On December 21st 2020, the administrator of Voat announced its upcoming shutdown on December 25th 2020. Thus, I began work on this video, in the hopes for it to become a historical record on Voatās financial troubles and eventual decline. Its not as simple as āran out of moneyā, no matter what the faithful tell you. These people, who have faith in Ruqqus and Saidit and other Reddit Alternatives, will tell you āThat could never happen to us!ā, but they are deluding themselves. Watch the video to see why.
A bunch of articles say the founder of Voat is named Justin Chastain, but I have no way of verifying if thatās true, so I didnāt say it. Instead I called him Putt.
This video was focused on presenting the evidence so you can build your own conclusion about Voatās decline. I encourage you to read Puttās statements in full before making assumptions. It seems like he wanted to hire people as some sort of status symbol, āIts what makes us different from the restā. On the same token, he didnāt want ads on the site. But he DID want to publish all his code to Github, which he claims made the DDOS attacks easier to accomplish. It seems like Puttās whims caused this collapse when everything piled on. Hiring people, getting ddossed, disabling registration, never asking for donations or advertising, disappearing for months on end without telling anyone, and so on. It would be so easy to blame the mainstream media for this, but the fact isā¦ Voat failed because of Putt. As captain of the ship, the blame falls on him. I want to believe he learned something, but heās always said āGod made this happenā, as though God has a stake in Voat or something. Its his way of deflection, of shifting the blame. And Iām not buying it.
Caveat! Being censored from google search results, kicked from paypal, blacklisted from web hosting providers ā made this shutdown a certainty. Still, my contention is that even in the best circumstances, Putt would have sh^t the bed. #Voat
SOURCES
https://blogg.com/2020/12/21/voat-co-to-end-on-2020-12-25/
https://archive.is/0kOST
https://poal.co/s/TellPoal/183326
https://archive.vn/bOLmp
https://searchvoat.co/
https://voat.co/v/whatever/4171043
https://youtu.be/MpFqV4VaVO0
TIMELINE
https://voat.co/v/announcements/1866053
https://voat.co/v/announcements/1881376
https://voat.co/v/announcements/2934082
https://voat.co/v/Voat/3178819
https://voat.co/v/Voat/3361289
https://voat.co/v/Voat/3371593
https://voat.co/v/announcements/4169936
Source
Welcome back warm potato.
Very happy šš ššā„ļøā¤ļø
RIP VOAT – I'll see yawl on Poal.co
1:45 you mean to tell me once you announce yourself to be a free speech platform after censorship of mostly dissident right on the other site you are gonna mostly get right wingers or some even hwhite supremisit in the site SHOCKERS lol
1:33 I remember that day I got 143 upvotes for that post. That was a hard one to beat. Great video sir! (edit) The crazy uncle after he's dead and gone is oddly the only one you truly remember.
While its sad, I see something better coming up soon to replace it. There are/were a lot of technical-oriented users who have the skills to completely rebuild it.
Welcome back.
There wasn't an issue with CP. Shills were posting illegal content to try and get it shutdown. There was a short period when shills spammed child pornography but I personally never seen it and ops posting that stuff were banned asap.
Hi Guys šš šš
Registration was disabled many times before 2019.
You didn't go down the rabbit hole very good. You didn't even mention how the site was proven to be a MOSSAD honeypot.
Thanks for the video…it was a fun run, there may never be another site like VOAT again…but we will not be silenced or censored, WE THE PEOPLE will eat the internet social media alive…people are waking up. ~The Bad Goat
I wasn't aware of Voat outside of your video. I enjoyed hearing about the history and timeline of the website.
Its messed up that many of these 'free speech' alternative platforms always either go too far in allowing illegal content, ACTUAL hateful people, or end up being just as censorious (if not more) than the original platform people fled from.
So average people just wanting a neutral platform to express our opinions without fear of partisan censorship (Twitter, Reddit, most big tech) or being exposed to actual hateful or illegal content (Some far right 'free speech' alternatives) don't have many options.
I miss the old days of social media, pre 2016. It was actually fun and they didn't have hate speech policies that went overboard into suspending people for accidently misgendering someone. Now they ban you for even daring to question the election results.
Nice 36:14 šššš
It was bought out, the shill efforts did fuck all there so "Angel" decided to shut it down, and pilpul NDA muzzled putt.
Glowies got to Putt.
RIP my favorite website.
Letting users customize their feeds isn't censorship.
Merry Christmas, Warm Potato!
You know what man, I'm going to give you a thumbs up simply for not going "WHAT'S UP GUYS!"
All in all p good video.
>another site filled with Trumptards got shut down
Oh no!
Anyway…
Voat is like the canary in the coal mine of free speech. A lot of people fail to see the importance in this.
This guy needs to hit his T's harder..
Do we really event need a reddit style social media site anyway? It basically operates like an old fashioned web forum; topics, categories, threads, quotes, etc. The only time I use it is if it shows up in a search result for something I need help with. Just get a web host and install vbulletin or phpbb.
So what Iām getting at here, is that Voat is just 4chan if 4chan had an upvoat system and absolutely no standards period.
š š¢
"only people who agreed with site culture could add" so its like reddit then
Ffs. I wanna make my own free speech platform. This is bs.
Let's make a free speech website. What should we use? All Microsoft products and nothing open source. WTF? They didn't use some cells. No wonder it failed.
I first hear about this when it shuts down
Iirc Ruqqus only shut down registrations to prevent the site from crashing from a massive influx of users. They opened them back up pretty quick.
15:20 – there's reference to a document that Voat users are sharing among themselves, but searching around, I can't seem to find it. I can't find it in the references listed in the video description, either.
Does anyone have a link to the source?