Don’t forget about SBBH and how many subs they’ve destroyed under the guise of protecting Voat. Most drama there is caused by the soap boxers and doxxers. They drove off many great users and almost all niche content needed to organically grow a community.
I actually didn't follow any of that drama. At all. So I have no idea what it was about.
The only "protection" I saw of voat was people calling each other nigger faggot kikes, and seeing who stayed. Also this one guy that kept pasting a huge text wall full of links, and another guy that followed him everywhere pointing out that many were wrong and to stick to strict facts.
Either way, now that it's possible to see who downvoted a post, I think that it'll severely limit their ability to do whatever they were doing before.
It always started by gooning around with alts as trolls to spam lazy borderline bannable shitposts on active subs not under their direct control or under the /v/ProtectVoat umbrella. Eventually when a sub mod or owner had enough and banned the spam account, that alt account or their main would then complain about censorship on /v/ProtectVoat. Usually it meant Kevdude pinged the posse into the post, declaring that the banner threatened Voat's principles. Which from that post they then brigade the sub with spam, declaring to outsiders on Voat that the mod was a Reddit infiltrator, further increasing attack. The result was either abandonment of the sub or a handover to the assailants. When this happened, it and substitutes made to eliminate censorship died or greatly declined, as SBBH lost interest after the attacks succeeded because they never cared about the target sub and its content to begin with. Finally, Banhammers and /v/ProtectVoat celebrated, proclaiming Voat protected by purging the threat. Now repeat reading that paragraph more times than you can bear and realize Voat's been run by another fucking clown world for the past few years.
The wall of text must have been either Dortex, WebofSlime, or theoldones.
It's awesome that voting transparency discourages coordinated content control from malicious groups.
Thanks for taking the time to explain all that. I really appreciate it.
I've been on voat for a while, but started going in earnest around the time that "the_pedes" were created, whenever that was. I didn't realise that there was so much drama. The only one that I recognize at all is Gabarra. I couldn't figure him out, and just decided to ignore him.
I gotta say though, transparent voting is one of the better things about poal (that neither vote nor Reddit have). They should probably have it for upvotes as well, but that's just my opinion. Either way, I judge content based on user reply and conversation. I'd rather have a post with 100 replies, and no upvotes, than 10k upvotes and no replies.
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