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.
I don't want to be That Guy, but I really don't think the UI is very intuitive. A lot of things really bug me about it. It's hard to peruse a list of posts and scan headlines, unlike on Hacker News or reddit. You compose comments with a serif font, and then the comment is posted with a sans-serif font. It appears as if all URLs are just frizbee.co/#SomethingGoesHere, regardless of what it is. This makes me lost a lot because I'll click the logo in the upper-left corner because I want to go back to the homepage, but it doesn't work. It also means that I have no idea what a link is before I click on it. When I see reddit.com/u/takua108, I know that it's takua108's user page. When I see reddit.com/r/dota2, I know that it's the Dota 2 subreddit. When I see https://frizbee.co/#ICameHereFromHackerNews558b70ef40cdf, I have no idea what the hell to think. Plus, there's no comment permalinks, and it looks like every link is using javascript or something, because I can't even hover over the link to see where it leads!
I like a lot of the ideas behind this, but I feel like the execution is very, very poor.
Its even worse than that. Navigation is just totally broken. For example I clicked your link then on that page I clicked Our Manifesto. The URL changed to https://frizbee.co/#OurManifesto5589a552786d5 but the page content did not change! This seems to happen all over.
Totally dont need to re-engineer hyperlinks. They are hyperlinks!
(logo in the left hand corner does change the url to https://frizbee.co/#HotPosts but as you and I said it just doesnt work)
No they haven't. I don't notice anything different - still navigation bugs.
The real question is why? What are you getting from replacing hyperlinks with something that performs horribly and needs debugging and has a poor user experience?
Just to clarify, the owners of particular playlist servers can moderate them as they choose. The difference is that because of the decentralization aspect, it is not chosen by a central entity.
If this website is another reaction to reddit, you're only going to attract the absolute dregs of that site — /r/fatpeoplehate, the pedophiles, the gamergaters, etc.
If someone creates a Frizbee server full of child abuse material, and it becomes popular, and is always on the front page, what would you do?
Also, I made a comment on Frizbee that consisted of `[wow](file:///etc/passwd)`, and it let me post it. You probably want to whitelist a few schemes.
"wow" will appear as a link with a URL pointing to the file on your local disk /etc/passwd. In UNIX/Linux /etc/passwd is a plaintext file used to list users accounts. In the old days it would store their password, too.
I'm still not following how that's any different than just owning a subreddit. If I own a subreddit I can moderate the posts in it. Under your model, you're suggesting that I can "moderate" posts that initiate from my server, but not others, and once again I'm still not sure what advantage that has over owning a subreddit?
Except where legally necessary, or when someone is in imminent danger. What happens if someone posts the details of someone's address and asks people to go to their house and heckle them / hurt them / kill them? Do you leave that up?
If that information is deleted, the difference between frizbee and reddit becomes so extremely marginal that one really wonders whether this really is a rationalization for allowing people to organize around threatening and stalking people online.
If that information is not removed, does such a site deserve to exist? It may pass some legal standard, but is that a site that differentiates itself in any way except in its support of systematic and continued online stalking??
So if I want to host content that other people would generally find objectionable I can set up a node and use you essentially as a wider distribution platform? And if I didn't want objectionable content on my node I would have to monitor it 24/7 to catch incoming posts? Unless I'm able to ban 'playlists' from my node.
> I want free speech except I want people I don't like to not have it.
No, actually, koko very loosely defined actual free speech. In a nutshell free speech means that you can say whatever you please so long as you don't venture into what the American courts call "fighting words" (words/images designed to cause harm to another person or words/images that inspire others to cause harm to another person).
Example:
Let's say that I am prejudiced toward piglets (those damn curly tails!). I can express my extreme disdain for the swines to my heart's content. I can talk to people who share my bacon-related woes in the open.
However, I can't encourage people to go and harass or do harm to the hogs. I can't dox Babe and let everyone know the specific pen of residence: that would be encouraging others to harm, harass or make breakfast out of the pig.
> ... and the insulting or "fighting words" those that by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace. — Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, 1942
Uh, yes it is. If you're going to take the time to tell me that I'm wrong, you might actually also take the time to correct me. Not only was your statement incorrect but it added absolutely nothing to the discussion.
That's the problem with restricting speech. Who defines what is acceptable and not. You can't even say something along the lines of no hate or no harm or no threats as what those terms refer to can change over time and also by locale.
Slang in one place may refer to something rather innocuous and that same term may refer to something entirely different in a different place or dialect. Also some terms can be endearing in one place and quite crude on another.
So, unless one represents an official standard, like a company or a government, censoring content is a bit of a wild goose chase.
Now, that's not to say I want to read crude or hateful content, as I find it a turnoff, but the alternative on balance seems worse. I'd say leave it to the indiv communities and their admins to establish norms rather than a site wide policy.
When I go to reddit or another community, I want civility within the subcommunity I'm interested in, if an alternative community wants to spring up with a free for all approach, so be it.
That's a really insightful post. It's difficult to determine what is acceptable and what is not. I often find myself at odds, particularly around political correctness - where there seems to be a free pass for some people to be prejudiced without accountability.
The question I ask myself is whether or not they should be banned. I usually come to the conclusion that rebuttal is better than banning.
However, i'm also a fan of Karl Popper's don't tolerate the intolerant.
reddit explicitly defined their language around harassment to mean:
> Systematic and/or continued actions to torment or demean someone in a way that would make a reasonable person (1) conclude that reddit is not a safe platform to express their ideas or participate in the conversation, or (2) fear for their safety or the safety of those around them.
Key words to pay attention to here are: systematic, continued, fear. This isn't about being a jerk, or even being a jerk randomly. It's about being a jerk in a targeted way, a lot and over time, in a very intentional way to the degree that it causes fear to speak up or fear for one's self.
Look at the extent to which reddit admins allow hateful speech so long as they don't step outside their boundaries, and you'll understand that they're actually sticking to that definition.
Unfortunately, there's a difference between the "official policy" and the way shadowbans and recent community bans are actually handed out. It leads me to believe they're not sticking to that definition at all, and are using the definition of harassment that includes "saying things I don't like".
Lots of officious nonsense posted by bot accounts, but the entire admin staff over there refuses to answer direct questions, despite them being posted every time one of them shows up in a thread.
Not exactly the mark of people who are acting in good faith. If they were, I'd expect them to be falling over themselves to answer questions...
Okay right, but it's not _decentralised_ -- if it was, I would be able to run a completely stand-alone server, or join an arbitrary network of servers completely unrelated to yours just by punching in the IP address of another member server.
If I _must_ have anything to do with you, it's not decentralised. Distributed, maybe. But _not_ decentralised.
I'm confused how the licensing of users' content is intended to work.
The site states that you own your content[1] but then on its manifesto page[2] states that all information is in the public domain. The license itself[3] is not particularly clear.
Putting information into the public domain does provide for maximum freedom in terms of how the information can be used, but that's because the copyright owner renounces their rights.
"you own the copyright to your content... all the content on Frizbee is in the public domain... you can use and redistribute [user content] in any way, completely free of charge."
Yeah, really really strange. That makes no sense. The whole thing in general seems to confuse copyright with responsibility of content. Of course I could have got the gist wrong because it was very confusing and contradicted itself.
It looks like you're off to a good start. There's design cleanup to do, for sure. Ya, there are buts that people can clear cookies and vote again - welcome to the world of building social news software.
There will be two key moments with this:
1. Will people stick around after this is off the front page of HN?
2. When people decide to game your site, how well do you handle voting rings? The reddit founders have mentioned that nearly half of their code catches voting rings; that's not trivial to do. And of course, it may be premature optimization, but it is something to consider that anyone with a few minutes of time to build a bot could completely destroy your site.
I don't see the difference. If you want to be free of censorship that also means free of moderation. Every community needs moderation if only for spam for a reason. That's why this doesn't make sense, there will have to be some choices at moderating the content thus choosing what is displayed or not.
If people are interested in P2P decentralized discussion systems, check out http://getaether.net made by @nehbit . Beautiful UX, wasn't released yesterday either.
Grey text is hard to read - needs contrast overall. Finding links and controls by random clicking and trial and error also isn't pleasant. mystery meat navigation.
Also, the "view counts" on the website are pure BS -- the comment view counts don't grow at the same rate the thread view count does, for example. The thread view-count grows at almost a clockwork rate, etc.
I know, I know, Reddit pulled similar stunts in its early days but it still feels a bit dodgy.
It's not a stunt, and you are purely speculating. The reason for the view count for the comments being different is very easy to explain: a comment may not have been posted at the same time as a post, and therefore has a different number of views.
I honestly hope one of these takes off. I don't want to ever go there, I don't take amusement in other people's suffering. But seeing so much outrage on reddit from assholes bitching that they can't be racist/bigoted/loathsome on a private forum screaming about freedom of speech which belies their own ignorance makes me long for the days of gopher. I find it repugnant, and I'm glad to live in a country where I'm free to say anything, but hate speech is prosecuted.
The Westboro Baptist Church make an easily graspable example of this. In the US the consensus (if any) seems to be "vile, but within their rights". But they're banned from entering the UK or Canada, because we draw that line differently.
More specifically, the government draws that line differently. And as civil liberties are basically never an election-defining issue, there is no pressure to change or improve things.
Unfortunately this means the UK tends to be run for long periods by social conservatives, because that's the only way to get people who are also fiscal conservatives. I don't think you can draw deep conclusions about the value of free speech to people in Europe or the UK when it's so rarely debated.
Well yes, where 'differently' means 'hypocritically'.
For example, you prevent anti-jihad activists like Robert Spencer from entering the UK to speak, but you're perfectly prepared to allow pro-jihad activists to live in the UK and preach hatred of Jews, women, and non-Muslims in general.
This is the problem with limits on freedom of speech - they allow people doing the limiting to ban speech they don't like, for no other reason that they don't like it.
This dichotomy always exists. Very few rights are without their limits. Their front page already makes a perfect example of this: "Our manifesto is clear: we protect your right to privacy and freedom of speech".
If a user wishes to 'doxx' me, my right to privacy and their freedom of speech are at odds. Which wins?
It always surprises me when Americans think their concept of free speech is the only model. Much, if not most of the rest of the western world does not share this view of unchecked speech.
That isn't the argument. Racism, bigotry, exploitation, bullying are all examples of speech that has no place in an enlightened society in my view. Freedom of speech is limited in America too, the rest of us think that if you're going to have limitations, then set limitations which promotes human cooperation and understanding, and excludes speech which only serves to promote violence and the insularization of arbitrary groups.
It rather is the argument! The problem with your perspective is that it's completely undefined and the words you used are so pliable, they can be used to suppress more or less any kind of speech.
For example, in the UK recently there was a notorious case where a Muslim teenager posted on Facebook that he hated the soldiers who went to Muslim countries and killed women and children, and he hoped those soldiers would go straight to hell. That is 100% pure political speech .... so what happened?
Well, a woman who was the mother of a soldier saw the post and was of course terribly offended. She reported him to the police, on the grounds that nobody should be allowed to criticise her boy's choice of career. The police arrested him and he was tried in court. The plods said, "He didn't express himself very well and that's why he's now in a spot of bother". Sounds so pleasant, doesn't it, except he was found guilty and sentenced to community service. It would have been jail but he agreed to renounce his heresy in public.
The moment you say "I support free speech but not if it upsets someone" you don't have free speech. The entire purpose of protecting free speech is to ensure ideas that some people might find ugly or insulting can still get heard and debated, and thus to keep flexibility in the political system. It must be possible to enrage other people with your speech.
I'm not an absolutist, there can be some exceptions - for instance I don't consider publishing a list of people's passwords to be "free speech", but the definitions of what's not acceptable should be incredibly tightly defined. And no countries laws even try, really. Especially not in Europe.
I'm not concerned with upsetting someone. But there is a difference between being offensive (of which I have no qualms) and inciting hate. You and I just draw the line differently, am I'm okay with that.
A lot of people feel that a "decentralized social service" would be great. It hits a techies' ideas: free, open, unfiltered, uncontrolled by government.
I personally feel that it's too much like dispora: Too much tech, too little network, and a bit unproven that its a reliable/convincing network. I believe that Voat [like reddit after the digg-fail] hit a sweet spot. Although they've been a little unprepared and may be a little naive about how dirty their opposition may be.
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.