Meet Voat, the website that wants to be the anti-Reddit
As social news site Reddit tries to clean up its act by limiting some speech, an alternative has sprung up that promises to be more free-wheeling.
With all the drama surrounding Reddit, from debates over free speech to its messy game of musical chairs among executives, it's understandable some users might want to leave.
Now they've found a place to go. It's called Voat (rhymes with goat), and it says it's fixed all those things people don't like about Reddit.
The site launched in April 2014 and was originally called WhoaVerse. It started as a part-time project of a third-year Swedish college student and now the site claims to be run by two students who are "currently studying computer science and economics at University of Zurich in Switzerland." One of them is called Atif, according to the "About" page on the site.
Voat users posted in relative obscurity until a month ago, when Reddit's management banned five noxious forums from its service, including one devoted to making fun of overweight people.
Fear over increasing control from Reddit's administrators, who are attempting to turn the site into a large, successful and profitable company, appears to have pushed swaths of passionate Reddit users, known as Redditors, to Voat.co. "Due to the recent interest generated by the online community," the site tells visitors, "this has evolved from hobby into full-fledged desire to create the website that will become the place where you can "have your say."
It's unclear how many people visit Voat. The site doesn't publish statistics about its usage, and industry tracker ComScore said its traffic is currently too small to track. What is known: The number of people who visited Reddit from a desktop or laptop computer dropped by 600,000 in the week of July 5 to 4.6 million.
So could this all lead to a MySpace-style path to Reddit's ultimate obsolescence? Could Reddit's users migrate in massive waves to Voat, as MySpace users did to Facebook a half decade ago?
Well, many of Reddit's angriest users aren't just hoping for it, they're actively encouraging an exodus. "The more people move to Voat, the better," wrote one Reddit user named TorchicBlaziken. "Voat is the evolution of reddit, so I hope that the diversity of its communities rivals that of reddit."
Experts say migrations can and do happen on the Web, particularly among the volatile user bases like those at Reddit.
"A new brand can come out of the blue in just months," said Sree Sreenivasan, chief digital officer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Loyalty is there but not guaranteed. Supremacy on the Web is not guaranteed to anyone anymore."
Or as one Voat user wrote: "It's the cycle of the internet. A website grows up and sells out then we move on to something better."
A spokesperson for Voat declined to comment for this story. "We have received too many requests from almost all major media outlets and we can no longer respond to media inquiries individually primarily because we don't have the manpower," the person wrote in an email. "We are currently fully focused on improving the technology behind Voat and that is our main priority."
Free speech: mostly or absolutely?
Voat says it promises completely unfettered free speech, "submitted, organized, moderated and voted on (ranked) by the users." "No legal subject in this universe should be out of bounds," the site says. "There's no doubt we can build a better home for those of us that enjoy aggregated content, if we simply listen to those that use it, and hold that as an ongoing priority."
That manifesto of sorts has become a rallying cry of Voat's users, frustrated with Reddit's tightening control over posts to its site.
"Voat's community already feels fresh and more respectful than Reddit's," wrote one Voat convert called boiglenoight.
Voat users' concerns over Reddit's increasing control likely won't be swayed by Steve Huffman -- a Reddit co-founder who returned as CEO on July 10 following the ouster of former chief Ellen Pao -- who plans to purge distasteful elements from the online community. On Thursday, he laid out new rules further restricting what users can post on the site.
Among the items no longer allowed: illegal activity; publication of people's private information; anything that incites violence, harassment, bullying, abuse; and anything sexually suggestive of minors.
"As Reddit has grown, we've seen additional examples of how unfettered free speech can make Reddit a less enjoyable place to visit and can even cause people harm outside of Reddit," Huffman wrote in a town hall-style meeting Thursday known as an Ask Me Anything (AMA). "Freedom of expression is important to us, but it's more important to us that we at Reddit be true to our mission."
Type Voat.co into your Web browser and you'll be transported to a website that, on its face, looks a lot like Reddit, down to the placement of buttons and the way users vote for (up) or against (down) on posts. Different forums, called subreddits on Reddit, are called "subverses" on Voat.
Some of the ways to organize Reddit posts are "Hot," "New" and "Rising." On Voat it's "Hot," "New" and "Incoming."
Voat's very existence traces back to users' frustration with Reddit, which was started in 2005 and has been a forum for a wide range of discussions in the past decade. But a shift in attitude by management toward the site -- and a $50 million investment last year by some of Silicon Valley's most prominent investors -- suggests Reddit will need to place tighter controls over its Redditors to ensure potential new users aren't rebuffed by some of the more distasteful speech and commentary on the site.
The tensions boil down to the basic question: What is Reddit?
For Redditors, the site is seen as a haven of free speech, the home of an idealistic everything-goes message board where members police one another and themselves through the site's voting system. Each article and comment is voted on, and those who receive the most votes bubble to the top.
But Reddit, the company, sees things differently. Groups that have banded together on the site who share racist and misogynistic tendencies have put pressure on the for-profit company, which is part-owned by Advance Publications, the parent of Vogue and The New Yorker publisher Conde Nast.
"We've spent the last few days here discussing and agree that an approach like this allows us as a company to repudiate content we don't want to associate with the business, but gives individuals freedom to consume it if they choose," Huffman said. "This is what we will try, and if the hateful users continue to spill out into mainstream reddit, we will try more aggressive approaches."
For Voat, that means more disenchanted or disenfranchised Redditors looking to its site as a new haven. "We are looking to expand," the site's owners wrote.
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Reddit CEO's Ask Me Anything session doesn't quite live up to its billing
Steve Huffman, the latest chief of the social news site, skirted a few issues Reddit fans and foes are keen to know more about.
Reddit may be best known for its Ask Me Anything forums, where celebrities allow themselves to be grilled by users on just about any topic. But that vaunted openness was missing Thursday, when the site's new chief executive sidestepped important questions about Reddit's operations during a nearly two-hour-long AMA session.
Reddit, which has operated as an anything-goes community forum for a decade, will no longer allow illegal activity, publish people's private information, write anything that incites violence, harassment, bullying and abuse or post anything sexually suggestive of minors.
"As Reddit has grown, we've seen additional examples of how unfettered free speech can make Reddit a less enjoyable place to visit, and can even cause people harm outside of Reddit," Steve Huffman, Reddit's co-founder who returned as CEO July 10, wrote Thursday during a company AMAthat drew more than 18,000 posts.
Reddit seems to be at a crossroads. With nearly 164 million monthly visitors, the online message board has had trouble managing itself. It's become infamous for postings and forums that many find offensive, including ones that are misogynistic, homophobic or racist.
"We've spent the last few days here discussing and agree that an approach like this allows us as a company to repudiate content we don't want to associate with the business, but gives individuals freedom to consume it if they choose," he added. "This is what we will try, and if the hateful users continue to spill out into mainstream reddit, we will try more aggressive approaches."
While Huffman published an 840-word post elaborating on some of the changes at the start of his AMA, he ducked some key questions, including why three key female executives left the company within a two-week span.
Here are three questions Reddit watchers wished he had answered:
Q: Who really made the decision to fire Victoria Taylor, Reddit's well- respected director of talent who helped numerous volunteer moderators run "subreddits," the message boards that keep the site going?
Taylor was fired July 2, though Reddit didn't announce her ouster until after the community learned about it. Moderators responded by angrily shutting down dozens of subreddits, which affected the millions of passionate Reddit users known as Redditors. There was speculation that Pao, who had served as interim CEO since November, was behind Taylor's abrupt dismissal. That speculation prompted renewed interest in a Change.org petition calling for Pao's resignation. Many wondered if Taylor clashed with Reddit execs on the issue of balancing the community's best interests with the need to make the site more commercially viable.
Taylor said in a Reddit post last week that "if I know one thing about this community, it's you'll continue making your voices heard. And that's an inspiration."
Alexis Ohanian, who co-founded Reddit with Huffman in 2005 and returned last year as executive chairman, also intimated in a podcast after Pao's resignation that he was the one behind Taylor's dismissal.
Huffman made no mention of Taylor's ouster on Thursday, even though the question was asked.
Q: Ohanian has said that when he returned as executive chairman last year, he wanted to bring back Huffman as CEO. Was Ellen Pao named interim CEO in November because she was always meant to be Reddit's temporary chief?
Pao was named interim CEO after former CEO Yishan Wong resigned. At that time, Huffman was working on his travel startup Hipmunk, and it remains murky whether Reddit planned to bring Huffman back.
In the past eight months, Pao has introduced policies that have proved unpopular with some Redditors, including the site's first ever anti-harrassment policy and its closure in June of five subreddits that violated that policy. Three days after Pao's exit, Reddit chief engineer Bethanye Blount quit. She said Pao had been placed on a glass cliff, a term that refers to putting women in a crisis situation that's highly likely to result in failure.
The ultimate question here is whether Pao was the architect of Reddit's recent missteps or the scapegoat?
Q: When Reddit raised $50 million in funding last fall, then-CEO Wong proposed giving about 10 percent of that share to the Reddit community to recognize their vital contributions. Will you pay up?
That's yet to be known as the decade-old, privately held company is partially owned by Advance Publications, the parent company of Conde Nast, which publishes 22 magazines including GQ, Vanity Fair and Wired. Prominent funders include venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, noted angel investors Ron Conway and Peter Thiel and entertainers Jared Leto and Snoop Dogg.
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Drone maker 3D Robotics sees the future, and it is apps
For Road Trip 2015, we travel to the outskirts of San Diego to check in with a company trying to democratize drone software for the world, a la smartphones and app stores.
SAN DIEGO -- What separates a drone from a smartphone? Well, other than the fact that your iPhone can't fly (yet), drones don't have an equivalent app store.
At least not for the moment, says Jordi Munoz, co-founder of the largest US commercial drone operation, 3D Robotics.
"The smartphone was a product that was intended for a consumer market, and now it went all the way to industrial applications and even the medical industry," Munoz says. "The same is happening with drones."
We're sitting on the second floor of 3DR's San Diego office where, from the window facing south, you can see Tijuana. The Mexican city, less than 10 miles away, is where Munoz grew up. It's also where 3DR's first manufacturing facility sits.
Munoz was just 19 years old when he got involved in the drone market eight years ago. A mostly self-taught programmer, he learned from the Internet and earned what he calls a "Google Ph.D."
Drones, he believes, are a market that's still primed for growth.
3DR started in 2009 selling Lego drone kits in pizza boxes; the first run of 40 sold out in 10 minutes. Today, 3DR sells seven models ranging in price from $550 do-it-yourself kits to $5,400 professional-grade devices. The company has more than 350 employees and is on track to rack up $40 million in sales this year.
Drones will truly take off, he says, when people figure out how best to use them beyond photography and for the simple fun of flying. What that means is that, as with smartphones, developers need to figure out how to build software that works on any drone -- similar to apps like Facebook, which are available on every device.
In that respect, 3DR is aiming to make tools that will be used to build apps for any drone.
Inside the drone nest
3DR is now headquartered out of Berkeley, California, where Chris Anderson, the former editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, oversees business operations as the company's CEO.
Anderson left his post at Wired in 2012 to partner full-time with Munoz, whom he met online.
Anderson understood that his partner was an impressive tinkerer with a big-picture view of the potential future of drones, but Munoz had no idea he was chatting with the head of a popular tech publication in 2007. Munoz was simply attracted to Anderson's community website, DIY Drones, which the journalist had set up that year to foster a hobbyist community and, eventually, to help others build their own drones.
Munoz, who thinks he was around the seventh person to register on the site, used it to show off his prototype projects and share code with fellow enthusiasts, including his groundbreaking autopilot system created from the innards of a Nintendo Wii remote. It became clear to Anderson in 2009, when he wanted to begin selling more DIY kits over the Internet, that he could turn to Munoz to get it done more efficiently. That partnership led to 3DR's incorporation in 2009.
As Munoz takes me into a warehouse in San Diego, 3DR employees in black T-shirts tasked with creating made-to-order drones are standing around a gigantic mutant device that's comprised of more than half a dozen motors and held together with 3D-printed piping. Behind them, a huge square section of the floor is enveloped in black nets and used for testing devices indoors.
The 3DR staffers are eager to show Munoz what they've been working on -- a drone that will deliver a special clamp to telephone poles for running new wire, like the fiber-optic cables that deliver ultrafast Internet connections. Munoz marvels at the drone's size and picks it up, feeling the weight.
"It weighs as much as it looks," he says with a laugh. For most people, something that size looks like it may weigh hundreds of pounds. For Munoz, who understands just how light drones have become in the last 10 years, the drone weighs an appropriate 45 pounds, or more than 10 times the amount of his company's standard vehicles.
"I didn't even know they were doing this," Munoz says with a shrug as he guides me through the rest of the warehouse, which is mostly used as a shipping center for the Tijuana plant.
3DR, given its DIY roots, is a no-frills startup, at least with respect to its San Diego offices. There is no free food and you won't find any nap pods or hulking commuter shuttle buses. An upper section of the warehouse floor was to be turned into a kind of game room with hardwood flooring, but it sits empty with a few lonely Ping-Pong tables and an open wall overlooking the warehouse floor. Munoz says they haven't gotten around to remodeling it.
Munoz resisted leaving San Diego for Berkeley because he wanted to stay close to his family and where he grew up. As Anderson and others take on bigger roles at 3DR, Munoz gets to work on new technologies and features that help drones become more powerful and less costly.
"I don't think drones are going to be just limited to delivery and photography," he says. Munoz likens the new and undiscovered ways we'll use drones to the versatility of different smartphone components. For instance, a smartphone camera was once restricted to snapping shots like a traditional camera. But now, it can now used with sensors like accelerometers and gyroscopes as a measuring device. Or it can help software programs see and map environments.
"It's amazing how similar they are," he says.
Democratizing drones
The smartphone-to-drone comparison is apt. The term "drone" is shorthand for the kind of unmanned and somewhat autonomous aerial vehicle that now more resembles an alien spacecraft than remote-controlled airplanes of the '80s and '90s.
Part of what's driven the boom in drone sales has been the popularity of smartphones. Nearly every single component inside the modern-day smartphone, from the GPS chip and camera to the battery and the processor, were made cheaper by Apple, Samsung and others racing to make handsets thinner, faster and more powerful every year.
Many drones are now controlled by apps on smartphones as well.
Fifteen years ago, it would have been impossible to cobble together enough computer parts to make a remote-controlled aerial vehicle without spending thousands of dollars, let alone one that could be flown without expertise. Now, the consumer drone market is exploding. Goldman Sachs estimates sales will triple by 2017 from this year's $1.4 billion. It's not just hobbyists. Industries from Hollywood and real estate to architecture and ecology are finding ways to utilize high-flying robots with high-definition cameras. The cost is getting cheaper every day.
"Gyroscopes used to cost $5,000 to $10,000," Munoz said. "And the cheapest one was $300 -- and you needed three" to help a drone fly. Today, you can buy a drone with all the gyroscopes and other requisite sensors to keep it stabilized in midair for around $50 from Amazon.
"This is stuff that used to be military industrial technology; you can buy it at RadioShack now," wrote Anderson in Foreign Policy magazine in 2013. "I've never seen technology move faster than it's moving right now and that's because of the supercomputer in your pocket."
And as a result of improvements in the smartphone and tablet apps created to fly these machines, maintaining and upgrading a drone is also becoming easier. That, in turn, is opening the market to new types of customers.
"The magic of computers is they solve that mechanical complexity and transfer it to the software," Munoz says. The reason drones began taking off in the post-smartphone world was not just that costs were coming down, Munoz adds, but also that what we know as drones today were suddenly "very robust, very easy to repair and easier to fly."
Compared to a complex rotor-powered model helicopter, the $1,000, 3.3-pound 3DR Solo, which the company released in May, is a mind-blowing engineering feat.
"Humans cannot control four motors" at the same time, Munoz says of the standard quadcopter drone design that has displaced traditional helicopter and airplane designs for consumer aircraft. But thanks to a handful of sensors, cameras and other smartphone tech coupled with stabilizing algorithms, motion detection and GPS, a drone like the Solo can be flown with ease within minutes of unpacking it.
Unlike its biggest competitors, China-based DJI and French drone maker Parrot, 3DR offers a majority of its software components as open source, so anyone can download and use the code and modify it. The company also provides tools and mobile apps to develop your own drone software and to better understand and utilize all the data drones produce mid-flight.
Of course, 3DR has a long way to go before it can compete on the scale of DJI. That company, which was founded in 2006 and has nearly 3,000 employees and offices around the world, controls around 70 percent of the global drone market, according to Goldman Sachs.
DJI is also on track to pull in $1 billion in sales this year. That's thanks to its popular Phantom line of easy-to-use drones, which are known for their sleek white, Apple-like look and for being the primary device of choice for drunk pilots who want to fly the device dangerously close to the White House.
3DR wants to continue fostering the open source software community from which it was born in the hopes it will create the drone and app platform everyone begins using, from rookies to the most advanced, software-literate pilots.
"Maybe in a year or two years, we'll release a drone where it doesn't matter how stupid you are, how drunk you are," Munoz adds, "You won't be able to crash it."
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