to use your real name? Again, the question of whether anonymity emboldens trolls is not the force of that article, it isn't about their behavior, it is about yours.
"But merely 'branding anonymity as bad' isn't going to stop the cyberbullying misogynists." You are correct, which is why the spokesperson for this crisis is Amanda Hess. No one is trying to stop cyberbullies, there's no point, they don't shop and no one wants to look at them. Hess has entirely misunderstood what the medium wants. The whole game is to get women-- not the cyberbullies, not criminals, but the consumers-- to voluntarily give up all of their privacy, while paying lip service to privacy at home-- knowing full well women that women will pay money not to have the kind of privacy they have at home. Voluntarily exposing yourself makes you a targetable consumer and targetable consumable. Is it worth it?

https://web.archive.org/web/20200420063821/https://thelastps...

kgwxd• 6 years ago

I used to use my real name, until my boss told me my HN comments showed up in his Cortana results when all he wanted to do was search for my email address in his personal contact list. A decent person will feel at least a little bit like a creep searching for someones name on Google to dig up personal details about them, but when all that info just comes along with their email address, it just doesn't sit right. My boss even felt compelled to tell me it happened, not because he saw anything bad, but because he felt like a creep just getting the info like that. Then I started thinking about all the Windows users in the business world that might get the same results under the same conditions, and I just don't need everyone I interact with, across the country, knowing, for example, I'm an atheist before they send me a request to add a new question to a web form.

cable2600• 6 years ago

The alt-right needs to go somewhere to leave the rest of us alone. No matter what they will blame liberals for the loss of Voat and other sites. When you have no censorship it is like the Wild West and the biggest guns rule.

Back when I worked as a CO-SYSOP for a College run BBS I had to delete posts that had cuss words in them or were hateful or porno. They had to keep the subboards clean because we had 13 year olds on there downloading info about the college and playing Tradewars, Stock Market, Food Fite, etc. One of the people I censored was Larry Kite, an alt-right troll. Who got mad and claimed he was going to the computer lab to meet the SYSOP and see his boyish face. My supervisor had a beard and met Mr. Kite and explained to him it was not personal we do that to everyone. Especially on networked subs where they have rules against it.

read_if_gay_3• 6 years ago

The alt-right needs to go somewhere to leave the rest of us alone.

Hmm, I wonder why the political divide has grown to become such a huge problem in the US...

PradeetPatel• 6 years ago

Sometimes hate speech must be limited in order for a greater freedom of speech to thrive.

My heart goes out to the founder of voat, I'm sure his heart was in the right place when he founded the site. But perhaps he did not anticipate it to organically evolve into a haven for alt-right extremism.

Perhaps this will serve as a lesson to many future platform providers.

janoc• 6 years ago

Well, the front page has literally "Holocaust didn't happen" plastered on it right now (crime in many EU countries) ...

Not really going to miss this one. "Neutral" and "free-speech" have unfortunately become euphemisms for a license to spew hate that wouldn't be allowed elsewhere (i.e "censored").

austhrow7432• 6 years ago

Linked post references red pilling and 4chan, celebrates being hated by people, talks about how great their terrible user base is, and mentions Christian shit multiple times.

Gives me the impression that it was always intended to be populated by the types of people that populate it.

torben-friis2• 6 years ago

For someone who has a bit of context: is this supposed to be real or tongue in cheek? It sounds like mental illness to me but maybe I'm just incredibly out of touch with the reality of the average voat user.

I will lay Voat upon the cross on December 25th 2020 at 12 noon PST. I have chosen Christmas as the day to do so in honor of the only True thing you will find in this world and that is Jesus Christ, the son of God, and the only way to the Father. I chose 12 noon in honor of the twelve disciples who spread the message of salvation to the world.

dwardu• 6 years ago

nothing bad about that. are you just annoyed jesus was mentioned?

vmchale• 6 years ago

Same with parler. It's now totally dominated by weenieheads.

commandlinefan• 6 years ago

Voat was founded as a neutral free-speech platform.

I was optimistic about Voat as I was about Parler: Reddit/Twitter, but without the left-wing censorship. But I found the same reality you did: the only people who bothered to migrate were complete lunatics.

whereistimbo2• 6 years ago

I'm from Indonesia and I can't ever access voat with error 1020.

ardy42• 6 years ago

Here's an archive of the announcement: https://web.archive.org/web/20201222001232/https://voat.co/v...

Looking at those comments, it will not be missed.

technion• 6 years ago

Whilst the content on voat kept me from using it, I clicked this link and couldn't help noticing how quickly it loaded. How much content was on the screen. How many comments I could read before hitting "load more", which simply loaded more rather than sending me to a different page.

For a site with funding issues and limited Devs, voats usability should be a huge embarassment to the Reddit it based itself on.

edoceo• 6 years ago

Once again tho, it's not the tech that makes/breaks the company/platform

alrs• 6 years ago

Tell that to Friendster.

gruez4• 6 years ago

Is this comparing to the new reddit interface, or the old one? The old one is just as fast, although the page size might be slightly smaller.

Sebguer• 6 years ago

This is a pretty weird assertion - Voat doesn't have to worry about literally any of the scale problems Reddit does.

cwhiz• 6 years ago

Reddit has usability problems by design. Reddit want to make it as obnoxious as possible to use on a mobile phone, so that you’ll download their stupid app. They also push you to login to view more content, so they can track you.

Reddit is just a cesspool, and it’s by design. Absolutely nothing to do with scaling problems.

tristan957• 6 years ago

The design of your website in Reddit's case has nothing to do with scale. Shitty UX will always be shitty UX no matter how many users are on your platform.

skavi2• 6 years ago

i.reddit.com and old.reddit.com are both sorta ugly, but fast enough.

deeviant• 6 years ago

Are you using the reddit re-design? Because don't.

stjohnswarts4• 6 years ago

Use old.reddit.com. Usually loads pages in a second or two, so I'm not sure why that's so bad?

striking• 6 years ago

Archive link: https://archive.li/vE4iR

TL;DR:

I fight not being bitter and resentful. You see, this wasn’t supposed to happen, at least not now. The short of it is that the “Angel” defaulted on the contract in March 2020. This is when Voat lost all of it’s funding. I personally decided to keep Voat up until after the U.S. election of 2020. I’ve been paying the costs out of pocket but now I’m out of money.
I will lay Voat upon the cross on December 25th 2020 at 12 noon PST

devteambravo2• 6 years ago

What a cesspool. There's so much racism, just in this post's comments... Good riddance!

rootusrootus• 6 years ago

Yeah, I was scrolling through some of the comments and saw things like "kikeflix" as an insulting variation of netflix, references to "hitler was right", etc.

First and last time I ever actually went to Voat. I'm not sure anything of value is being lost.

devteambravo2• 6 years ago

And despite all that, some people on here are talking about... performance issues? Gross.

adkadskhj• 6 years ago

Yea.. The owner (or w/e) is talking about how he loves them all - i don't get it. At best i feel like he could say he loves some of them enough to not burn the whole place down before now. Eesh.

jpxw• 6 years ago

3 comments in and I see a racial slur. 8 comments and I see “Hitler was right”. Both comments massively upvoted.

The optics on Voat are not the best, are they...

mey• 6 years ago

Not sure that is optics, more that is just the shape of the community on there.

gerdesj• 6 years ago

"It’s embarrassing but it’s true, I just can’t keep it up. I’ve tried meditation, I’ve tried prayer, I’ve tried reaching out for help. Some solutions worked for a little while but nothing has remedied the underlying issue. No matter what I do, I simply just can’t keep it up. I expect most will be disappointed and let down, while others will just point and laugh. So be it, it’s a problem every man like me will face at some point."

I know absolutely nothing about voat but the bow out post is well written and heartfelt.

Clearly the intention was for something better but the piranhas and xChan int al turned up. The funny thing about free speech is it needs to be policed.

soz/lol etc

StavrosK• 6 years ago

That's actually a thinly veiled erectile dysfunction double entendre.

excitedleigh• 6 years ago

idk, the first three paras are pretty clearly an erectile dysfunction joke. It continues:

One thing is true though, while I kept it up, it was glorious in many ways. It was the hardest[…], it was the biggest[…], it was bulging[…], it was throbbing[…]. It’s so great in so many ways that it has a list of haters who will be extremely aroused by this post.
I know I’m going to get a hundred PMs from all of Voat’s hottest girls (Voat has some hot women, fact) with tips and tricks on how to help me keep it up. […]

JasonFruit• 6 years ago

The funny thing about free speech is it needs to be policed.

I can't agree with that — 'policed' and 'free' are really practically opposites. I wonder if a better formulation is "free speech needs to be parented": that is, subjected to social pressure by people who have the maturity to exercise their freedom with wisdom.

If I could figure out how to encourage communities to develop in ways that encourage parenting, rather than subjecting them to imposed policing, I'd have a potential product on my hands. I haven't got that figured out, though.

Brian_K_White2• 6 years ago

Heartfelt and well written?

"I know I’m going to get a hundred PMs from all of Voat’s hottest girls (Voat has some hot women, fact) with tips and tricks on how to help me keep it up."

xeromal• 6 years ago

Yeah, he sounds kind of like a jokester but it was a fun read. Feels way more genuine than any of our "incredible journey" hangups

tootie6• 6 years ago

I'm pretty sure voat turned out exactly as he intended. While "Free speech" is laudable goal, he wanted a platform that allowed for racism, conspiracies and threats. I don't think he wanted only racism and conspiracies, but he wanted them to be allowed to flourish alongside and within mainstream conversation.

dawnerd• 6 years ago

Wow, just the replies alone is reason enough for it to be shut down for good.

efwfwef3• 6 years ago

As far as I can remember, it was a platform full of fascists that were booted off of reddit, so nothing of value was lost.

moonbug• 6 years ago

Never heard of it. A quick tour shows it to be full of quite unpleasant people. Good riddance.

dmode• 6 years ago

This is the fallacy of a "free speech" site. It gets taken over by extremists and soon you are just talking to each other in an echo chamber and agreeing with each other. And then you lose interest. That's why I never visit r/politics in Reddit anymore even though I am somewhat aligned with the political attitude of that sub.

fastball• 6 years ago

I genuinely hope for your sake you are not aligned with the attitudes of /r/politics, that place is fucking bananas.

root_axis• 6 years ago

I guess the refugees will head off to parler or thedonald.win, though I wonder if voat's level of racism is too much even for those sites.

0xy2• 6 years ago

Voat is irrelevant compared to thedonald.win, which is #2,743 on the global internet according to Alexa.

redisman• 6 years ago

8kun seems to be at the same level last I checked

tzs• 6 years ago

Most of the original Voat groups were groups that has been kicked off of Reddit, but then people there made groups that corresponded to groups that were still on Reddit, like /v/science and /v/movies.

Reading those is quite an experience. On /v/science right now there is a submission about dark matter and MOND [1], which was also discussed today on HN [2].

The title of the Voat submission will give you a good idea of what the place is like: "Another Jew Science Lie to Fall? DARK MATTER not needed?! Evidence of "modified gravity" in 150 galaxies strengthens dark matter alternative. Gravity has >8 anomalies but this one is solvable."

That's actually a fairly tame discussion by Voat standards. Here's one that was a submission of a video on pilot wave theory from PBS Space Time [3] (or as it is referred to in the comments, (((PBS)))). Voat title: "Kikes have been shitting up science for over a century". See the comments for how the ether is the right theory and the Jews suppressed it.

Here's what a movie discussion is like over there [4], "Mandolorian - Season 2".

[1] https://voat.co/v/science/4169827

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25496725

[3] https://voat.co/v/science/4152241

[4] https://voat.co/v/movies/4164913

whereistimbo2• 6 years ago

Why I suddenly felt like voat is a psychological science experiment?

rchaud5• 6 years ago

In a way, it is. It's the perfect embodiment of "careful what you wish for", which is referencing people's inability to anticipate unintended consequences. Every HN post about Patreon or Youtube banning somebody leads to lengthy treatises about free speech.

Well, here's Voat. All free speech, all the time. What's that, bigots have taken over the platform and chased out all the non-bigots? Who could have seen this coming?

biohax2015• 6 years ago

Jeez.. what a disgusting, hateful place. Good riddance.

konjin2• 6 years ago

If only reddit would follow it.

intended8• 6 years ago

I salute your visiting the site and creating this view.

Whatever drove you to wade into these waters? I’m greatful, But also curious.

Aeolun• 6 years ago

Holy fuck. That’s way worse than I expected.

I can’t imagine people actually think like that. They must be doing it for the shock value, or because of some echo chamber effect.

fake-name• 6 years ago

It's worse. They actually believe that.

tialaramex2• 6 years ago

Not for this, but for the "obviously crazy" Trump beliefs we have a useful proxy. PredictIt ran a large number of betting markets (far more than a traditional bookmaker) for the 2020 US Presidential Election.

Of course the markets about Trump have lots of people spouting outrageous nonsense. You could dismiss that as just "for shock value". But PredictIt is real money (albeit not the sums involved in the "real" international betting markets) and the actual bets placed reflect those same crazy beliefs.

About 24 hours ago the market for how many Electoral College votes Trump will get closed. The answer, as we've known for about a week now, was 232. In a normal healthy market, even if people are writing comments saying that the US military will force people to vote again at gun point, the price for Trump gets 232 votes would be $1 (the way PredictIt works you're getting one dollar for each correct prediction, so if you are absolutely certain of something it's worth precisely $1 and you wouldn't sell it for anything less).

The closing price, less than 24 hours ago, was 96¢. For 96¢ you could buy a dollar, just by being sure of a well known fact about Donald Trump's loss. Because the people "trolling" the comments really believe he didn't lose.

qPM9l3XJrF• 6 years ago

Ideological homophily is a bitch. I actually tried arguing voaters out of their antisemitism for a while. As you might expect, it was a thankless task. I really think that examples like voat should make us skeptical of online communities in general. No one likes to be told they are wrong, or tell others they are wrong, so you get echo chambers.

unethical_ban• 6 years ago

I've seen it happen. Stew in that cesspool of "jokes" and humor long enough, and it becomes how you think. Your brain comes to anticipate the jokes and the comments so you're part of the in-crew. And you start to think "I mean, it's kind of true". A subset of those people go on to be truly hateful.

HappyDreamer2• 6 years ago

Don't be surprised that there are people who believe such things for real. There're organizations for the 1 in 50 or 1 in 1000 brightest people, but there's the other end of the spectrum too.

A friend/acquaintance of mine has Alex J and Info Wars as her primary (only?) news source, and she sounded proud about this, as if she's discovered something others didn't know about.

echelon• 6 years ago

That's a rolling dumpster file.

And they just donated several million dollars to the operator:

https://www.walletexplorer.com/wallet/00000014ea8b260f

mxxx• 6 years ago

Wow. Clicked your last link. That is absolutely awful.

flatiron• 6 years ago

Same here. “It’s a silly sci fi western style brain dead fun tv show what could you hate?” Boy was I wrong. I’m not sad a site that tolerates that is closing.

tinus_hn• 6 years ago

Question is where they will end up now that this forum is dead. They will find another one.

koffiezet• 6 years ago

They already have Parler. Don't recommend going there, it's even more explicit in its toxicity... Also not public, for a reason I guess...

tootie6• 6 years ago

Just look at the comment thread on his goodbye message. There's no shortage of commenters blaming jews, blacks and gays (with much less savory language). And they all have plenty of upvotes.

ffpip2• 6 years ago

Voat never works for me. Seems like they banned all Indian IPs using Cloudflare.

https://i.imgur.com/gUQQgdI.png

sedatk• 6 years ago

So much for the so called bastion of free speech.

meowster2• 6 years ago

That speaks to the country, not the website.

iKevinShah3• 6 years ago

I thought I was the only one. Seems like they did ban. Not sure before or after the announcement

anshumankmr6• 6 years ago

Why Indian IPs in particular?

ffpip2• 6 years ago

I live in India. All IPs from here are just banned. I tested from multiple places and providers.

I think they just turned on a switch and forgot to turn it off.

otterley• 6 years ago

And nothing of value was lost.

intended8• 6 years ago

Hey, a containment board has dropped, those people are going to spread again. So Something was lost!

xtracto• 6 years ago

Theres a plethora of .win boards that could absorb some of the same people that frequented voat

athriren• 6 years ago

there is social utility in leper colonies.

igetspam• 6 years ago

It's a shame. Where will we ever find such worthwhile speech as "I don't have cable/satellite, kikeflix, go to movies or restaurants (even if they were open), and so on. I can only buy so many bullets and bunker supplies. Show me a way to support this website without doxxing myself and the money will flow." again?

If only the flames of this burning cespool would spread to its kin.

intended8• 6 years ago

Crap. The containment board is down.

I never thought I would want to create a go fund me for voat. But if it keeps stuff contained in the long run?

altdatathrow• 6 years ago

There are plenty of other alt-right hangouts, and probably 3 more already started today.

city41• 6 years ago

Is that a good thing? Seems when extremists get together with only other extremists, they become even more extreme.

zemo• 6 years ago

is there any evidence to support the idea that having places for hate speech to grow has a quarantine effect, reducing hate speech elsewhere? Studies on the effects of banning hate speech communities suggest that the mechanics don't work that way. For example, when reddit banned /r/fatpeoplehate and other subreddits centered around hate groups, other subreddits did not inherit the hate speech problem, and former hate group users reduced the amount of hateful content they posted.

http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf

nicbou• 6 years ago

If you spread them among fragmented communities, the "clean" communities remain the louder voice on the internet.

input_sh• 6 years ago

They still have their own echo chambers. thedonald[.]win, Gab, and Parler come to mind.

rchaud5• 6 years ago

Wasn't 8chan a containment board as well?

raldi3• 6 years ago

Moderated communities beat unmoderated ones on any metric you can name. Always have, always will.

Nobody wants to drink at a pub that won't throw out rude patrons.

ninkendo4• 6 years ago

Exactly this.

Folks can rant about free speech all they want, but no sane person would actually want to experience it. I support your right to speak, but doesn’t mean I want to listen to you.

IMO the only parts of the internet that should be absolutely required to allow unfiltered (legal, protected) speech, should be ISP’s, and maybe datacenters that rent out physical rack space. Everyone else should absolutely consider it their right to exercise moderation on their platform (throw out the rude patrons, as it were.)

MinusGix2• 6 years ago

I think this is more of a matter of scale, like in your ISP and datacenter example, social media could be counted in on that too due to the sheer size of it and influence it can have on people. I agree that not having moderation isn't something we can do, for staying on topic or getting rid of certain users. The benefit of Reddit in this is that sub-communities can be made with harsher moderation policies than the outside Reddit, which allows getting rid of users they don't want. Since this is small sub-communities, if the users who disliked that subreddit really wanted they could make their own alternative and still be accessible to the wider Reddit. This would help avoid the problems of Voat becoming full of people on the extremist end of the spectrum. It wouldn't be a perfect solution, but being shared around reddit and accessible through the same account would make it a lot easier to dilute things like that.

Throwaway17715• 6 years ago

In many cases, the free speech (shocking stuff) is a litmus test for the compromised nature of the platform.

It's important, historically, to test this regularly, and thoroughly.

Voat/4Chan et al MUST be viewed in this context.

Must!

ashtonkem7• 6 years ago

Folks can rant about free speech all they want, but no sane person would actually want to experience it.

Always remember that "free speech" is 100% about the right to say what you want and not be prosecuted for it. It has never, ever been about the social consequences of any particular one person's speech. Insulting your boss and getting fired isn't an abridgement of free speech, neither is getting banned from the neighborhood pub for racist monologues.

axguscbklp2• 6 years ago

I enjoy rude online communities. Sometimes it's nice to go to places where people say what they mean rather than try to be polite and/or politically correct.

Pubs and websites are different from each other. I probably wouldn't go to a pub that refused to throw out rude patrons because there would be a relatively high chance of physical violence occurring at such a pub. Online, assuming that my use of a website would have no consequences like doxxing that could get back to the rest of my life, that wouldn't be an issue.

Also, it's hard to ignore loud people at a pub. On the other hand, it's easy to ignore annoying people on a website.

eropple9• 6 years ago

Don't worry. The places in question do that, too.

sellyme5• 6 years ago

assuming that my use of a website would have no consequences like doxxing that could get back to the rest of my life

This is a brave assumption.

TameAntelope• 6 years ago

4chan has a place on the Internet, and if that counts as "moderation" then Voat had moderation too.

judge20204• 6 years ago

Voat definitely has moderation, CP and other illegal content is kept off of the platform; but both 4chan and voat can be largely hateful places with threats of violence thrown around. 4chan somehow has funding (it has ads and a paid subscription option but iirc there's also angel investors funding it) so it's going to stay up for the foreseeable future. Unless voat can start a patreon or something of the sorts (maybe chargebee), it's going to be turned off.

nemothekid• 6 years ago

The idea that 4chan doesn't have moderation isn't true. I largely have to suspect it has to do with the the time moot stopped making bans public, but 4chan moderation used to be very visible. A number of other alternate chans were created because 4chan was "too strict". Even /pol/'s current political flavor is a product of deliberate moderation. Regardless, despite 4chan's "lack of moderation", with the exception of /pol/, the level of racism and hate you see isn't anywhere near what you would see on voat.

egeozcan2• 6 years ago

Even though there are many actual racists in between, I wouldn't take 99.9% of what's posted on 4Chan seriously. It's just a place people talk sh__ with zero consequences. There are no explanations (other than trolling like QAnon), or rationalizations. I guess it's because actually 4Chan is moderated, and it detracts the people with "real agendas".

Voat on the other hand, from the preview I've seen above, seems to be horrifyingly serious. People really seem to be trying to rationalize their racism. From my 5 minutes there, I really got scared about what some of those people would think of other human beings.

anshumankmr6• 6 years ago

True. But the only problem is when moderators hold too much power, like in the case of most subs in Reddit.

sellyme5• 6 years ago

Moderators on Reddit hold very little power. Unlike almost every other messageboard in existence, they can do absolutely nothing to stop you from creating a competing community on the exact same website, leveraging the existing userbase.

The only tools are standard moderator ones: content deletion, stickying, and a banhammer. There's not many sites where moderators have less power.

octoberfranklin• 6 years ago

Moderated communities beat unmoderated ones on any metric you can name.

Prevalence of power trips?

Let's face it, almost nobody gets paid to moderate, so the compensation has to be something else. I never had much interest in IRC because the format (live/real-time) has a much higher moderation (op) burden, more powerfully attracting people who like power trips and narrative control.

The solution isn't Galilean absolute-frame-of-reference moderation. It's something more relativistic, like the PGP Web of Trust.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25405128

Throwaway17715• 6 years ago

Bikers do.

Because the bikers handle their own personal space...

aaron6953• 6 years ago

Voat was moderated.

No one designs forums that are un-moderated that I know of? Maybe newsgroups 25 years ago would fit.

Community moderation is an interesting idea that I believe is still unsolved online.

raldi3• 6 years ago

That reads to me a bit like saying party planning is still unsolved.

ourcat• 6 years ago

Ahh NNTP. Those were indeed the days. As were the killfiles we used, to try and deal with an ever-increasing amount of spammers.

berryjerry3• 6 years ago

This is dead on correct. The problem is online most people don't have to hear what you say, they can just not subscribe or not follow you and never hear a word of what you said. This is why over-moderation on the big tech sites like Reddit, Youtube, Twitter, and Facebook is so frustrating. It goes beyond kicking someone out of the bar to not allowing someone to open a bar. And they get their moderation wrong, and I mean a lot. Unless the person they got it wrong with has a following that noticed it, they have zero chance at appealing or arguing their side.

raldi3• 6 years ago

Not following. You can't make your own subreddit / YT channel / FB group?

phoe-krk• 6 years ago

It goes beyond kicking someone out of the bar to not allowing someone to open a bar.

You can open your bar just fine. Just don't expect someone else to invite people in there for you.

mtberatwork• 6 years ago

It goes beyond kicking someone out of the bar to not allowing someone to open a bar.

This analogy doesn't work. Anyone can open their own "bars" on the Web. Reddit and Voat are the "bars" here. Voat was created because they were kicked off of Reddit. Voat even mimics Reddit in terms of functionality.

fulafel2• 6 years ago

There have been some pretty successful unmoderated (centrally) social networks. Email, Usenet, IRC come to mind. The moderation does happen in these but it's self organizing.

ninkendo4• 6 years ago

I wouldn’t call IRC or Email “social networks”, or even platforms at all, really. Email is more of a direct person-to-person communication platform, similar to SMS in that it isn’t really used to “publish” stuff, outside of spam (which is the worst part of email) and mailing lists (which you ostensibly have to sign up for, or else it’s spam.)

IRC is a bit more in the middle, but it’s never had much of a critical mass outside of maybe EFNet? The rest of the IRC world is too fragmented to even call it one social network. And I would say moderation problems are directly proportional to the scale of the network (EFNet has its trolls, especially in its heyday.)

Usenet has always had a huge problem with trolls... again, proportional to its usage. It was only “good” back when the internet was very young and there was such a thing as “netiquette”. See also the eternal September.

fulafel2• 6 years ago

Also: the blogosphere, with pingbacks and RSS is a social network.

thinkingemote• 6 years ago

4chan is heavily moderated.

The moderation is just that the barrier is in a different place, and it's hidden for the most part. But there is moderation.

It's like the pub you don't want to drink in because it's full of the thugs and drug dealers who have the scariest bouncers at the door. Any trouble makers get taken out back, but they do have methods to control what they consider to be trouble makers.

sonotathrowaway3• 6 years ago

We know 4chan is moderated, simply because 8chan exists and has produced several more mass murderers than 4chan has, despite the close overlap of ideologies. 4chan has a magnitude less users posting their manifestos before committing mass murder.

conradfr• 6 years ago

I'm part of an unmoderated forum and it's so refreshing.

We have some racists and we laugh at their posts. We have some threads that are hidden for non-trusted members but that's more about censorship laws in our country.

Of course things like child porn would be removed and one or two members may have been kicked but anyone can register.

I would agree that it's a matter of scale though.

_opc6• 6 years ago

I've said this before and got downvoted for it.

But if companies allow extremists on their platforms then the moderates will leave. It's not so much a paradox but a cause and effect.

phponpcp• 6 years ago

I dont know about that... Twitter has a huge problem of leftwing extremism.

qlm• 6 years ago

Can you provide an example of what you perceive to be "left wing extremism"?

Barrin92• 6 years ago

not really sure why you were downvoted for it. You let nazis openly rant in your bar I'd bet you won't have any normal guests there pretty quickly, it's just a broken window dynamic. Unmoderated, a few bad users will scare most of the civil people off.

hombre_fatal3• 6 years ago

What almost every comment about Voat here misses though is that when you start a competitor clone to an incumbent like Voat did, there’s literally zero reason for most people to join. The only people who have an incentive are people banned from the incumbent.

You see this all the time. As a kid I posted on a forum Opa-Ages that was just weirdos banned from Gaming-Ages (NeoGAF).

This isn’t so much about free speech and moderation. You also need to answer the question of how to compete with Reddit with these facts in mind.

The only people who ever had reason to use Voat were those with unsavory opinions. Ok, you’ve banned all of your users. Now what?

So, all the times you’ve said this before, did you ever pitch a solution?

andrewflnr3• 6 years ago

There's no "solution", just like there's no "solution" to "politics". Everyone just has to keep trying really hard all the time so we don't drown in shit. That's it, until the lights go out for good.

As for the next step, it looks less like starting a reddit competitor and more like building individual, independent communities that can stand or (more likely) fall apart from any others.

Vinnl• 6 years ago

The only people who have an incentive are people banned from the incumbent.

Other groups might be people who feel harassed by people who aren't banned from the incumbent. For example, I think Mastodon saw early large influxes of LGBT users who were getting tired of Twitter's lack of moderation.

(Though of course, Mastodon has seen other influxes as well that might have helped it get over a specific niche - IIRC many Japanese who had different ideas about what is tolerable than Western platforms, and of course techies enthusiastic about federation.)

tootie6• 6 years ago

Not necessarily. Reddit was riding the coattails of Digg for a long time until Digg actively alienated it's user base with a redesign. Also, MySpace losing to Facebook.

mariusor3• 6 years ago

So, all the times you’ve said this before, did you ever pitch a solution?

The solution is to attract small communities off reddit. There are countless decent communities on reddit that have issues with the vast majority of the website outside their niche interest. If each of these small communities will have their own little place to discuss and share ideas without having the Damocles sword of the larger reddit assholery and bad design over their heads, I feel like there's a chance they'll move to a different platform.

I am planning such an alternative to reddit that targets these small communities. I hope it will actually be useful to people.

konjin2• 6 years ago

But if companies allow extremists on their platforms then the moderates will leave. It's not so much a paradox but a cause and effect.

One only need to look at /r/news and /r/politics to see this happening on the original site.

SN76477• 6 years ago

Good.

anshumankmr6• 6 years ago

Will the same happen to Parler?

judge20204• 6 years ago

Parler has VC money to keep it running, so it won't be shutting down.

px43• 6 years ago

JFC that entire comment section is about blaming the Jews and using some pretty fucking horrific slurs to do it.

Let that trash pile burn. Fuck those guys and anyone who would give pieces of shit like that a platform to spread their hatred into the world.

egeozcan2• 6 years ago

I think trying to win those people may be a better strategy in the long term. People feeling left out are angry, and if the train stops and they ride together, they wouldn't be so anti-social. Again, "I think" (Which is more of a hope, admittedly).

KukiAirani• 6 years ago

People with views like these shouldn't be given oxygen with platforms that allow them to form community around horrible and hateful ideas. In my opinion they should feel left out, until they realize that it is their immoral views that make them unacceptable to larger society.

forgotmypw5• 6 years ago

i don,t think your comment is any better.

approxim8ion• 6 years ago

Yes, indeed, there is no difference between good things and bad things.

stjohnswarts4• 6 years ago

I think is despising hate speech and the haters who deal in it is perfectly okay. His comment was fair, voat is a dumpster fire of ignorance and hate.

TheRealDunkirk2• 6 years ago

I love that, at the end, he justifies not naming-and-shaming the angel who pulled out by quoting... scripture, and claiming to take the high, spiritual road, while this is the giant, flaming trash-fire-visible-from-space raging behind him.

noodles_nomore• 6 years ago

It's amazing how quickly the internet has indeed become srs bsns, and grown men and women are angrily typing at teenagers and each other completely unaware of the farceness of it all.

jelliclesfarm• 6 years ago

Could be a honeypot maneuver. The raison d’etre for Voat.

rnd03• 6 years ago

8chan and 4chan already serve that purpose, though.

aaron6953• 6 years ago

Voats problem was it was boring. This is why it failed. As far as I could tell they couldn't start or prop up anything like a Pizzagate. It was a poor mans 4chan.

They had a real opportunity in 2015 to be the next Reddit, but seem to have missed it. To many outages, I felt like they didn't embrace Venture Capital as well as they could. They still created something. And it's easy to criticise I guess. But it sucks being stuck with Reddit.

Throwaway17715• 6 years ago

Pizzagate moved there.............

renewiltord5• 6 years ago

God damn it. That's the shitty thing about the honeypot running dry. Now all the flies are in one spot and they don't have anything keeping them there.

forgotmypw17• 6 years ago

This is why it is important to design decentralization and overgrowth resistance as well as community moderation into the platform itself.

sun_tzu• 6 years ago

Good riddance.

INTPenis• 6 years ago

Does the founder go into details on how much it cost to run and what the traffic was? Might help future generations.

ahmetyas01• 6 years ago

already did

blntechie• 6 years ago

For whatever reason, they are blocking all requests from most Asian countries with Cloudflare.

I tried my own home internet, couple of different VPN services in different Asian countries and it only worked on US and UK IPs.

pii5• 6 years ago

LOL

peanut_worm• 6 years ago

There is a holocaust denial post on the front page right now. Good riddance.

kypro• 6 years ago

Voat and Bitchute are the platforms that convinced me censorship just radicalises people more. I tried to use Voat a number of times after the subreddits and communties I liked online were censored one by one, but each time this happened I noticed Voat got progressively more extremist as it started to become one of the last places that allowed that type of speech on the internet.

While I never felt I needed to use Voat the problem because there are many alternative communities online, I do feel I HAVE to use Bitchute if I want to watch some of my favourite creators because YouTube banned them for reasons I can't quite understand. I'm aware this is now exposing me to a lot more radical content than I would otherwise be exposed to if I was still watching on YouTube.

For example, just yesterday I shared a funny video I found on BitChute to a friend, but he wasn't able to view it because it was deemed potentially illegal in his country. It was a fairly innocent parody video so I didn't really get why it was banned until I took a look at the channel which was full of extreme and racist content.

I'm self-aware enough to know that exposing myself frequently enough to content like this could shift my views and I'm making efforts not to click on related views on Bitchute, but just to watch and support the content I used to enjoy on YouTube but it's obvious to me how many people can become radicalised by communities that consist solely of radicals that have been banned from the more mainstream platforms.

Here's the video btw, https://www.bitchute.com/video/AlSYTmkVfUFw/ I love Bill Gates and don't agree with all the conspiracies surrounding him but I did find this parody kinda funny. I'm a big South Parks fan though, and it reminds me a lot of that.

jl2718• 6 years ago

exposing myself to content ... shift views

How is this a concern if you know your views are correct to begin with?

Tade0• 6 years ago

You guys crack me up, even now you accuse me of being mossad or a honey pot. If I keep it up or shut it down I'm the same thing. Damned if you do, damned it you don't.

I think nothing sums ups this community better.

read_if_gay_3• 6 years ago

This is every community ever. There are always haters.

HelloNurse• 6 years ago

Free speech is important, but seeing the horrible content on the Voat frontpage (anti-vaccine and US presidential election hate speech and silliness, "the Holocaust didn't happen, but it should have happened", "how the Yids stole Christmas"...) the only reaction I can think of is GOOD RIDDANCE.

I hope losing an online echo chamber causes Voat ex-users to be accidentally exposed to different points of view as they settle elsewhere online or (I know I'm being optimistic) have a civil conversation with real people.

stjohnswarts4• 6 years ago

While I supported their right to have a forum, that place is/was a cesspool, but that's the price you pay for freedom of speech. Ultimately they failed (and will soon go down) and that's a good thing and it makes me feel better about the country. I suspect that in a year or two that Parler will also fail but the fact that they can exist still makes me proud to be in the USA where speech is speech as long as it doesn't incite violence or danger to individuals.

scruffyherder• 6 years ago

I'm more interested in the whole .NET forum aspect of it... is the source still available?

Cyberthal• 6 years ago

The site founder didn't like asking for donations, so he almost never did, and then he ran out of money. Overly principled people are often impractical.

Ruqqus is better in every way. Voat was obsolete.

The pious celebration of the HNers is amusing, but there is no reduction of free speech availability for the banned pro-Aryan right. If anything, their user experience will now improve. It is a consolidation.

Voat Is Shutting Down

Related Stories