The reason given was "Under the Acceptable Use Policy, PayPal may not be used to send or receive payments for certain sexually oriented materials or services or for items that could be considered obscene". This is wrong/false on so many levels. We used PayPal only as a means to receive voluntary donations from people who wanted to support further development of Voat and to help pay for our hosting fees. This is beyond crazy.
According to PayPal User Agreement, our funds can be kept by PayPal for 180 days. I requested further clarification from PayPal, but I would like to advise everyone who planned to donate to Voat - to NOT do so via PayPal.
Honestly, I don't know what I expected when I trusted PayPal with our donation money. I apologize to everyone who donated to us through PayPal and I will badge everyone who did so even if the funds are never released by PayPal.
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Soupias ago
This brings me to another set of questions. How come the sjws are so organized that they can rain e-mails to companies in order to damage what they do not like? Also how come they do not like voat? If I was an sjw I would be happy if all the shitlords left for another forum and I can have my safe place. Why go after voat? It looks like they are reddit's lapdogs.
And finally, no matter how many e-mails does one company receive, they simply can't end business relationships without solid evidence. That is why I am wondering. Is there any chance that such material exist here?
punished_snake ago
Hah.
SJW here. I laughed to hear that FPH was memory holed. The resulting drama was pretty funny...
... Then a friend told me to check out Voat. So I checked the source code, then registered.
I really don't think a mailing canoaign would get many members. @Soupias offers a realistic scenario. The thousands of dollars suddenly flying into Voat's account also could have set off alarms.
rwbj ago
I don't think it's necessarily the socjus types behind the more sophisticated attacks.
Advanced Publications, the company that owns Reddit, being responsible is nowhere near as absurd or conspiratorial as it might seem at first. Reddit ostensibly should be worth far more than it is. It's a social media network with supposedly hundreds of millions of users. Networks a fraction of their size have capitalized themselves in the billions of dollars. Reddit's valuation varies, but in general it's struggling to pass even half a billion. I imagine this is beyond frustrating for Advanced Publications who owns vast swaths of the media yet themselves have reported gross revenue of "only" $8 billion. All of the crazy stuff started happening after people suddenly started throwing thousands of dollars not even at a functional Voat, but at Voat's overwhelmed and frequently inaccessible servers even before the denial of service attacks began. That made the idea that Reddit might very well be following in Digg's footsteps suddenly seem a lot less hyperbolic.
Advance publications is a large mass media company. They own newspapers, television channels, Reddit, Ars Technica, Vogue, GQ, Wired, and much much more. Consequently they're going to have an extensive network of connections in nearly all realms of business. Them doing things like getting a host or paypal to nix service isn't some super secret underground hush hush conspiracy. It's John, a random VP's assistant director, making a 30 second call to his friend Bill who he knows is friends with some guys over at [insert company such as Paypal] and simply asking them to not release the funds, and it's done before he's finished his first cup of coffee.
It's not any of this hyperbole about the internet being under attack or whatever (though it may well be - it's just not the cause here). It's just that the internet is a great equalizer. If you try to open up a goods market WalMart isn't going to care less. It's literally impossible to compete with them due to economy of scale. But on the internet suddenly some little website that just a year ago was nothing more than a school project is in the media everywhere and is actually looking to pose a meaningful potential threat to a competing website operated by a multi billion dollar mass media company. And so they do care, so we get the treatment they would give to competitors they're worried about.
derram ago
We mock Tumblr a lot for the shit that gets said there, but it's a pretty dark place.
For instance, there's no rules against doxing on Tumblr so they're pretty brazen about it. http://vgy.me/T9aJW7.png
They don't need to be organized when they're all on a single site that caters to their behavior.