Mine is that it's NSA owned and operated.
Mine is that it's NSA owned and operated.
Atko started the site just as a free speech alternative to Reddit, it was doing alright. Then it started picking up a lot of members from the different exoduses from Reddit, FPH, Coontown, Ellen Pao, etc, etc.
It became more and more of a conservative site. Pushing the boundaries through what was considered acceptable, became more of a /pol forum. He got tired of developing the site to deal with people he didn't like. So he passed it on to Putt.
Putt being more active before Atko left, slowly started being inactive and unreachable. Gave developing rights to members that didn't have the site base's interest in mind and became faux-opensource.
Voat chat got taken down without it ever being replaced, disallowing users to communicate in real time, without much explanation.
They did a massive rollover to a different site base and shit started getting real weird. People were losing hundreds of CCP and SCP in minutes. Certain people spoke out about it and their accounts didn't get deleted, but they lost access to them with being able to login.
SRS started making a strong presence with gaslighting on the boards, downvoting everything that would hurt their cause to prevent it from being pulled up on /v/all where most users browse.
Subverse transfers never got approved, blatant spamming of websites without users getting banned, only downvoated. PDFs being posted recently that has a potential to be malicious whithout the user being banned.
It just turned into a leftist honeypot IMO. Too many coincidences going on over there to be trusted anymore.
This is it exactly. Thank you for typing this out. I keep hanging on trying to figure out what is going on, but that is the nature of the psyop. So many accounts posting so many different things, all of them coordinated and controled to a certain degree.
As an exercise in psychology it is remarkable what happened. How you described the initial goals of Voat being a free speech haven to the affected of reddit, but in the end it just drew in a lot of controversy is telling of how we act subconsciously.
Still I cry.
I'm glad I was able to shed some light on it. Same here Voat was my home for almost 3 years coming up in June. Something that is going down that you may be interested in with archive links.
I heard of users not being able to delete their accounts. Is that what a global ban is?
Also, not to pick a fight with you, but could it really be as simple as overreaction? Putt/Atko do have a huge problem on their hands plus they are living a life, there might be somethings keeping them from active communication besides gag orders?
But still it is really out of character and at the end of the day, it felt like Voat was going downhill anyways.
I don't think that the Exodus such as coontown or the others were what had to do with the site failing. It was the imposter types that came with those groups.
Most the user base of coontown that was on Reddit was great....as was the moderators, but when they came to Voat they were all different. It is my belief that controlled opposition was the name of the game all along.
Just scatter the user base and fragment the movement.
Call me paranoid, but I firmly believe that those sub bans were planned by reddit for the sole reason of giving a cover for those various imposters to enter the site unnoticed. Reddit was threatened by voat in the beginning, and after the early DDoS attacks failed to drag the site under, they resorted to subversive, covert means to maintain their market share.
Consider, what's the cost of a few full-time, minimum wage trolls against the threat of forever losing their hold on the market?
blatant spamming of websites without users getting banned
Honestly, if you ever tried to ban someone then you were lit up real hard. Sub admins were never allowed to enforce rules or generally administrate their subs.
The developers burned out years after they picked a shitty language to write a website in. They discovered that picking a language / architecture that isn't designed to scale down and is meant to for rapid development of business aps of a 100 or so users in a corporation can't support thousands of people a day and turns into spegetti code when you try to reduce costs.
Nobody runs a major website written in c#. Honestly in the time Putt has spent trying to port Voat to .netcore, he could have just rewritten it in a better language and kept 90% of the features.
It's just a massive drain and nobody wants to deal with it. The financial situation has not been anywhere near good in the past 2-3 years and I have no idea how it's even still up. If crypto did not have a very sharp increase in value, I definitely do not think it would still be around.
The userbase has always had a lot of drama going on that can be difficult to deal with too. I got a feeling a long time ago now that it was starting to get to Atko when he was still actively working on the site.
9-11 posted that the voat bitcoin wallet has $9M in it. I thought that sounded extreme but I followed the link and today's bitcoin valuation is between $8K - $9K so that adds up.
There's no way it's anywhere near that high. If it was, the announcements about needing funding wouldn't have happened.
There was a comment made by putt around 6-7 weeks ago that said the rise in crypto value had given them a runway, but it was "short". If they really had that much money they'd be paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for hosting every month for their runway to be short, which is ludicrous.
I am not completely sure about this but I do recall a conversation we had a while ago about voat not withdrawing their crypto funds when BTC was approaching 20k USD. Perhaps that is the reason the funding talk dropped off for a while and has suddenly come up again since the value drop.
The $9M sounds like a crazy number to me too but I can't see how else to interpret the wallet sheet. If anyone knows more about this I'd like to hear what they've got.
Well nothing has been said about the financial statement for a long while. At one point there was an announcement that said "Give me all your money or the site is going to go down within a week!" the community had a huge drive, then donations, ads, and merchandise was no longer available to purchase/donate.
My theory is that if it did get honeypotted, they wouldn't want anymore $$ coming in because that's the one thing you could trace to who took control. That last drive was just a bonus for them on the way out.
What use is it as a honeypot? Would that be for nations that don't have freedom of speech? As an American I don't see anything illegal going on.
I remember reading that announcement. It didn't seem like there was a lot of follow-up after that, but I don't really use the site now so I wouldn't know. It is only of interest to me because I used to use it and most of our users filter in from there.
Yeah I don't recall anything mentioning money on Voat for a year and a half now, since that donation drive. People have been begging to give money essentially and nothing has every been said.
EDIT: https://phuks.co/s/Whatever/28428/0537a63c-1975-4d84-b355-e8974a3edda3 something mentioned in the other Voat thread.
EDIT2: https://voat.co/v/bitcoin/1871513/9169459 Looks like that statement is wrong from the first glace at this thread.
Well, no doubt its a honeypot, but that's just the internet these days. Anything served through cloudflare is wide open to inspection by the NSA, and anything that isn't can still be seen if they're interested enough. Due to that, I see no reason for the NSA or any other feds to get directly involved with the ownership or operation. Its no doubt that the FBI and the ATF have active honeypot ops though accounts though. I've personally received PMs requesting services and advice related to illegal activities.
As for voat I see a few possibilities, but they each boil down to a coordinated effort to push the userbase onto new platforms for some reason.
The most optimistic is that the voat admins are in some way compromised, and the only legal way to fight back without violating a gag order is through inactivity and hostility towards the users, which has successfully driven many away.
Another possibility is that voat was purchased by some non-government 3rd party who hates free speech, and just wants to scatter the userbase to the wind. Reddit or one of the various soros-esque NGOs would fit.
Finally, its possible that Putt has made his money already (massive crypto stash), and the troubles on voat are just the result of true apathy, or a coordinated effort to drive traffic down to the point where he can just let the site stagnate, and therefor costing him less. This would explain the lack of fundraising and merchandising in recent months (wouldn't want people accusing him of scamming when the place shuts down).
Whatever the reason, I think its clear that the golden age of the internet is long gone. There will always be some sites around that will let you speak your mind, but they'll keep being pushed to the corners of the web until those people are ready to give up on digital communication altogether.
All that said, its still quite nice to be here on digg 4.0
Sanegoatiswear took over a while back.
Mismanagement