So Voat has been under some pretty serious attacks recently, the DDos attacks being only one. Of course, it’s not unusual in my experience to see a new platform that suddenly doubles (and more) their user base to come under some sort of attack across the Internet. It’s a shame there are douchebags out there that do these types of things, but hey it’s the Internet.

Another problem they’re having at Voat is getting donations made to them via PayPal released. That’s just nonsense in my opinion. If the funds have been verified, then release the money. I’m really interested in why PayPal froze their account. I’m also going to be wary about using PayPal in the future for anything. You should be as well.

Yesterday, Atko posted this in announcements briefly laying out the recent problems as I described above and also discussed questionable content. I could tell from the way this was written that Atko was not happy with having to even bring up the subject, but I do understand his reason.

What Voat doesn’t need are any legal problems from someone, as he says,

To make things worse, we may be personally liable for the content you guys submit to Voat. I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel like going to jail just because someone chose to anonymously post a link to an illegal image hosted somewhere on a third party server.

I completely agree with that statement. I do not believe that Voat wants to in any way restrict users ability to discuss any and all topics they wish, but there are legalities involved in some cases and if some idiot published some illegal content, it could be the end of a very promising platform.

I don’t see Voat attempting to restrict speech in general, or by whim, as it appears that Reddit is beginning to do. I mean, other than the legal definition of harassment, in online forums it seems to me to be very subjective. Something may offend me and not others. So? I won’t visit that subverse. Easy. Of course there’s always complainers out there and Voat will have to make decisions based on the number and types of complaints received. It’s one of the costs of operating a forum like this one.

I think that all of us need to give this some time to settle out and see what the future holds. As I’ve already written, I like this platform. For someone new to this type of discussion forum, I find it easy to use and at least for now, it’s not as cluttered as Reddit seems to be.

I hope no one is giving up just because of a few startup problems and I would really like to see Voat eventually become a competitive alternative to Reddit.

Let the SJW’s have their forum, we’ll have ours.