Not sure how that's relevant. Voat appears to have too few differentiating features to be a significant threat to reddit. Frizbee, on the other hand, appears to be something genuinely new. As far as the other claims in that post go, the administrator of 8chan has compiled a more accurate recounting of this controversy here: https://medium.com/@infinitechan/what-do-we-know-about-voat-...
It’s worth nothing that PayPal’s only value is in decrementing values on one side and incrementing them on the other, a preschool exercise it nonetheless somehow routinely fails to carry out. 180 days to do some adding and subtracting is asinine.
It's not even decentralised -- if it was, I should just be able to set up a server, and connect it to any other server, and have a network. AFAICT you're forced to connect to Frizbee's servers / network and register, and that by definition makes it centralised.
Did I miss a post? SRD seems to say that Paypal terminated their account. I don't see involvement by law enforcement, unless I missed a post?
Or did they refuse to take it down? I thought the CDA protected hosts as long as they took it down when notified? But I also haven't been following this closely and I don't know where Voat is (was?) hosted.
Where does law enforcement come into it, then? I'm missing any involvement, so far everything appears to be private parties that don't want to associate with them.
To be fair remember that Atko (the Voat founder) has always maintained that he would act when authorities told him to. This wasn't a buckling under pressure: it was following the law (albeit reactively and not proactively).
However:
The whole scenario is an utter joke: Reddit is thought-policed to the point of unbelievable absurdity. It's like a nursery school filled with Rachel Dolezals. Voat is filled with people who have gone completely off the rocker, given the ability to exercise their rights, and see fit to use their newly acquired rights to speak of nothing but those unsavory topics - most commonly racists.
The website are polar opposites and both are a hindrance to free, critical and intelligent thought - be it on purpose (Reddit) or by virtue (Voat).
It seems like the website format is a flawed concept. I don't take either website seriously.
> It's like a nursery school filled with Rachel Dolezals.
I'm sorry, but what does that even mean??? Please, enlighten me on how a community openly filled with racist (chimpire) and sexist (candidfashionpolice, not even gonna list ones involving dead women or children) is "thought-policed."
If you mean there are groups of Redditors that openly oppose such subreddits, then yes, those do exist. That is a far cry from thought policing.
/r/LGBT and the events surrounding it are often cited as a good example of Reddit thought policing. Unaware of the story? You are making assertions out of turn.
Look at this graph: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/voat.co It shot up to its current rank in almost no time. That is a lot faster growth than both reddit and HN experienced.
Of course it did; there was a big hullabaloo that led to some people migrating to it. That's not really a sign that they did anything right, or that they'll have similar momentum in the future.
I don't think minimaxir was "dissing" voat.co, just stating facts. As for voat's success, I can't see how it can ever hope to supersede reddit - or even come close to competing with reddit - given that it is indeed a blatant clone. There's no real redeeming qualities of voat that are not already present on Reddit.
I personally am not using voat yet, but think that the fact that ModLogs are totally public and open instead of being hidden away and largely controlled by a couple of cabals of users is a huge plus.
I don't see voat as being a long term viable thing though, since it's just one kid in college and the recent surge of users was largely driven by an exodus from reddit over banning politically incorrect speech.
In fairness, I will admit my recap was more terse than my usual HN posts. Mostly because this particular startup deleted-then-resubmitted their Show HN multiple times yesterday.
Had no idea Voat was run by a sixteen-year-old. That's pretty impressive. The poor kid must be peeing his pants trying to figure out how to keep the site up and having no money for servers.
After people claimed Reddit was censoring users by banning /r/fatpeoplehate, the more unsavory users flocked to Voat, a blatant Reddit clone.
As you would expect, said unsavory people posted unsavory content. Said unsavory content, while free and uncensored, was not legal, and that causes problems: http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3avyem/voat_...
Said issues caused their PayPal account to become frozen: http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3augr0/drama...
No, "decentralized" does not magically make you immune to law and punishment.