
Reddit users flee to Swiss copy Voat after harassment clampdown - SimplyUseless
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jun/15/reddit-users-flee-to-voat-after-harassment-clampdown
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pm24601
Good.

Seriously, the subreddits were pulled down because of behavior not speech. It
would be nice to have a little less hate behavior.

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rilita
Of note related to this are the following:

* There is an email going around supposedly from an insider saying reddit intends to sue voat.co [http://cityworldnews.com/reddit-plans-lawsuit-against-voat-c...](http://cityworldnews.com/reddit-plans-lawsuit-against-voat-co/)

* Voat.co ( when accessible ) was mirroring some content from Reddit ( copyright infringement? ... )

* Voat.co seems to be crushed and possibly being DDOSed

* Last I heard when I was at a speech by Alexis Ohanian himself, he is for free speech to a rather extreme level. I did not get the impression he would ban any content besides what is absolutely necessary to keep the business running.

~~~
thanatropism
Alexis Ohanian himself is not quite calling the shot these days. New
management has said in exact words that reddit is not meant to be a "free
speech platform"[0]. And that's exactly why people are angry: the community
built reddit on a premise that was suddenly changed.

Anyway, the less social media, the more time left to focus on important
things...

[http://www.businessinsider.com/reddit-ceo-ellen-pao-its-
not-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/reddit-ceo-ellen-pao-its-not-our-
sites-goal-to-be-a-completely-free-speech-platform-2015-5)

~~~
rilita
There is a difference between the internal vibe of the company and statements
by the current CEO. One has to say things that make the company money; the
other is the true reality of what drives it.

The "free speech platform" notion is alive and well with Reddit, both in the
community and in the people working to support it.

Alexis may not be calling the shots, but you can be sure that people are still
keeping his vision alive.

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taternuts
I don't think the site has been operational since this whole thing started

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dummy7953
I'm trying to recall the name of a crowd sourcing project where... I think
participants were trying to arrange shreds of documents back into their
original form. But then there was basically one guy who used different IP
addresses to mess up everyone's process. And in the end, that one person was
able to ruin the contest.

Anyway, that's the tug & pull of building a community on-line and featuring
unfettered free speech. I don't think you can have both at the same time, only
one or the other.

Both community and free speech are their own kind of tyrannies, but then how
does one become better than the other? Well, I think it's to the degree that
the members of either forum style are thoughtful, wise and can absorb new
information. And I think that a forum that is striving to be a community of
some kind, rather than a watering hole for everyone with every idea, is going
to be more successful at providing something helpful to people.

Because let's face it, internet forums are for the most part a vast wasteland
of stupid, ignorant comments and opinions. There's a lot of dummies out there.
And there's a lot of people who like to troll and break things. In some places
it's actively encouraged. Moderation of forums is probably the best way to go
if you want to build something that people can use and find lasting value in.

~~~
mindslight
We certainly do not have to give up anonymity to have community. HN for
example is as psuedonymous as you want it to be (as your green username
shows).

You can architect systems such that the actions of bad actors are isolated.
For instance if your example site had stored actions in an immutable log, it
would have been possible to revert the malicious changes. This itself could
even be crowdsourced with cross-checking. Public distributed computing
projects have always had to deal with this in ways appropriate to their
problem domains. Distributed systems are hard, but that doesn't mean we should
give up and centralize them.

As fecebook and spewtube comments show, even using real names doesn't make
dimwits magically wisen up.

Reddit was setup such that "trolls" (whomever you consider that to be) could
form their own communities with their own mod policy - free to go their own
way. Of course that's not good enough to appease people who want to control
what others communicate about.

