The “Front page of the internet” had a rude awakening on the morning of July 2 after finding out that Reddits director of talent, Victoria Taylor (u/chooter), was fired abruptly, causing the subreddit /r/iAmA to be down.
No one, except for a few select Reddit administrators knows the reason for Victoria being fired.
The drama has caused an uprising in many of the website’s most popular default subreddits, such has /r/movies, /r/history, /r/gaming and /r/AskReddit, where moderators chose to convert their respective communities into private subreddits as an act of condemnation. Amusingly enough, even /r/buttcoin (a subreddit that parodies Bitcoin and pokes fun at Cryptocurrency enthusiasts) has gone offline.
This news later seeped into the rest of the Reddit community, causing many users to relocate to Voat.co, a media aggregation website with less rules to govern it. As of the time of this writing, Voat is going offline intermittently due to the reportedly heavy traffic of Reddit users migrating.
Voat is currently getting hit with a huge amount of traffic as a direct result of recent changes happening (cont) t.co/Sne398gH7I
— Voat (@voatco) July 3, 2015
Redditors Jump Ship to Voat.co
Pronounced Voat as in “goat,” the website launched in April 2014 as a loose Reddit spin-off by a third year BSc student in Lund, Sweden. Much like Reddit’s subreddits, Voat has subverses where people with similar interests interact and share links.
Voat, in comparison to Reddit, centers on privacy and has a more libertarian view towards the content aggregated, where “No legal subject in this universe should be out of bounds.” The website, however, had a rocky start with multiple DDoS attacks, its web host dropping it and Paypal freezing the ability for users to donate due to questionable subverses and politically incorrect content.
The Voat administration has since then released a statement regarding the banning of Subverses that contain questionable content. The media aggregating website claims that it “doesn't pander to the lowest common denominator in return for traffic.”
Additionally, many redditors who left to Voat see this as a direct response to Reddit’s recent Anti-Harassment policy.
A sweet spot for bitcoin
While Paypal may not want to fund alternative websites like Voat, Bitcoin, of course, does not care. The website, which is still in its alpha phase, does not currently contain any ads for revenue, relying instead on anonymous bitcoin donations to keep their servers up.
Voat also intends to launch a partnership program which issues bitcoin rewards for users that write constructive posts. Those eligible for the partner program are the “users who share their original content, the people who write comments and the moderators who keep everything spam free.”
While this system is still being worked on, the Voat team has already shared three possible options for partner program payments:
- To reward users with a portion of Voat ad-revenue earnings based on the quality of the content they submit to Voat;
- To let users donate their earnings to humanitarian causes;
- To let users donate their earnings to other Voat users.
According to their Partner Program page, the Voat team claims that the reason behind a reward-based system is to “promote creation of original content by rewarding people who take their time to write comments and vote, we want to encourage quality of said comments.”
While there is a possibility of using traditional payment methods, the Voat team has confirmed that they plan to use digital currency as the main payment method for its users. Registrations for the initial partnership program testing stage are already closed, but users may be able to register once the site grows out of Alpha Phase.
While we have no idea what constitutes as “quality content” worth rewarding, a fresh, decentralized approach towards content aggregation is always welcome in the cryptocurrency ecosystem.