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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Holonomic ago
Ohhh for crying out loud Put.....I'm not a baby and I don't need to see you prance around here on these pages everyday to know you are active with your site and doing things with it behind the scenes that we may not all know about or even understand.
I saw your post where you have sooo many other things in your life and am aware, and smart enough, to know --- there's a guy that has a LOT on his plate and I hope he is successful in what ALL he does.
I appreciate this website more than you know, and the crap I get away with here is unlike ANY other site. I can express myself and not get banished to faggot-hell and back, and I appreciate being able to VENT and express myself. To me, that alone is priceless, and whatever you do that keeps things going is fine with me. I'm generally nice to everyone here, but there are those refugee morons from 'other' sites that want to drag this site through the SJW-mud, and I don't like that, so I mouth-off about it.
As far as I'm concerned, I think you do a terrific job, and all the pansies that piss and whine about you being here or not, they should be told to go back to [d]reddit and crawl into their safe space and sob. Instead of bitching about what you aren't doing, why can't they appreciate what you DO do? I appreciate what you do. I couldn't do what you do. I wouldn't want to.
If you have things to get done here....fine.....do them. Do them as you can, when you can. Is the world going to implode of you don't? I see little glitches here and there, but so what. I couldn't care less. How big a problem are they, really?
You don't owe [me] any accounting of your activities. You can't have a site like that and NOT be working on it. What kind of dumbass would think otherwise? I appreciate your doing it, and couldn't do it myself, so why should I judge?
You have a GREAT website, and all the whining pains in the ass......send them to ME.
You are appreciated, and valued a great deal, so just keep doing what you're doing and know that it works just fine.