PayPal is actually notorious for shutting down accounts for anyone doing anything slightly illicit. Cam girls. Donations on sexy wallpaper sites. Forums not entirely on the up and up. Donations to wiki leaks. Donations to proton mail. Etc. Google search it. It's crazy how clean you have to be to keep a PayPal account open. They don't touch controversy with 100ft stick.

No one... And I mean no one... In their right mind uses PayPal if they aren't a 100% clean business because of their tendencies to randomly shut accounts down. I don't keep any sum of money in there even though all my international clients pay me via PayPal and I pay my international employees via PayPal.

People told voat not to use PayPal the second they started using PayPal. It's odd that they didn't head the warnings.

All and all, this is just another sign confirming my initial thoughts about voat. Honestly, I wanted them to succeed. They had big, albeit naive, ideals. Plus they took all the people who "just want to watch the world burn" and sent the good users for us. ;) . But the more I hear and see, the more announcement posts that are made, the quick flip flopping, make the entire thing seem like no one is really thought this thing out. You know that you are attracting people who DDOS. Be prepared for that. And I don't mean some massive code to prevent ddosing - I mean a couple lines allowing your site to fail fast under those circumstances. Don't use paypal. Don't make promises you can't keep. You know saying "anything goes" is impossible. You have numerous case studies of sites (4chan,8chan) who tried to do the same thing and had the same exact things happen. No one wants to host your child porn, even if it's technically on a 3rd parties server. No one wants to fund that. No one wants to touch that.

I understand that the owners are quite literally kids with high hopes, but when your user base skyrockets and you're getting media attention every single day from every tech blog, it's time to get real.

At least hire a lawyer or two. Just cause you read the Pirate Bay blog and decided Switzerland is the shit, doesn't make your any more prepared for the 8000 issues you're going to encounter for linking to nefarious sites and taking the notorious user base from reddit.

If I were them, I would start by spending every single cent of the donations on a well recommended lawyer, consults with any people who have dealt with sites like 4chan,8chan,tpb etc in the past. Then I would write out a 1 month, 1 year, and 5 year plan as to what I would the site to be. Then I would write out the steps, tone, marketing, ideas, etc that I would need to do to get there.

Then I would get really fucking real and do the same exercise for what the site realistically is going to be based on the current user base, the current media attention, the promises I've made, the tone of responses to announcement posts and so forth.

The reality is, voat wants to make a site where anything goes. That's about it. They want to please their users. Based on the actions they've taken, where they are right now is entirely expected. You could see this coming from 1000 miles away. If you want to be something different, then do it. But you better start having real thoughts and wants for your site that are fucking SOLID. Not hopes. Not ideals. Instead of trying to please your users, be realistic about the balance between pleasing your users and making a sustainable site that fulfills your goals and attracts the users you want to fulfill those goals.

The one thing I can say about mk is that he knows, at his core, what he wants hubski to be and to represent. There are no doubts about it. Anything that makes him uneasy or doesn't move towards that goal is shut down. It's a hard trait to have and one that I don't think I've seen in such a pure form before. If you look at the features and the things we do and don't do, you can start seeing how mk thinks. Even the features that were removed or didn't work out for one reason or another work toward the greater hubski goal. If mk does something, I know it's because it fits into what hubski should be. I know mk has debated it internally for days if not weeks and gotten feedback from external sources. I know this without a doubt. If voat does something, it's because someone came up with the idea and thought it was cool and managed to implement it before the "what are the consequences, however unintended?" question even came up.

It seems to me that if you are going to make a near clone of something, you ought not be surprised when you suffer from similar problems.

This is why i never looked into Voat as a legit alternative to Reddit. It's literally the same thing as Reddit but with different admins - same voting system, same "subreddit" model, etc. - so why would it end up being any better than reddit? It just has less content and fewer users to vote on things.