'Free Speech' Reddit Clone Voat Says It Will Shut Down on Christmas (theverge.com) 167
Voat, an "anti-censorship" alternative social network that's been described as the "alt-right Reddit," is scheduled to shut down on December 25th. From a report: Voat co-founder Justin Chastain announced the pending closure this week, saying the site had run out of money after an investor defaulted on their contract in March. "I personally decided to keep Voat up until after the US election of 2020. I've been paying the costs out of pocket but now I'm out of money," Chastain wrote. Voat was founded in 2014 and hosted Reddit-like forums with minimal moderation. It grew rapidly after Reddit added an anti-harassment policy and banned five subreddits that it said violated the rules, including its infamous r/fatpeoplehate forum.
Parler soon to follow (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Parler soon to follow (Score:4, Funny)
Re: Parler soon to follow (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Parler soon to follow (Score:5, Insightful)
Or willing to pay for the service apparently. Lol
Well the right wing generally claim to be pro free market. Looks like voat just got free marketed.
Re: Parler soon to follow (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Parler soon to follow (Score:4, Informative)
If you are actually interested.
The users of this site have been begging the admin to take their money for years. He has repeatedly refused to ask for or even except readily offered money. His partner had two donation drives before he departed the venture and that kept the site afloat till 2017 when it was announced the site was out of money, mostly because they were running on licenced .NET servers and paying a ton of money for them each month.
After that a single person came forward to fund the site secretly. The users of the site also ran a volunteer effort to rewrite the site code in .NET Core and switch to all Linux servers to save money.
That kept the site afloat until March of this year when apparently the funding stopped. Rather that tell anyone about this, the site admin just started paying for the site himself until now, when he announces he does not want to pay for it anymore. Users still begging to give him money.
I think he just wants to be done with the site.
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How many users? How reliable?
My wild guess is that the costs of the bookkeeping and adhering to tax laws would be too much to justify the expected amount of donations. If you were correct, I'd expect that someone else would have offered to take the site over. (OTOH, I don't know anything about VOAT. I didn't know it existed before this article.)
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I don't know if the current operator is the same guy that started it way back when, but I do know the original founder was Swiss and made a big deal about that being whose law he would follow when it came to matters of speech. This may be making it more difficult to take other peoples' money, because offshoring money to Switzerland tends to draw attention from government officials.
Re:Parler soon to follow (Score:4, Insightful)
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You overrate rationality. Just about no human decisions are actually rationally justifiable. People can't even clearly state what goals they are trying to satisfy. They can feel them, but the can't verbalize them.
Note that this doesn't make them wrong. There's a long evolutionary history behind us that isn't verbal, but was successful in leaving descendants. But it means that rational verbal arguments are a waste of everyone's times. Emotional appeals are much more successful. Rational arguments are
The unhappy are broke, whooda thunk? (Score:5, Interesting)
The ugly truth is that there's people on 2 extremes, but most of us are in the center. We function in society. We hold jobs and pay our bills. We don't feel threatened by diversity, nor do we pat ourselves on the back when we embrace it. We don't look for the next ideological group to hate.
As one of those who identify as a centrist, I don't have fucking time to get on twitter or parler and rant all day. I'm too busy going to work at a good job, paying my bills, raising my kids, and functioning in society. I am an ideal demographic. I have money. I have responsibilities and thus if you can reduce the burden of my responsibilities, I am happy to give you money. I have healthy interests. If you can sell me something to enhance the limited time I have for hobbies, I am happy to give you money. I and many like me are who the advertisers want to target.
My job, my kids, my responsibilities, reduce my urges for anger and radical tendencies nor theories that the mainstream media/society is persecuting me. Let's be real. If you're spending all day on parler complaining about the nebulous left wing and pushing conspiracy theories, is life going well? Is your job going as well as you'd like? Are you happy with your life choices? Do you have a lot of money in your pocket you're ready to spend for new things?
My Father In Law, in contrast, is retired. When he turns on Hannity at night, I notice how many ads are scams targeting seniors. How many "my pillows" can someone buy? How many buying gold scams can you buy into? Fox has good ratings and decent revenue, but there's only so much purchasing power for those living on social security or their retirement accounts....or those who hate the direction society is going in. It's not an infinite well of demand. Fox took many years to hone their business model. I am not surprised there is a limited amount of money to be made by going farther to the right and catering to those who feel that Reddit, Fox News, and Twitter are too liberal and constricting for their ideas.
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That said, you're describing your current state. What does the future hold? Aren't you worried about the world your kids will live in? What will college cost in a few years?
I'm glad you're comfortable, but I think you're myopic. There are things you should be worrying about that you are just shrugging off. FWIW, I invested in solar panels for my house over a decade ago, when it was clearly a non-economic choice, because I wanted to solar industry to succeed. Now I'm worried that they aren't seriously
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https://www.reclaimpv.com/ [reclaimpv.com]
obsolete or broken solar panels?
obsolete solar panels are still usefull (We upgraded our home's solar array and the old panels are now powering the pool pump. )
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No, there are plenty of right-wing extremists, just not enough who know how to type.
Or read, for that matter
Re:Parler soon to follow (Score:5, Informative)
Parler is bankrolled by the Mercers. Like many propaganda organs on the right it does not ever have to break-even much less make a profit.
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Parler is bankrolled by the Mercers. Like many propaganda organs on the right it does not ever have to break-even much less make a profit.
When did The New Republic last break even? The Nation? Jacobin mag?
You act like this is something unique to the right. How much shit would die without left wing donations? Newsweek was sold off for $1 and debt, FFS.
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But how many companies are going to be happy to advertise on a service associated with a platform espousing far right views? Certainly not mainstream corporations. I imagine the likes of Parler will attract the absolute dregs of ads that wouldn't look out of place on a pirate websites or whac
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There just aren't enough right-wing extremists with money out there to make it a viable venture...
Fixed it for ya!
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Spoken like a True Anonymous Coward.
You believe that you have a right to speak,
and that others do not.
Bad ideas should be countered by firm reason and discussion, ... in the light.
Not allowed to fester in the dark.
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Almost as if the Far Right is Wrong (Score:3)
Why the repeated failures of alt-right alternatives to 'mainstream' internet media makes it look like there claims about the mainstream media being anti-conservative are totally false.
That when they get exactly what they want, they hate it and would rather go to the mainstream media.
Funny how that works.
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I don't think it has anything to do with whether the far right is right or wrong and everything to do with the business viability of being a platform for unpopular opinions.
One of the things I used to say to my business partner was that if the customer is always right then you'd sure as hell better be selective about who your customer is. You can't treat customers who cause a lot of disruption and don't spend much money the same as customers who are easy to deal with and have lots of money to spend.
Faceboo
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Well, that *is* a decent website. And it worked with JavaScript totally blocked. So that's a bonus. Too bad it's not something I'd ever want to follow.
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Why the repeated failures of alt-right alternatives to 'mainstream' internet media makes it look like there claims about the mainstream media being anti-conservative are totally false.
That when they get exactly what they want, they hate it and would rather go to the mainstream media.
Almost as if you're full of shit.
Outside of Fox, right wing media is increasingly locked out of the ability to even do business thanks to payment processors banning them for "terms of service violations" that are never actually explained. There is no "free market" when the players collaborate to keep people from doing business that they don't like. If there really was a free market, when YouTube bans someone because their whiny SJW staff are offended by a channel, someone like Vimeo would jump at the chance
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Almost as if you're full of shit.
Said the pile of cow manure...
There is no "free market" when the players collaborate to keep people from doing business that they don't like. If there really was a free market, when YouTube bans someone because their whiny SJW staff are offended by a channel, someone like Vimeo would jump at the chance to get that business.
What if Vimeo also doesn't want these people?
A free market doesn't guarantee that someone will take your business. It means that every market party can make up their own damn mind about who they want to do business with and under what terms.
So this is actually the free market in action. You're just butthurt that you're not being served by this market. But the market is free so you'll just have to take it up your pooper or else start your own company that serves your needs.
we'll keep using Bitcoin to go around you shitty little weasels.
That
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Your argument totally fails. Basically you stated a couple of points without any comparison.
You see things you dislike not being punished and you think "Must be prejudiced". The response is simple - yes, Twitter does those things to your side but they do far worse to our side. That is, what is happening to you is not censorship or prejudice, it is simply the very few times your side gets so ridiculous they finally get punished.
The problem is you never look and see the tons of shit your own side dose wi
Re:Almost as if the Far Right is Wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to keep pushing conservatives into racist sites like Voat, just keep pretending you're not censoring conservative points of view
"They censored me for my conservative views"
Oh, because you want lower taxes?
"No"
Because you want smaller government?
"Um, no"
Because you believe in the Free Market?
"Ah, no"
So what are they censoring?
"Oh you know..."
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Centralized idiocy again. (Score:3, Insightful)
Look, centralization always leads to dictatorship or some other downfall. It's a single point of failure... made out of a detonator fuse.
Don't create "platforms". Create *protocols*!
Ditto for "frameworks".
You can still create a client and have that be like a platform, but when it dies, the ecosystem might already not care anymore. And nobody will ever be able to Gestapo... err, I mean "moderate" it.
Then the only factor to its success is the right moderation.
(Mainly making people believe it is the new hot thing that everybody uses, until they actually do.)
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Don't create "platforms". Create *protocols*!
I guess you also don't know the difference between a programmer and a user if you think that "protocols" are an alternative to "platforms".
Here's a hint: free and open protocols exist that mirror all the proprietary protocols that underpin large platforms. I'll leave it as an exercise to you to determine why people prefer using a platform over battling with some protocol.
Makes sense (Score:2)
Okay, I will not be very "politically correct" here, but "clean" Internet has won, and "free" Internet had lost today.
Nobody* wants to pay for ad space on "free" (read wild) content. When Coca Cola comes with $100 million advertising budget, they want to target "clean" sites. They "don't want to be associated" with other content. Same with users. They don't want to see ads from "questionable" vendors.
Back in the "wild west" days of the Internet (AltaVista times), I would have to disable all images while bro
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But.... this is just the 'free market' in operation.
Advertisers choose where they spend -- surely you're not advocating forcing them to spend on sites you approve of but which they don't?
Likewise with site funding -- if your views aren't popular with the mass market, you're not going to attract mass funding -- this is true for 'left/right' politics and other areas which divide people.
Free market capitalism works right up to the point where it doesn't align with personal or societal viewpoints.
I do agree wi
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I'd rather advertisers were told "You have no choice".
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No, there are MANY situations where "Free Market Capitalism" doesn't work at all. And many where it doesn't work well.
The places where it works well have several characteristics:
1) a decision doesn't need to be made *RIGHT NOW*. (Many medical situations fail this test.)
2) the parties making the decision have full information. (Many purchasing decisions fail this test.)
3) there is a fair balance of obligations between the purchaser and the vendor. (Fair is a notoriously difficult thing to define.)
There m
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Okay, I will not be very "politically correct" here, but "clean" Internet has won, and "free" Internet had lost today.
Thank god. The free internet was only good before it became a platform for hate and bile. If you want to live in an open sewer go your hardest. I prefer to live in a house under a set of rules.
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I find your ideas offensive, you would be tyrant thug. I demand that you be censored, and take your hate and bile for free speech and its proponents to some disgusting place where only you and your ilk are allowed.
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I find your ideas offensive
The thing is *your* opinion is completely irrelevant. The concepts we are discussing here is societal norms, the same norms that ultimately underpin the laws that legally bind us to be functioning members of society.
If you deem my perfectly normal ideas offensive, chances are you're not a happy functioning member of society, and that's okay, go make your own society out of publics eye.
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Whooosh!
The problem is that you are advocating banning or silencing people based on their "hate" and "bile" - purely subjective terms. You, and your views, can just as easily fall into those categories; it all depends on who is allowed to define what falls into those categories.
If you are unwilling to abide by those rules if I am the one that makes the determination of what is or isn't "hate" or "bile", then the truth is that you don't want to be free of those things, you just want the power to enforce you
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That depends on the rules. There are many sets of rules that are worse than anarchy.
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Every
reading the comments here...and the past 4 years.. (Score:2)
Makes me wonder, are most of these people bots and trolls or are all these self proclaimed open minded people *really* this binary and one sided?
I would like to submit a piece of advice to any who will listen: completely detach from all social media. You are being manipulated and your personality is being altered to suite multiple agenda's. This applies to all "sides".
Used to consider myself a pretty progressive liberal...but the last 4 years has convinced me nuance has been lost in discussion from the side
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Well, "The intellectuals" were always given to "intellectual violence" against those they disliked. Teller could rarely give an open speech without attempts to shout him down. The nuance came in reasoned printed articles. (Even there it was often absent.) And at that time the "Right" also had it's nuanced articles with reasoned points. You don't need to agree with them to notice that they are reasoned and nuanced. Even then people generally only saw the nuanced articles on the side they supported.
Wha
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Shouldn't be that hard to silence Teller.
Penn does all the talking anyway.
Re: reading the comments here...and the past 4 yea (Score:2)
"Current communication favors short, easily grasped, statements"
In other words, "soundbites". This is how shit starts, with people latching on to sound bites without delving into the whole truth.
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"Soundbite" is the essential idea, but it's missing parts. E.g., in a video the visual images are a part of the message. Easily grasped, but hard to verbalize. There are other pieces, e.g. background music, various lighting, but especially how you frame the images.
Much of this "easily grasped message" is hard to verbalize, so difficult to criticize, but it still carries emotional impact.
Free speech? (Score:2)
"Voat" (Score:2)
Yeah, what Trump was against when the election did not go his way.
In fact, he wanted to stop the election months before it happened.
Anybody who still thinks Trump is about democracy is suffering a severe disconnect from reality.
Re:What's happened in the last twenty years? (Score:5, Insightful)
So like what you find on Parler and Voat?
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Something has now flipped, and free speech has become associated with Naz*s, and it's the liberals that want tight control of speech on-line.
What's happened is that the right discovered that "free speech" didn't mean "allowed to lie uncritically". Voat and Parler are very much about being allowed to spew garbage that you know is garbage for the sole purpose of manipulating dumb people. That may be free speech but it's not obvious why anyone should or would fund a platform for you to do it.
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Re:What's happened in the last twenty years? (Score:5, Insightful)
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You fundamentally miss the point.
You assume that an authority, "allows" you to speak.
That a platform will be "given" to you.
A privilege. Which can be removed for "naughty" behavior.
Value judgements, performed by a legitimate authority upon a subservient subject.
Look at you, willing peasant.
Kneeler.
Faced with those, with different views. ...
Ridiculous, abhorrent, trivial, mocking, insightful, provocative,
What do you do?
You call them scum.
Belittle them. Mock them.
Ban them.
Well, it did not work against the Nat
Re:What's happened in the last twenty years? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, because doing everything they can to get Voat shut down is the same thing as "given a platform for it".
You're gonna have to suck it up bro. Voat lived and died on the altar of free speech and the free market.
You do realize there is absolutely zero chance this will stop at shutting down places like Voat?
Yeah the government should force advertisers to give their business to voat because free speech. Also librulhs on twitter aren't to criticise things (e.g. voat) they don't like because free speech.
You have free speech. What you don't have is someone giving you a free megaphone. There's a difference.
Re: What's happened in the last twenty years? (Score:2)
Yes exactly like that. Private companies deciding who they want and who they donâ(TM)t want to do business with.
Maybe if you beg daddy Trump, the big gov will bail them out.
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Free market as for when PayPal and other payment processors refused to take donations to keep Voat running?
Yep, Paypal is free to do business with them or not as they see fit. If paypal deem it unprofitable they can choose not to do business with them.
Free market as for when VISA blacklisted Torba (and his wife too) because he runs Gab? Is this the "Free market" you are talking about?
Yep, VISA is free to do business with them or not as they see fit. If VISA deem it unprofitable they can choose not to do bus
Re:What's happened in the last twenty years? (Score:5, Insightful)
Voat has been shut down because nobody goes there. Republicans don't want uncensored discussions, they want to argue with libs and present propaganda to the general population. They found they don't get that on Voat.
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Voat has been shut down because nobody goes there.
If that was the case, the hosting bills would not be what killed it, as implied in the article. I participate in a number of hobbyist community-funded forums, typical hosting costs for an active forum of 10K is about 100$/mo. Typically, once a year there is a donation drive and it is good to go.
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Can you explain exactly what "everything they can to get Voat shut down" actually entailed? From what I can see the operators of the site don't have the money to keep the site going. How is that in any way someone else trying to shut them down?
Re:What's happened in the last twenty years? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, by paying for it yourself and using a vanity press [beallslist.net]. Getting other people to pay for your soapbox, now that's the thing that Voat apparently couldn't figure out.
Traditionally you've always been allowed to fail in relative obscurity too.
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I forgot to ask them- do these people owe the platform they spew their filth all over? Are they publicly owned?
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Reddit is full of garbage intended to manipulate "dumb people".
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Reddit is full of garbage intended to manipulate "dumb people".
Sure, but it's also full of people talking about their hobbies. That's something that can get funding; the political shit rides on that.
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You would be surprised how heavily-manipulated and over-moderated those reddits for "people talking about their hobbies" are. Political shit aside, people really need an alternative without capricious moderating, alt-righters be damned.
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it's usually business. this guy just failed at monetizing his fanatics, but these propaganda machines can pay for themselves may times over once set up properly.
Re: What's happened in the last twenty years? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: What's happened in the last twenty years? (Score:5, Interesting)
And that's the problem with these sites. They are a refuge for the haters and conspiracy theorists who want to attack *others*. But the unrestrained unjustified hate will eventually turn inward causing a crisis of who exactly the "other" is. Then they tear themselves apart trying to prove they are a true conservative or true trumper or true whatever fealty test or scale they use.
Infowars is doing this now. Chris Christie lost his political career to it. He was a darling of the right when he was lashing out a liberals, but then he had the audacity to say something, correctly I might add, about a subset of his supporters and that was it. You hate *others* not us.
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What's happened is that the right discovered that "free speech" didn't mean "allowed to lie uncritically". Voat and Parler are very much about being allowed to spew garbage that you know is garbage for the sole purpose of manipulating dumb people. That may be free speech but it's not obvious why anyone should or would fund a platform for you to do it.
I wonder how truly dedicated to free speech Parler is. I'm guessing is all it would take to start banning people is for liberals to start posting facts and trolling the other users; under the guise of protecting alternate viewpoints, i.e. ones we agree with. It'll become "Free Speech for me, but not for thee..." (with apologies to Nate Hentoff)
Re:What's happened in the last twenty years? (Score:5, Informative)
It's not truly dedicated to free speech because it's done exactly what you said. When the liars and white supremacists started fleeing FB they went to Parler. What followed were all those who rubbed those people's faces in the fact Biden won the election. Parler started banning people [techdirt.com] shortly thereafter.
In fact, Parler's own TOS says they can ban you for any reason, even if you're following their guidelines [washingtonexaminer.com].
So yeah, not truly free speech
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What's happened is that the right discovered that "free speech" didn't mean "allowed to lie uncritically".
Horseshit. What happened is that shitweasels like you redefined what "free speech" is, with your "hate speech isn't free speech" bullshit. And you slapped "hate speech" on anything that offended you. And the rest of us refused to cave into your demands.
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If we want true free speech online then we should lose the anonymity. In the real world, spreading lies can get you in legal trouble. On line is treated as some sort of wild west of commu
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Stop gaslighting us.
The ACLU literally defended the KKK's right to say terrible things.
A decade ago the Internet celebrated the Streisand Effect; last year if you tried to even mention the name Eric Ciaramella your post would be marked as spam and removed.
Facebook outright blocks posts to https://www.codeisfreespeech.c... [codeisfreespeech.com]
A decade ago we celebrated Wikileaks and whistleblowers. This year Twitter literally suppressed a true story about Biden because it was "hacked materials" and the New York Post was banned f
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That part about scale is crucial. (It's not the only crucial part.) In a small enough group, you can pay attention to everyone without a need for moderation. Scale it up a bit and you only hear the louder voices. Up a bit more and you either only hear the loudest voice, or you don't hear anyone. This is a part of why intolerance increases with scale.
So moderation systems are crucial. Even so, how many comments do you read on Slashdot? I rarely read all of them. Selective attention is a necessity.
OTO
Re:What's happened in the last twenty years? (Score:5, Insightful)
Freedom of speech doesn't mean what you think it does.
It doesn't mean freedom from failure. It doesn't mean freedom from consequences. And most especially, it doesn't mean other people have to put up with or even make room for your shit. It never has.
Don't you think the civil rights movement or the anti-Vietnam war movement would have liked to have access to mainstream newspapers as a platform to promote their views? Movements promoting changes to the status quo have always faced public ignorance of their ideas maintained by media indifference or even outright hostility.
The US version of "freedom of speech" doesn't fix this for you, it only protects you from government interference. Beyond that point the windmill-tilting is up to you.
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"Twitter, do your thing"
Saying that is freedom of speech. Twitter can choose to listen to them or not.
encourage doxxing or harassment
First of all, this is a straw man. People who advocate consequences for misuse of free speech don't necessarily encourage doxxing people. However, that would be freedom of speech if they did, and they would be liable to consequences like public shaming and shunning.
Now anyone who actually followed up and did those things would be subject to criminal and civil penalties, which again is non-freedom-from-consequences.
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See, nobody's saying that it isn't freedom of speech, they're merely saying it's deeply hypocritical to call in the referee each time they hear something they dislike, while pretending to be for free speech.
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You can protect people from persecution, but you can't protect them from feeling persecuted.
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So in other words you are calling for restrictions on someone speech because it causes someone else harm?
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The only people censoring you are the people who find you repugnant. It's their right to do so, just as it's your right to rant to your family about Mexicans stealing all your jobs and Black people driving down your real es
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Let look at it the other way around.
Should a baker have to make a wedding cake for a same sex couple? It is the exact same principle of payment processors restricting who can use their service.
Re:What's happened in the last twenty years? (Score:5, Insightful)
Several things have changed
1) The extremists now have free or nearly free forums to spread their messages to a much broader audience.
2) the natural filter of distance has disappeared. Any semi-deranged individual living anywhere can reach millions continents away..
3) anomonimity is now the norm rather than the exception. It's a lot easier to sink to the lowest levels when you can hide behind a convenient handle instead of standing on a soapbox in a real public forum. Near-total lack of accountablity..
4) trust in traditional media, education and training has nearly disappeared. People eagerly embrace the rantings of an ignorant con man, who feeds their fears and enables their darkest beliefs. Much easier, and more satisfying, than accepting the difficult truths they hear from those with the education, training and experience to speak factually on the subject.
5) For many, the goilden age of employment has almost disappeared. The good paying industrial jobs (with benefits and a secure pension) have been lost, mostly to technology. Look at tradtional blue-collar industries that never moved: most factories/plants are more productive than ever, with 1/3 or less of the workforce they had 30 years ago. Outsourcing plays it's part, but, nationally, has never been the biggest reason for loss of those jobs.
Left behind is a large frustrated and fearful population that does not comprehend how their "secure jobs" disappeared. These are the same jobs, requiring nothing more than some high school, that employed their grand-parents and parents for their lifetimes. Makes for very fertile ground for schemers, cheats and con artists to plant in.
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The only moderation a community needs is a two-way Ignore command.
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That's a way information silos develop.
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Being able to do that is the very worst kind of moderation- you construct your own echo chamber.
This can be easily seen on service like Facebook and Twitter.
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Would you rather the echo chamber was constructed by someone else for you?
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The one you propose is the most insidious imaginable, because people are rarely self-aware enough to understand teh walls they've built for themselves; but it's hard to deny the walls others have built.
It isn't a coincidence that the insanity that is social media now has risen in accordance with the ability to block out anything you don't want to see.
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Don't worry, if actual left wingers show up and push actual left wing ideas such as unions, workers rights and such, they get banned even quicker then the right wingers.
There's a reason that there is more right wing content then left wing on these sites and it's not that they're actual left wingers running it, more like center right.
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People will say with a straight face that freedom of speech is a liberal idea
Well that's because it is, in terms of political science.
The problem is that you don't know what the word liberal means. The fact that a group of people have adopted it as a label does not negate the original meaning of the word, as in we live in a liberal democracy.
Re: What's happened in the last twenty years? (Score:2)
And somehow the giant swazis, penis bird, gn.aa, and other retarded crap get through.
Yet if you type "naz1", even if it's an intelligent post about the brutality of that regime, you are "lame".
Just do away with the lame lameness filter, and let the morons who post racist, antisemetic garbage get downmodded into oblivion as they always do.
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Lol you haven’t spent much time on voat. Half the posts are complaining about jews running the world and the other half complain about “the blacks”. It’s called the free market at work. Nobody will advertise there and the users certainly won’t pay up.
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I had a decent post in reply to this, but the lameness filter killed it, and wouldn't tell me why. So I've got no real idea what was wrong with it.
That lameness filter is totally absurd.
Re: (Score:2)
It's probably because you used some words/phrases that are abused by some trolls, like neo-n@zi trolls, etc. Try to mask it, or use other words, maybe?
Re: Big Tech killing competition (Score:2)
Yep. Itâ(TM)s a self-fulfilling prophecy. The mostly identitarian left platforms and media (e.g. Twitter, YouTube, NYT) react very poorly to any new platform seen as a more open alternative. The new platform will be denounced as âalt-rightâ(TM), or done other nonsense, citing isolated instances as the norm. Right-wing nuts flock to the platform, fulfilling the prophecy. Voat, BitChute, SubscribeStar, Parler, Gab, and Saidit all face this problem.
Meanwhile, many of us simply want a civil platf
Re: Ran out of money (Score:2)
Funny, given how what you people call "Antifa" is the same damn people as what we call "right wing nutjobs".
Under some three-letter agencies even actually the same people. (Source: Snowden leaks talking about injected agents provocateurs to make both Occupy and the Tea Party look harmful and crazy. Among 43 (other) groups (in total).)
Re: Google delisted Voat. (Score:2)
Again, this is why people are switching over to Duckduckgo.
I swear, I think Google is really trying to kill off it's own flagship product.
Re: Google delisted Voat. (Score:2)
And I'm not right wing, but I don't need Google deciding what it wants me to see. I expect a search engine to be as agnostic as possible.