Reddit's been running pretty awful in general lately.
Ever since the UI update the website loses track of if I'm logged in from page to page. Some pages load in the old format, some in the new. It's completely ridiculous.
If you are not logged in, it defaults to the big blocky, whitespace filled, media heavy new UI. There is no longer a sense of a compact text website. If you are logged in, you can get the old look.
My MacBookPro (2010) now crashes frequently when using the new UI on subreddits that have a good percentage of videos - not sure why. Otherwise, it has been a reliable machine even for streaming.
https://voat.co/ is still running. Similar design but different people. That site could use some love.
Edit: People seem to think that I would endorse the things that are posted on voat. I do not. But I do endorse free speech even if it means that others express things I don't agree with or wouldn't want to hear. Voat does so, too. You can discuss your topics and views on voat. If nice people gain the majority the ugliness will have to stay in the dark corners.
That is to say, a site that prides itself on "free speech," but in reality makes itself the home of the same cesspool that produces the alt-right, incels, 4chan, and whatever hairdo Richard Spencer is wearing right now.
It's sad, though. It had a lot of potential as a Reddit alternative.
It's really the natural outcome of any "X Alternative" site. Anyone that gets banned from X goes to the alternative, and anyone else has no reason to go, because X still works for them. So X Alternative fills up with horrible users, and even more nobody wants to go there.
I'm a big fan of free speech as a philosophy, but I also am practical enough to understand a bit about how hateful culture festers, spreads, and grows when allowed to thrive online, and honestly I'm at a loss for how I'd reconcile these two concepts.
What's the current state of the art for curbing the growth of hate groups while still providing a platform for honest and free discussion? We all probably have some ideas on how we'd give it a shot, but I wonder if there are one, or a few common themes.
The upvote/downvote-system by itself seems like a bad idea in regards of free speech. You'll end up with the largest group agreeing to each other and upvoting each other thereby silencing (and driving away) other groups. The votes themselves take almost no energy and simple puns get showered in upvotes while long and well thought-out but slightly unusual posts die in the desert.
If you go with the voting system alone with moderate moderation you'll probably always end up with mediocre content that is easy to consume by a majority of your users. Depending on your users you'll get funny cat gifs or ever repeating racist jokes.
The subreddits seem to help a bit since they filter users by interest first and employ strict moderation throughout but after they reach a certain threshold they, too, seem to go downhill fast.
I have no solution but the effortless vote system doesn't sound like such a good idea after all these years.
If you're really keen on free speech as a philosophy, read up on John Stuart Mill's contributions. His take is that free speech is paramount except when it causes harm, which is missed by many today.
ah yes, an alternative whose front page is currently filled with pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, and everyone's favorite past-time, closeted racism
I would say its often open racism on that site. It's a shame the community is so awful, as the site looked promising early on and we need a viable alternative to reddit.
Wow I didn't know it turned out so bad. Even then reddit isn't much better either. Damn the internet has turned into a cesspool or maybe I don't remember it was a cesspool 20 years ago too.
Voat once was very similar to reddit of the past before hoards of reddit users were driven away by strict moderation policies and found refuge in the free speech advocating site that voat is. It reflects what those think who are not allowed to speak on reddit.
Sadly, that beautiful garden is now overgrown by heaps of ugly weeds and you have to dig deep to find the nuggets.
What nuggets would that be and how deep would I need to dig into the shit? I couldn't find any content of interest on the frontpage so I visited the section dedicated to programming. Top content over there seems to be of roughly the same value (or lack thereof, "github something something SJWs").
It's like a beautiful lake gone bad where the dead fish swim on top. Sad but true, it's hard to find anything worthwhile even though there is no real barrier of contributing. It doesn't have to be this way but now it is.
Free speech also doesn't mean you get a blank check to cause harm to others, like mobilizing your online community to stalk, threaten, and harass individuals.
Before your edit to remove the I.P address: 146.185.172.196.
Q: Using DigitalOcean to host a VPN?
Bans still happen for abuse/spam and banning well-known VPS/Server/Cloud Providers isn't all that uncommon when it becomes an issue. This happens on every platform, otherwise there wouldn't be a platform. Voat has experienced many DDOS attacks in its days - so it wouldn't be surprising if some of the attacks originated from a VPS Provider and got the IP range banned.
> This happens on every platform, otherwise there wouldn't be a platform.
It's just a bit hypocritical of the Voat people to complain that another platform has arbitrary and carpricious censorship, and then to start their own platform that ostensibly has no censorship, only to instate their own arbitrary and capricious censorship.
Banning legitimate users, editing their posts, and shadowbanning are examples of "arbitrary and capricious censorship". Banning IP ranges for effectively taking down the platform (thereby censoring everyone using the platform) is not arbitrary - although it may be capricious (since it may be unbanned once the abuse has stopped in hopes the abuse doesn't immediately start back up).
Spinning up an ad bot and spamming 10,000 messages every hour on every board effectively shuts down discussion for any legitimate users. It takes extremely bad faith to argue that stopping spam and bots is anything equivalent to censorship. Especially when the goal of the abuse is to remove the platform for the legitimate users to converse on, in an attempt to silence them.
No, but you were trying to access through a DigitalOcean IP which may have been range banned for spam/abuse/botting. Same reason why almost any public proxy is banned on 4chan. Same reason many uploading/hosting sites block Tor exit nodes. If your intention was to remain private - they do not guarantee that anywhere.
Arguing that you "are" DigitalOcean and they are censoring you is a bit disingenuous if you ask me.
It's hardly surprising given how many truly repugnant people on Reddit were promoting Voat as an alternative to Reddit for the subreddits that were so bad that even Reddit wouldn't tolerate them.
Ever since the UI update the website loses track of if I'm logged in from page to page. Some pages load in the old format, some in the new. It's completely ridiculous.