0
0

[–] ghotioninabarrel ago  (edited ago)

As Pao? I'd hire a few college students to use VPNs to spam all sorts of shit all over voat. Some just annoying but also a bit of stuff that's illegal wherever voat is getting its servers hosted. Then I'd have them start reporting everything in sight, especially innocuous stuff, to voat admins as being child porn or whatever. Eventually, voat admins will get frustrated (remember to use a VPN so no ip blocking) and stop responding. Then report some real cp (probably posted by the same students with different accounts+ips) and now there's "evidence" that voat admins aren't removing cp. Send that to police everywhere and try to get creators arrested + website shut down.

As voat? 2 possible responses if we figure out what's happening in time.

Response 1: Timeouts. Place timeouts on submissions and on reporting submissions. A new account can only submit every X CCP until it reaches a certain threshold. This also applies to reporting. It isn't necessary to completely stop the spam tide, just to slow it down since the captchas require humans and humans are slow+expensive.

Response 2: Verification. Make email verification a requirement. Restrict accounts per email and require verification over a 24 hour period to break temporary email services. Monitor new email and account names for patterns like regularly incrementing numbers/letters, and flag for review. Forcing the spammers to think will slow them down significantly.

Also, in addition to the 2 above: Solicit more donations, hire dedicated staff just to handle reports if that becomes necessary.

0
1

[–] chmod 0 points 1 point (+1|-0) ago  (edited ago)

If I were Reddit/Conde Nast I'd swat Voat away with a couple million dollars. It'd be trivial.

I wouldn't want Atko and friends to fight it. I'd congratulate them and move on.

0
1

[–] Reow 0 points 1 point (+1|-0) ago 

The average person working for Reddit either wouldn't care enough to do anything, or would be too afraid of rocking the boat. If anyone official is going to do anything, it will come from senior management. They are part of a very large company worth a lot of money - other issues aside, even Pao is not stupid enough to do anything that could drag Reddit into disrepute with the broader community. By all means they may pressure infrastructure providers to take Voat down etc, but they're not going to be linked to a DDOS or hack. Amongst everything else, they don't want to leave themselves open to litigation. Those sort of attacks will come from the self-organising grassroots supporters.

What Reddit is most likely to do is launch legal action against Voat, against its owner, against its administrators, etc. Reddit has deep pockets and they would be well aware that Voat doesn't - their goal will be to cripple them financially. In this regard, unless one of you is a high-powered international lawyer, or some other organisation comes to our rescue, Voat's probably fucked. If Voat survived this and became large enough, and Reddit still cared, they may attempt to go after strategic resources that Voat uses (i.e. acquire any companies Voat relies on). I don't know Atko, so no disrespect intended, but maybe there's a price where he'd sell Voat.

As for defences, maybe we can make friends with some other larger organisations that stand for freedom. I'm not saying these ones in particular, but examples include TBP and WikiLeaks - they're certain to already have lawyers who may help us out if Reddit attacks via that route. If we can get large enough, we need to set up strategic partnerships with for-profit entities - that way, if done correctly, if Reddit comes after us, it will be in their financial best interest to defend us.

We should also be mindful that someone working for Reddit is likely reading the front page of Voat on a regular basis. I'd suggest IP banning them, but they'd just use a proxy or use one of their phones, so that would be an exercise in futility.