[minimaxir]

Let's look at what happened to Voat.

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.

[pervycreeper]

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-...

[bhouston]

That is a pretty good synopsis - thanks.

[aptwebapps]

Some of the asides are, well, take a look:

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.

[empressplay]

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.

[Natsu]

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.

[minimaxir]

Ah, forgot to include that Voat was earlier shut down by their hosting provider (hosted in Europe) due to the nature of their content: https://voat.co/v/announcements/comments/146757/

They switched to a cloud provider to fix it in the short term.

[Natsu]

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.

[bhouston]

That is because voat.co has porn like Reddit does and most hosting providers do not allow that.

[zamalek]

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.

[octobyte]

> 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.

[zamalek]

/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.

[bhouston]

Diss Voat.co as much as you want, but so far Voat.co is actually a pretty huge success: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/voat.co

[eevee]

Reddit is rank 32. Hacker News is rank 1,859. Bulbapedia, the Pokémon wiki, is rank 4,101. Voat is rank 25,171.

I don't think I understand your definition of "huge success".

[bhouston]

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.

[eevee]

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.

The same thing happened to 8chan, and then it entered a gentle but consistent decline: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/8ch.net

[bhouston]

> Of course it did... That's not really a sign that they did anything right

Actually the fact that they shot up at all is a sign they did something right.

Now it is a question whether they can maintain that momentum, but they did get a real good start.

[iLoch]

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.

[rjbwork]

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.

[koko775]

Harassing people and subreddits whose moderators encouraged and supported harassment go well beyond just "politically incorrect".

[minimaxir]

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.

This time I decided to be more constructive. :)

[Shorel]

And digg was 'inspired' by slashdot and reddit stole digg userbase.

It's the community and moderators who make the site, not only the technology.

Therefore all redeeming qualities lie in the respective users of those sites, and less in the programming.

Voat is just starting and reddit is perfectly capable of performing a 'digg' and alienate its users.

Let's wait and see.

[jaredmcateer]

Who is dissing Voat? minimaxir was just pointing out what happened.

[tomjen3]

Subredditdrama is a not exactly a high quality place.

[austenallred]

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.

[personjerry]

According to https://voat.co/about it was created by a third year BSc student which would place the creator at around 20?

Though, you specified "running a website" which is not the same.