First off, I need to say that I know I’ve let a lot of you down (if not all). I know I’ve not met your expectations of an admin or a leader. I have no excuses as even I feel this way about myself. I won’t make attempts for empathy, I will only acknowledge the truth, and it is such.
Life is full of surprises. You can be rich one minute and living out of your car the next. You can be healthy one year and a regular in the doctor’s office the following. You can have life figured out only to discover you know nothing in the end. The only constant in life is change.
My life is not the same it was when I first met @Atko and started working on Voat. I have much less time, I have a bit less fight in me (getting old does this), I have a bit more struggle in life. These life changes have forced me to put Voat on the back burner (which hurts me).
Let’s get real
When it comes to “Free Speech” sites, I once believed that people cared enough about the value of free speech to make “clone” sites like Voat (or gab) successful. I’ve come to realize, and have said before, that this single factor isn’t enough. People simply do not value this right enough to make a “clone” successful.
You can see this with Voat. A majority of Voat users still use Reddit. People use Reddit for posting and interacting when it comes to PC topics (4 wheel drive subs, movie subs, book subs, etc.). They use Voat to post the things they can’t post on Reddit. This creates an imbalance where Voat becomes increasingly un-PC, while Reddit gets the neutral content (I know even the most hardened ideologue has a level of civility). The end result is this imbalance drives people away as people wear out when confronted by content like this over the long run.
I don’t know the solution to this, and I am not attempting to pass blame, I am simply stating a truth that has to considered.
What makes a clone not a clone?
Why I mention this in the first place is that I know a “clone” site will not become sustainable based on Freedom of Speech so I’ve tried to revolutionize the “community” aspect of Voat by providing a way the community itself can “vote” on policy (rules, mods, anything actually). It's the future capability of this feature-set that is appealing. A community can become self-sustaining and self-manageable through this new technology. After all, the draw of sites like Voat or Reddit is that it is community-oriented vs. self-oriented.
And I’m going to finish it. I’m going to finish it for me. I’m going to finish it for you. I’m going to finish it for Voat. I’m going to finish it for Freedom of Speech (because I still believe in this ideal).
I’m going to finish it because a “clone” site with no differentiation but policy will never succeed.
So Voat, please forgive me for my shortcomings if you can, and expect my work to continue on making Voat a truly unique website.
Soon.
P.S. Downtime today was because of a full disk (Thanks @derram for letting me know). We had an issue from about a year ago that inflated some files to crazy sizes and I took the time today to deal with this. So the next downtime should be something completely different! Yay!
https://voat.co/v/announcements/1330806
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Maxcactus ago
PC is just a synonym for civility. Free speech is nothing if it is just used to attack and hate people. You are correct that most people use both Reddit and Voat and it has caused the haters to distill out and end up on this side of the apparatus.
I was one of the first dozen people on Reddit. When I came over to Voat to check it out it reminded me of Reddit in its infancy. I decided to stay so I could watch it evolve and grow. What I found was that the haters grew steadily and leveraged their numbers exclude and control in an abbarent new form of PC. The first pure experience of this was when I made a simple post that an evil person was not that way because they were fat. That day I experienced a lynch mob that gave me nearly 300 down votes on a simple statement of fact. Voat does not tolerate people outside of their faith.
I perpose that handing Voat over to this group that presently dominates things here will lock it into its present stat of disfunction and lead to its demise.
absurdlyobfuscated ago
No, PC is a synonym for ritual defamation, wherein the forbidden opinion is usually something that goes against neo-marxist dogma. Free speech doesn't exist at all if "civility" is harshly enforced or people are excluded from society for saying the wrong things.
Granted, you ended up on the receiving end of this when it swung the other way, but you were still free to speak regardless. You didn't get banned or censored, presumably. You're still here and you can comment freely. You see the greater potential for danger if you were censored, right? No one could voice opposition to bad ideas. That's why the free exchange of ideas should not be hindered by force, period. As long as the people in charge adhere to that principle, I don't care what they believe.