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.
Yeah, it's hard for me to envision what the next iteration on Reddit could be. Maybe there isn't one and instead we're seeing a resurgence of forum silos again that's winning back the mainstream.
For example, I was pleasantly surprised to see Discourse have so much success and high profile roll outs (like Boing Boing and Blizzard). It turns out that everyone was ready for a modern revitalization of the forum experience, not that forums were doomed.
I think I'd liken it to the explosion of Slack/Discord popularity. It would have been a mistake to look at the slow death of IRC and conclude "I guess people don't like chatting anymore."
"Discourse" and "Discord" are two different products. One a slack like chat app for gaming, the other is a forum software produced by that guy from stack overflow
discord and twitter, everything is just a messy ocean of piss imo, discord is not an iteration on reddit, maybe some people prefer discord to reddit but it is far from a replacement. It's a big JS-heavy chatroom (almost like new reddit...).
> 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.
“Me-first capitalists who think you can separate society from business are going to be the first people lined up against the wall and shot in the revolution,” he tweeted. “I'll happily provide video commentary.”[0] - Dick Costolo, former Twitter CEO
Context: he's not saying he'll start a revolution, he's saying one is coming regardless. And he doesn't want to be shot as a rich person. Maybe he also doesn't like how tech tends to ignore the consequences of the decisions they make.
And your knee-jerk response is to defend other parts of his statement? It’s a perfect example of leftism amok because it’s a common one I’ve increasingly heard over the past few years about the indifference or glee to rich people dying.
We can easily flip this into a right-wing statement and it will be highly disapproved of.
“Right wing nationalists will think your statements excuse leftist tendencies towards violence, and shoot your for this in an uprising. I’ll happily provide commentary.”
There are a tonne of tankies on the site. Some who claim Holodomor was fake, Tianmen square was an exaggeration and the DPRK/China are heroes, Fidel Castro was a benevolent dictator and that everyone who escaped his regime was a slave owner.
Here is the secret: most leftists don't like tankies. Ban them as well I say! I people want to defend Stalin's murderous regime then I don't want them there either. Appealing to some hypocrisy here isn't super useful since the large bulk of people who don't want fascists on their webforums also don't want tankies.
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?