Andrew Torba / Gab (Gab.com / Gab.ai) / Dissenter (dissenter.com) - An incompetent captain sinking millions of other people's dollars.

[TaInTeDtAcO]

It looks like Gab just went down for the count.

 

[Scratch This Nut]

View attachment 579207
It looks like Gab just went down for the count.

He seems like he's too busy doing damage control and looking for a new server to help with the FBI.

 

[stets]

How hard would it be to start a payment processing company? Given how companies like Paypal will cut people off at the first sign of public outcry, maybe it'd be in Torba's best interest to start one up.

Pretty hard. You have to comply with not only federal regulations but the regulations of 50 different states. Just the regulatory compliance end of it can take years and tens of millions of dollars.

Starting a payment processor is literally one of the hardest business ventures imaginable. In addition to compliance and regulatory costs, you’d have to hire an expensive army of highly specialized programmers with experience writing niche code. And since the credit card industry is so opaque, you’d have to hire several (expensive) executives with lots of high-level industry experience to get you networked with all of the various players and factions that are involved.

There’s a reason why Paypal and Square have been the only major new players in the industry in decades - it’s an absurdly complex industry with a deep moat to keep out new upstarts.

 

[AF 802]

Perhaps do what WikiLeaks did and move over to OVH? I mean, OVH took a lot of shit for taking in WikiLeaks, and even got their ass handed to them in French court, only to have the French courts say that WikiLeaks can stay.

Perhaps an option.

 

[Triple S Rank]

Something like Mastodon is the way forward with these kinds of services, and is really the only way to prevent censorship while still keeping the platform usable. By making it so that decisions are decentralized and only applied locally, you can fix these issues.
On the other hand I can see Mastodon potentially having scaling issues.

Little autistic rant:
Mastodon is built in the Ruby on Rails coding language which is really traditional in it's resource scaling (the lead programmer of it, Eugen, is a personal lolcow of mine for this and other tech/moderation reasons). IMO the best decentralized microblogging implementation is the ActivityPub structured Elixer coded Pleroma. Can do neat things with load balancing/threading to support 100+ users on even a Raspberry Pi so scaling would be much better on resources. It's still not at 1.0 yet but by the end of the year I think it'll be ready. Definitely agree decentralization is the way forward. Join a server that appeals to you and it has a nice mix of similar people on it yet federated with enough other servers with different appeals that you get differing people so it doesnt turn into an echochamber and it's really fun. Though hugboxes do exist, they're naturally isolated and ignored. Theres also TOR/I2p based decentralized federating microblogging for max free speech people. Images are usually disabled though for obvious child abuserelated shit.

Back OnTopic: LOL, Torba is such a political sped this was the only way gab was headed. Deserves it even for just being a rip off of an open source pile of PHP garbage.

 

[Richard Stabone]

Why does he keep mentioning "helping law enforcement put a terrorist away"? They caught the guy with a gun in a room full of bullet riddled corpses. Pretty sure Torba wasn't the key to solving this murder mystery.

 

[Ruin]

Gee wiz it turns out building your online platform entirely on pedophillia and "kill all Jews" isn't profitable or something.

 

[TaInTeDtAcO]

Why does he keep mentioning "helping law enforcement put a terrorist away"? They caught the guy with a gun in a room full of bullet riddled corpses. Pretty sure Torba wasn't the key to solving this murder mystery.

He's trying to use the "helping law enforcement" argument to guilt his web-hosting company.

 

[Richard Stabone]

He's trying to use the "helping law enforcement" argument to guilt his web-hosting company.
View attachment 579234

Wait, is he really whining to the FBI agent about losing his web host and payment processor? An FBI agent who is dealing with an investigation into the mass murder of 11 people?

Also I'm sure his userbase of pedophiles and neo-nazis are real happy at how eager Torba is to share data with the FBI.

 

[Done]

If Gab goes down, can we turn this into an Andrew Torba thread? The guy is a best-in-class careercow. He literally made every worst choice he could ever make.

He is literally the DSP of start-ups at this point.

 

[chadmuska]

https://twitter.com/JacobAWohl/status/1056735784642916353
https://archive.is/CrP2u

If Gab goes down, can we turn this into an Andrew Torba thread? The guy is a best-in-class careercow. He literally made every worst choice he could ever make.

He is literally the DSP of start-ups at this point.

Oh ABSOLUTELY. The dudes approach to PR is some of the funniest I've seen of any major company this side of Elon Musks anime tweets wrecking havoc on his companies stocks.

 

[TaInTeDtAcO]

Torba, handling this in a professional and mature manner.

 

[Done]

Oh ABSOLUTELY. The dudes approach to PR is some of the funniest I've seen of any major company this side of Elon Musks anime tweets wrecking havoc on his companies stocks.

"WHAT? I totally bought that domain! This is bullshit! Totally a beginner's trap! This game is bugged!!"

Spoiler

 

[Slimy Time]

Starting a payment processor is literally one of the hardest business ventures imaginable. In addition to compliance and regulatory costs, you’d have to hire an expensive army of highly specialized programmers with experience writing niche code. And since the credit card industry is so opaque, you’d have to hire several (expensive) executives with lots of high-level industry experience to get you networked with all of the various players and factions that are involved.

There’s a reason why Paypal and Square have been the only major new players in the industry in decades - it’s an absurdly complex industry with a deep moat to keep out new upstarts.

It's a highly specialised area of the market, which is why those two are so prominent. I do have to wonder the implications of this though. These companies can basically threaten to pull support or actually do from sites like Gab or Patreon to force them to comply with their wishes. Given the current political sphere, and where it seems to be heading, I wonder if those two will start becoming more "forceful" will ensuring compliance with whatever politics they deem acceptable.

To use a very bad example, in Spain, it is being/has been put in law that corporations will be fined if the boards do not have at least 40% female representation IIRC. What were to happen if these service providers like Paypal and Square take similar woke stance? We won't deal with you, or we will pull services unless you change you terms of service, or conform to our standards? Mastercard is guilty of this as well. As you mentioned, no one seems to be able to break into this area of the market. So what will happen? No one can break into the market easily, so will people be forced to rely on their services?

 

[cecograph]

Something like Mastodon is the way forward with these kinds of services, and is really the only way to prevent censorship while still keeping the platform usable. By making it so that decisions are decentralized and only applied locally, you can fix these issues.
On the other hand I can see Mastodon potentially having scaling issues.

The main difficulty I see is persistent identity between instances. Right now, you better join an instance that you are confident will be around for a while, because if it shuts down, you lose your identity. That completely goes against the point of federation. Same if you get pissed off with your instance and want to move to another. You're basically having to toot at all your followers the equivalent of: "hi. here is my new email address" because you need to change provider.

Except that email solves persistent identity through the domain name system and MX records. That's what federated microblogging needs. Matrix looks like it's working towards something like it with a centralised identity provider based on public key crypto, which would be good enough.

 

[Done]

Oh ABSOLUTELY. The dudes approach to PR is some of the funniest I've seen of any major company this side of Elon Musks anime tweets wrecking havoc on his companies stocks.

Forgot to mention this, but it's not just his approach to PR, it's his approach to everything!

Let's recap, this guy managed to somehow gather up all the personas-non-gratas that Twitter wanted to get rid of under one unmonetizable platform , that in-turn, somehow managed to be a far worse user experience than Twitter. He managed to completely fuck up every single step of the way from there. Up to this present day, where he somehow lost his payment processor, his hosting and even his domain in less than a week. And all of it because he was too busy sperging on Twitter about how superior his shit platform was.

This is not even mentioning his cryptocurrency, which totally won't blow up in his face anytime soon.

To reiterate, this guy is the DSP of start-up founders, and I can't wait to see his next ventures covered on Kiwi Farms.

 

[Scratch This Nut]

Forgot to mention this, but it's not just his approach to PR, it's his approach to everything!

Let's recap, this guy managed to somehow gather up all the personas-non-gratas that Twitter wanted to get rid of under one unmonetizable platform , that in-turn, somehow managed to be a far worse user experience than Twitter. He managed to completely fuck up every single step of the way from there. Up to this present day, where he somehow lost his payment processor, his hosting and even his domain in less than a week. And all of it because he was too busy sperging on Twitter about how superior his shit platform was.

This is not even mentioning his cryptocurrency, which totally won't blow up in his face anytime soon.

To reiterate, this guy is the DSP of start-up founders, and I can't wait to see his next ventures covered on Kiwi Farms.

Twitter is mostly made up of lefties, yes, but most of them don't go out of their way to bother righties and just post pics of their cats. Could Gab have worked if its marketing wasn't so tied to political views?

I just want him or some other big name user there to call us a bunch of leftist cucks.

 

[The Reaper]

Twitter is mostly made up of lefties, yes, but most of them don't go out of their way to bother righties and just post pics of their cats. Could Gab have worked if its marketing wasn't so tied to political views?

I just want him or some other big name user there to call us a bunch of leftist cucks.

The only thing I ever found weird on Twitter was the check marks. I only used it for a few months but there were left wing reporters with very small followings with checks, and the larger alternative media faces with 10x the following never got one. The problem Righties face on Twitter is that they are using the service with a different mindset. Most of the righties aren't on there to post pictures about their lives or interact with friends. They're there to fight with lefties or report their work. The only interaction they really get on Twitter is conversations with themselves or lefties who do want to argue.

Really one of these sites could take off if they just say: Yeah we're free speech but what you say on this site might have consequences. You want the site to stay up don't be a sperg. The one thing that I also found very successful observing the chans is the use of anonymity. As long as the gestalt stays relatively neutral more radical anons get laughed down and don't take a foothold. Giving people names allows them to build followings and shift the overall views of the site that much easier.

 

[Jack Awful]

View attachment 579207
It looks like Gab just went down for the count.

That's what happens when you stand for "free speech" and unpopular right wing political opinions while also trying to become a profitable mainstream social media website.

 

[Slap47]

"Daddy Trump, I believed in you, why you forsake us?"

From Soygon to gab, I love watching these idiots who so blindly believed in their messiah so much getting their shit wrecked and realizing that Trump was in it for himself the whole time. Hilariously, now neither party is happy.

A Trump that actually gave a shit would be largely powerless anyway.