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?
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.
> 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.
> 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.)
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.
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_fatal|5 years ago
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?
andrewflnr|5 years ago
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.
mariusor|5 years ago
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.
Vinnl|5 years ago
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.)
tootie|5 years ago
Barrin92|5 years ago
konjin|5 years ago
One only need to look at /r/news and /r/politics to see this happening on the original site.
phponpcp|5 years ago
qlm|5 years ago
unknown|5 years ago
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