Reddit users flee to Swiss copy Voat after harassment clampdown | Hacker News Reader

Reddit users flee to Swiss copy Voat after harassment clampdown

theguardian.com

13 pointsSimplyUseless10 comments

Good.

Seriously, the subreddits were pulled down because of behavior not speech. It would be nice to have a little less hate behavior.

Of note related to this are the following:

* There is an email going around supposedly from an insider saying reddit intends to sue voat.co http://cityworldnews.com/reddit-plans-lawsuit-against-voat-c...

* Voat.co ( when accessible ) was mirroring some content from Reddit ( copyright infringement? ... )

* Voat.co seems to be crushed and possibly being DDOSed

* Last I heard when I was at a speech by Alexis Ohanian himself, he is for free speech to a rather extreme level. I did not get the impression he would ban any content besides what is absolutely necessary to keep the business running.

If its difficult for reddit to turn a profit, how does voat.co plan to exist? Its maintainer footing the bill out of his own pocket forever?

Alexis Ohanian himself is not quite calling the shot these days. New management has said in exact words that reddit is not meant to be a "free speech platform"[0]. And that's exactly why people are angry: the community built reddit on a premise that was suddenly changed.

Anyway, the less social media, the more time left to focus on important things...

http://www.businessinsider.com/reddit-ceo-ellen-pao-its-not-...

There is a difference between the internal vibe of the company and statements by the current CEO. One has to say things that make the company money; the other is the true reality of what drives it.

The "free speech platform" notion is alive and well with Reddit, both in the community and in the people working to support it.

Alexis may not be calling the shots, but you can be sure that people are still keeping his vision alive.

I don't think the site has been operational since this whole thing started

I'm trying to recall the name of a crowd sourcing project where... I think participants were trying to arrange shreds of documents back into their original form. But then there was basically one guy who used different IP addresses to mess up everyone's process. And in the end, that one person was able to ruin the contest.

Anyway, that's the tug & pull of building a community on-line and featuring unfettered free speech. I don't think you can have both at the same time, only one or the other.

Both community and free speech are their own kind of tyrannies, but then how does one become better than the other? Well, I think it's to the degree that the members of either forum style are thoughtful, wise and can absorb new information. And I think that a forum that is striving to be a community of some kind, rather than a watering hole for everyone with every idea, is going to be more successful at providing something helpful to people.

Because let's face it, internet forums are for the most part a vast wasteland of stupid, ignorant comments and opinions. There's a lot of dummies out there. And there's a lot of people who like to troll and break things. In some places it's actively encouraged. Moderation of forums is probably the best way to go if you want to build something that people can use and find lasting value in.

We certainly do not have to give up anonymity to have community. HN for example is as psuedonymous as you want it to be (as your green username shows).

You can architect systems such that the actions of bad actors are isolated. For instance if your example site had stored actions in an immutable log, it would have been possible to revert the malicious changes. This itself could even be crowdsourced with cross-checking. Public distributed computing projects have always had to deal with this in ways appropriate to their problem domains. Distributed systems are hard, but that doesn't mean we should give up and centralize them.

As fecebook and spewtube comments show, even using real names doesn't make dimwits magically wisen up.

Reddit was setup such that "trolls" (whomever you consider that to be) could form their own communities with their own mod policy - free to go their own way. Of course that's not good enough to appease people who want to control what others communicate about.

Sometimes, a benevolent dictator is required.

Each community has to find their own level of acceptable moderation vs. acceptable behaviour, though. Reddit is probably OK with a bunch of supposed trolls, etc. jumping ship. Voat's OK with getting them.

It's a win-win situation.

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