So what's up with Voat?
hey all!
i think this is my first ~talk post, 👀 nice place ye got here!
so, i got to thinking about social media sites a few days ago (whilst trying to brainstorm a sideproject that isn't a social media site) and i got to thinking about Voat.
it seemed like an interesting idea at first, a nearly literal copy-paste of old reddit meant a system that i was already used to, but i'd also be early enough to get whatever username i want, and they even have a cute little goat!
and then uhh
reddit got rid of a lot of hate-communities
and they all went to voat.
now - i guess that's fine. if they want to all exile themselves into their own corner of the internet, i can't stop em
but my question is like - what about the people behind Voat? obviously there's people running the site, there's investment money involved, and they have to know that their site is the front-yard above-ground pool with green water of the internet, right?
i tried looking for some interviews of the founder - but i couldn't find anything.
any of you lot know what's goin' on with voat? what are your thoughts on the site itself? its longevity?
Dumpster diving in shitholes like /pol/, /r/the_donald, and voat is one of my self destructive hobbies, so I know a decent amount about those places.
The thing is run by one guy, PuttItOut. Originally, the site started as a free speech bastion where no moderation except for removing spam would happen,and it's largely kept to that. Lately though, and especially after the widespread Reddit banning of harassing and questionably legal subreddits, he's taken less of a role as an impartial administrator of free speech, and more of an active racist contributor to the site. The site can be viewed nowadays as less of an anything goes, free speech free for all forum and more of an out and out white supremacist site, more akin to stormfront than 4chan in general.
There are different subverses which are analgous to subreddits, but on any of the larger ones, regardless of the actual topic at least 50% of the content will be out and out racist venting, or purposeful bait meant to incite anger at other races.
The founder of the site was on the verge of financial collapse and was openly pondering shutting it down, but about a year ago he got a mysterious investor to keep the lights on for some reason. PuttitOut hasn't elaborated on who this person(s) are.
tldr; it's an explicitly white power forum run by an explicit white nationalist. Basically stormfront with slightly better software architecture.
It's disturbing to me how the internet managed to correlate "free speech" with hate speech so strongly. I remember when I was younger and more naive, I would have defended "free speech" blindly but you can only see so many racist, sexist and homophobic communities before losing your idealism. I guess it's a more difficult question of when to regulate by law but any online community without strict content policies just turns to shit, it's like some stupid law of nature.
I once read an article that had a quote that seemed to hit the nail on the head. I can't remember the exact phrasing, but it was along the lines of "If you build a community where the defining feature is that it's against witchhunting, no matter how principled your objection to it is, you'll quickly find it ends up being about 1% people who are morally opposed to witchhunting and 99% witches."
In the case of voat, really the only feature that distinguished it from Reddit was a lack of moderation. Of course, that draws along some of the hardline anti-censorship crowd who are opposed to having any sort of restrictions on content on moral grounds, but the vast majority of Reddit users aren't going to care enough about that to switch to a new site. The ones who do are the ones who find themselves getting consistently censored on Reddit - that is to say, the racists, the sexists, the homophobes, the [insert group of bigots who any reasonable community won't give a platform to]. And as more and more of the people who just want a place to spew hate speech show up, it becomes more and more about them and starts a feedback loop where anybody else is even less likely to join.
Now, if you had a site that had a draw of its own AS WELL AS being devoted to free speech, it might not go to shit quite so quickly (though I'd wager it eventually would unless it added in moderation), but when the site is "It's just a smaller Reddit, but nobody will stop you from being an asshole", it's kind of inevitable that the people who got kicked off of Reddit for being too big of assholes will take over there.
That's not true any more. They switched to hosting it on Microsoft Azure long ago. You can see it mentioned in this old announcement when their free credit on Azure runs out and they have to start paying almost $7000/month to host the site (which is absolutely insane for its size):
That's the only explanation that makes sense to me, any sane normal person would have closed the site and burned everything related to it a long time ago.
WhoaVerse/Voat, from the get-go, was built by and for people disgruntled with Reddit taking slightly harder stances against racism and pedophilia on their platform. The Wikipedia page really says it all: it's not that hate-communities landed on there by accident, Voat specifically catered to them by telling them they would be free to post whatever they felt like there.
Voat also has barely any features or ideas that iterate on Reddit, even it's much vaunted "we kept the upvotes and downvote scores seperate" harkens back to old Reddit design.
They either don't care or specifically wanted this. This ends up being the unfortunate path of many platforms rising up in the wake of their 'mother' platform cleaning up it's act: the absolute focus on freedom of expression and nothing else means that the first and last people who come to you tend to be the scum that got driven off another site. And once you're stuck with those people you aren't going to be able to climb out of your pit. (Dan Olson elaborated on a similar point for former Youtube competitor Vid.me)
Voat is a toxic tarpit assembling the worst people who don't feel like using /pol/ or 8chan. It will live on by the grace of Reddit not wanting those people back and apparently there being just enough money to keep the servers going.
Fondly enough Voat seems to have outlived it's competitor Imzy, although I wouldn't attribute that so much to Voat's strength as to the fact that Imzy was clearly not entirely well executed, and wanted to actually be not just an alternative to Reddit but it's competitor.
That's not true. I was introduced to WhoaVerse pretty soon after it started, and it was just intended to be an off-brand copy of Reddit - with no political agenda. The creator had copied Reddit's (at the time) open source code, and was experimenting with creating a copy of Reddit. The early adopters were mostly just random people who wandered in from Reddit to see what this new thing looked like. People were creating all sorts of "verses" to copy Reddit's structure, with many subreddits getting a /v/ replica.
However, soon after WhoaVerse opened (I don't remember the exact timing), Reddit had one of its periodic clean-ups of the worst of the worst subreddits. I want to say it was /r/FatPeopleHate, but it might have been /r/CoonTown.
Unlike in previous clean-ups, the outraged folks whose favourite subreddit had just been closed had somewhere else to go: WhoaVerse. So they went. Suddenly, the fledgling site was flooded by all these pro-free speech refugees from Reddit... and WhoaVerse's destiny was set.
The poor owner/creator was a bit surprised by the sudden influx - and his website was overwhelmed. It crashed a few times from the sudden increase in traffic in those early weeks following the exodus.
WhoaVerse's creator was in favour of free speech and against heavy moderation, but he wasn't deliberately looking for WhoaVerse to be the alt-right version of Reddit. That just... happened to him. He let it happen, by not pushing these paedophiles or racists (I can't remember which) away, but he hadn't deliberately sought it out.
My own introduction to WhoaVerse came because disgraced ex-/r/games mod XavierMendel was orbiting in chats with the head mod of the one of the subreddits I was moderating, and he immediately evangelized WhoaVerse as the "Reddit-killer" and it's founder as somebody principally opposed to the kinds of 'censorship' on Reddit. So admittedly that has made me somewhat biased against it.
Your version is probably the correct one, XavierMendel may very well have been talking out of his ass.
FPH and the Chimpire subs were banned more or less at the same time. June for FPH, August for Coontown IIRC. But FPH was by far the bigger deal at the time and the one seemingly most dedicated to try and re-establish itself, so it's move to Voat was the more public one.
This happened in 2015 though, I remember back in 2014 when Gamergate was in full swing people were already talking more and more about moving shop to Voat purely out of principle or to evade Reddit's increasingly tight restrictions on content, especially on KotakuInAction (which also had it's little niche community of pedophile and racist apologists)
Just because people on Reddit were talking about turning WhoaVerse into a mirror-Reddit, that doesn't mean that's what its creator intended. Remember: some people have imagined that Tildes is intended to be a home for free speech!
I clearly remember the early WhoaVerse, before it was invaded by alt right refugees from Reddit, and it was just a novelty, a website without a purpose. It was populated, as I said, by people who were mostly just curious about what this not-Reddit was about. The main users seemed to be people who wanted to be their own little kinglings and queenlings, by creating copies of subreddits they wished they could run but which were already squatted on by people who'd made it to Reddit years before them. This was their opportunity to stake their own claim to their own little piece of the internet by getting in before everyone else.
The creator did not seem to have any goals beyond just making his site work and getting people to use it. He did seem to have a preference for freer speech than Reddit allowed, but I had the strong impression at the time that the alt right invasion of WhoaVerse was nothing more than an unplanned happenstance - which he then took full advantage of.
Remember when reddit hid the up/down voting numbers on comments, long before they started banning hate communities? I remember the people who were pissed about that censorship of voting information as the first wave of ex-redditors to hit whoaverse. That crowd just wanted to see honest numbers and vote counts coming back from the website. That was when I got involved over there.
I do remember that, but I don't remember those people being the first ex-redditors to go to WhoaVerse. It makes sense, though.
Yes, a very fair point. I suppose I could be a little more charitable to the creator's original intent.
Whoaverse was originally just a college project. Atko just took a straight copy of reddit's HTML and CSS so the site looked exactly like reddit and then gradually rebuilt (some of) the backend functionality from scratch in C# for his project. Like you said, he had no particular purpose for it, it was just a school project that he decided to make public.
I didn't know that. I remember that the creator didn't seem really invested in growing the site; he just let it sit there. This would explain why.
Yep. I remember that.
Why do all places with "no political agenda" turn into extremely racist right-wing outfits?
Because there are no barriers to keep them out.
I don't think it's actually places with no political agenda. I think it's places that allow unfettered free speech. "We don't want to censor anyone here at FreeForAll.net, so we're not going to remove anyone's comments. Everyone is welcome here, and everyone can have their say." It's an attempt to be too neutral - which includes having no political agenda, but the more important aspect of this idealistic neutrality is having no filter on anyone's speech. It's a free-for-all.
Coincidentally, in another discussion about Voat, I explained how Tildes' policies indirectly discriminate against right-wing people. All it takes is a Code of Conduct which requires civility, plus a limited tolerance for arseholes, and you've incidentally stopped a lot of the right-wing mob from participating as freely as they'd like to.
Therefore, they need to go somewhere else. So they go to places like the aforementioned (imaginary) FreeForAll.net, which has no such policies against nastiness and arseholery. The people who want to be racist and misogynist and homophobic and transphobic and otherwise bigoted find that they can say what they want in those places. And they settle in and get comfortable.
Meanwhile, people who don't like racism and misogyny and homophobia and transphobia and other bigotry find that places like FreeForAll.net are a bit too toxic for them - so they withdraw from sites like that and look for sites which don't allow that sort of thing (such as Tildes).
So, we find a division: sites which have some sort of restriction on speech, and sites which have a "free for all" approach to speech. The former become homes for left-wing people, and some moderate conservatives, while the latter become homes for alt-right people.
#applause with emphatic agreement
I started out on CompuServe, where I later became a sysop. There were 400 hugely popular communities -- that people paid to access, and they all worked with exactly two rules: "No marketing" and "No personal attacks." (As I'd explain, you could say, "That's a stupid opinion" but not "You are stupid.")
It's the same rules I apply to any community I moderate to this day. People feel safe about participating. They care about one another. I'm still friends with dozens of people I met in those long-ago forums... 35 years later.
It's funny and a bit backwards if you think about it. I, like most left leaning liberals believe in the concept of a society based around free speech. I don't think the government has any right to restrict the things people say no matter how abhorrent and disgusting. I think those ideas should be debunked constantly, and the people that say them should be shown the light, and socially ostracized if they refuse to see the evidence in front of them.
On the other hand, many people on the extreme right (white supremacists, christian/islamic/jewish fundamentalists, fascists) believe that there are things that people should not be allowed to say. However, I like spending my time in places that restrict free speech because I don't feel like engaging in the same tired, thoroughly debunked, harmful arguments over and over again, and extreme right wingers feel more comfortable in places where they're allowed to spew their ignorant bigoted garbage.
It's a strange paradox. People new to the internet, or younger people who lean to the right always make the case that leftists are too afraid to engage in debate about "the issues", which is why we prefer our "safe spaces". I think the real explanation is that extreme right wing views as they exist today are generally more offensive and less palatable to most people than extreme left wing views.
It's a lot easier for most normal people to stomach hearing someone talk about how money should be illegal and we should arrest rich people than they are about how other races should be exterminated. Right wing extremists have the tendency to push people out of free speech spaces over a long enough period of time, despite absolutely not supporting free speech as a concept.
Left-wing people might believe in free speech in theory, but I've found they're not so happy about it in practice. As soon as they start seeing or hearing people use words like "nigger" and "faggot", they get very upset and require that this free-speech thing be stopped.
Right-wing people are less likely to shut down free speech they disagree with. Quite the contrary: they're likely to use someone else's freedom of speech as an excuse to start indulging in some free speech of their own - and the whole thing turns into a nasty free-for-all, with insults being bandied about, left, right, and centre.
(You mentioned government, but I'm talking about internet forums.)
Of course, there are examples on both sides of people creating "safe spaces" by banning anyone who disagrees with them. People do like echo chambers, as much as they complain about them - but it's only ever other people's echo chambers they complain about, not their own.
Right wing people don't care what people say because they think everything that disagrees with their world view is a lie. About a week ago I was told by one of them in person about "all the horrible things" done by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and yet when I asked him what she was doing, he couldn't actually name anything. He changed the subject and started talking about what a shame it is that people only ever talk about her race.
The feeling I got in that conversation as I did when reading through some Voat threads. Its full of people who aren't really paying much attention to what the others were saying.
To be honest, I don't think that "right wing" is the right way to categorize these types of people in this case. The people we are calling left wing care about what you say because they assign value to it. The people we are calling "right wing" do not value what others say. The more specific subset of people we are discussing, those attracted to platforms like Voat, take it to an even further extreme - purposely posting offensive content of a toxic or destructive nature.
Edit: it turns out that someone posted a video earlier today that expands on my ideas: https://tildes.net/~misc/9xu/the_alt_right_playbook_the_card_says_moops
That's because until recently, they haven't been the ones in power. Their power over the culture is still barely there, and the past 300 years around the world have been marked by a slow march away from authoritarianism and towards liberalism. If right wing authoritarians ever got a firm grasp on the government, blasphemy laws, laws against criticism of the president and so on get enacted very quickly. It's happened literally everywhere else in the world where a far right power structure gained a hold on the government.
Banning hate speech is a fringe believe among left leaning liberals in the US. There's not a lot of support there. By the same token, the entire concept of free speech is completely misunderstood on the internet.
The alt right likes to use the concept as a bludgeon. "I'm allowed you call you a cuck and you have to listen to me because of free speech". Well no, that's not what the concept means at all. Not even remotely. You can call people cuck all you want and not worry about being arrested for it, or have some authority tell you you can't. Other people also have the right to not listen to you, including silencing you from any platform they control.
So no, I don't believe at all in the idea of free speech that the alt-right pushes whatsoever, because I disagree with the premise that it has anything to do with freedom. I think it's the exact opposite of freedom. I think maybe a lot of liberals, myself included, tend to play on the defensive on the issue because we have a tendency to defend our preferences according to the alt-right's definition of free speech instead of our own.
PuttItOut isn't the founder. Atko was the one that originally started the site, but he's almost entirely abandoned it now (I don't think he's happy about what it's become), except when he had to come back and fix the site because it was down for a week or so without PuttItOut even noticing.
I'm not denying that. If I remember correctly, he was overwhelmed by the attention for his formerly unknown litte website - but definitely not unhappy with these new users. As I said, he did not push them away, even though it was in his power as the owner/creator to do so. He is at least complicit in what happened to his website, if not actually culpable.
Normally you have exceptional spelling/grammar (and markdown formatting) so I was just wondering WTF was up with your typing in that last comment. It's a bit of a funny coincidence too since I cut my index finger wide open after Christmas while opening the packaging on a new Chefs knife I received and so have also been struggling to type/text and play games for the last few weeks as well. It only recently healed enough to not bother me anymore. Hand/finger injuries really suck, especially in this day and age. :(
Ditto. And LOL, yeah more than a tad ironic. I haven't cut myself using a kitchen knife in decades since I am normally exceptionally careful around them and have decent knife skills, but this new Chef knife was in one of those damn-near impenetrable clamshell anti-theft packages. Even after going at it with poultry sheers I couldn't get the f'n thing open so in my frustration I just ripped it open with my hands... and paid the price for my impatience. :(
p.s. Ouch. Mandolines are wicked dangerous too. I have a friend who lopped off several fingertips with one. It's kind of a PITA but I always use the hand guard when using one for that exact reason.
Front page right now:
Picture of a "Make Women Property Again" pink hat, under the heading "Found my hat for the next women's march."
Anti-diversity shitpost
Anti-Semitic image
Semi-legit news post (NYPost) about Covington MAGA teen hiring aggressive lawyer
"Fake News" claim
Anti-Democrat meme
Music site post (not sure what BitChute is but a music site)
"Children as young as 4 instinctively prefer whites over blacks," link to article
"What Shutdown? Federal Spending Per Day Is Down Only 7%," link to article
"White Existence Is A Crime, Says South African BFL Party Spokesperson," link to article
Should give you a pretty good idea of what's going on there. Didn't see any FPH, CP, jailbait or creepshots, surprisingly. I kind of expected more of that than just typical MAGA and T_D-style posts, and a lot of rampant racism. Judging by upvotes and comments, that's what's overwhelmingly popular there.
T_D and voat are on completely different levels.
T_D is forced to keep a veneer of civility about them. They don't do things like upvote racial slurs and post memes about jews. They're mostly cryptoracists because they know they have the sword of damocles hanging above their head. The minute that overt racism becomes the norm on that subreddit, there's a very good chance that it gets banned once the media runs a story on it. They're the most public face of Trump's supporters on the internet, and despite his best efforts, most people in the US are still put off by open, unambiguous white supremacy.
Voat is another animal. It's largely the same people, but they take off their masks. It's the place that those people go to blow off steam about black people and jews. It's where they go to tell everyone how they really feel.
I think the OP is looking for something a bit more in-depth than just a view of the front-page of Voat. Not literally "what's going on with Voat", but more like what's its point and purpose and mission? Its why rather than its what.
They are. I just thought a quick overview of the front page might be helpful for people who don't go there and assume it might be Tildes-like, and I wanted to satisfy my own curiosity since it's been a long time since I visited that site. But I get it, I didn't answer the OP's core question. Feel free to label it noise if that's appropriate.
To be honest, I didn't know how bad the site was until I actually looked in at the comments. I'm looking at an anti-jew tirade on the front page, and literally the only comment that even remotely defends Jewish people in any way is the one hidden at the absolute bottom which states:
I do remember reading on reddit that all the creepshots, revenge porn and jailbait subs had found a home there, but I haven't kept tabs on that site. Apparently that stuff is a no-no, but rampant racism is fine. I didn't even include in my list above the holocaust denial posts (I meant to, but left it out somehow).
As someone who loved the idea of a free speech / censorship free reddit in the way Aaron Swartz envisioned it, I participated on early voat for several years. Early on, there were still negative & racist comments but I feel like it was more the minority and often downvoted. Sure, there were racist subs but they were compartmentalized, and you could block them entirely. I hoped that the community would keep them in check, if not through overt censorship then by calling them out and downvoting their stuff.
Unfortunately, that proved not to be the case as more white nationalist types joined, and it was non-racist content that the community ultimately rejected. Finally I saw it to be a lost cause, and removed my account. It did make me realize how difficult it is to run a free speech community, without becoming taken over by a bunch of nasty people.
I think it's just some dude, so no investors.
It used to be, but as of exactly a month ago it sounds like the site has a (secret) owner now: https://voat.co/v/announcements/2934082
Heh. Hate-centric sites seem to have magical superpowers when it comes to securing funding.
Would be keen to hear thoughts on gab.ai as well. From what I remember it is termed as free speech social network that is naturally attracting some questionable audiences :/