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

[TaInTeDtAcO]

Here's Torba claiming that his site's problems are a result of nefarious forces such as the "deep state" attempting to shut down the "only" free-speech site on the internet. In reality he simply can't code for shit and has no actual mechanism in place for dealing with trolls and bots.

Edit: The mysterious DDos attack right on schedule.

 

[Super-Chevy454]

Timcast post his pinch of salt about Gab and "journalists" who was triggered by Dissenter extension.

 

[AnOminous]

Timcast post his pinch of salt about Gab and "journalists" who was triggered by Dissenter extension.

Too bad it sucks so much. It would be a good thing to have a means of directly commenting on content that isn't controlled by media monopolies.

Such a thing would automatically be "alt-right" or "Nazi" though, because what could be more fascist than people being allowed to comment on content by megacorporations?

 

[⠠⠠⠅⠑⠋⠋⠁⠇⠎ ⠠⠠⠊⠎ ⠠⠠⠁ ⠠⠠⠋⠁⠛]

The latest feature added to the Dissenter.com site.. a 'live chat' function.

It allows you to just write HTML tags to link to images, iframes, etc straight into the textbox.

REEL GAB HOURS

Bringing the web back to where it used to be, security wise, circa the late 1990s, with people deploying badly written PHP scripts they didn't understand.

 

[Colonel J]

Why does Null hate Torba so much? I don't personally see the person as a cow and Null themselves despised Torba so much they felt the need to create the thread themselves. I'm very doubtful if anyone else would have borhtered making it and It feels very undeserved. Gab and Dissenter are good ideas. May not be top-notch coding, but it works, has a presence, and is important enough for the media to care enough to try and shut it down every few months or so with fraud article after fraud article.

Is it because Torba doesn't need to flee the country to keep their site going?

 

[ProgKing of the North]

Why does Null hate Torba so much? It feels very undeserved. Gab and Dissenter are good ideas. May not be top-notch coding, but it works, has a presence, and is important enough for the media to care enough to try and shut it down every few months or so with fraud article after fraud article.

Is it because Torba doesn't need to flee the country?

The biggest issue with Gab at least is that by trying to flee a left wing hugbox, Torba simply created a right wing hugbox instead, which isn’t any more conducive to actual discussions than Twitter

 

[Colonel J]

It's not a hugbox by design though. Of course it's going to be filled with right-wingers particularly when the current paradigm has the right being pro-free speech and the left wanting to restrict it.

 

[Done]

Too bad it sucks so much. It would be a good thing to have a means of directly commenting on content that isn't controlled by media monopolies.

Such a thing would automatically be "alt-right" or "Nazi" though, because what could be more fascist than people being allowed to comment on content by megacorporations?

So essentially YouTube comment section for everything ever published?

 

[Marvin]

It's not a hugbox by design though. Of course it's going to be filled with right-wingers particularly when the current paradigm has the right being pro-free speech and the left wanting to restrict it.

It's a hugbox by incompetence, not inevitability.

Even if your overall goal is some kind of free speech utopia, that doesn't constrain your approach to marketing. Emphasizing "free speech!" in your marketing materials is only going to appeal to the speds who got banned from everywhere else, not the actually quality posters you need to sustain the site.

Basically Torba had all the money in the world and managed to make a shinier looking stormfront.

 

[ProgKing of the North]

It's not a hugbox by design though. Of course it's going to be filled with right-wingers particularly when the current paradigm has the right being pro-free speech and the left wanting to restrict it.

Even if they don’t actively ban they still chase off anyone that doesn’t align with their viewpoints though.

Also it’s all politics all the time. At least on Twitter you can just avoid political shit in general if you carefully curate who you follow, Gab just seems like /pol/ with extra steps

 

[Done]

It's a hugbox by incompetence, not inevitability.

Even if your overall goal is some kind of free speech utopia, that doesn't constrain your approach to marketing. Emphasizing "free speech!" in your marketing materials is only going to appeal to the speds who got banned from everywhere else, not the actually quality posters you need to sustain the site.

Basically Torba had all the money in the world and managed to make a shinier looking stormfront.

This brings an interesting question, what should have been the alternative pitch?

 

[Colonel J]

Hard to be Stormfront-lite when you've banned Patrick Little and Chris Cantwell.

 

[Hastur]

Why does Null hate Torba so much? It feels very undeserved. Gab and Dissenter are good ideas. May not be top-notch coding, but it works, has a presence, and is important enough for the media to care enough to try and shut it down every few months or so with fraud article after fraud article.

Is it because Torba doesn't need to flee the country?

No, it's because Torba is an incompetent grifter. He was warned by multiple experienced gab users about depending on third party software services from companies that hated his guts (like Microsoft's Azure) for over a year before the shutdown began in earnest; warnings ignored. He was warned about the threat of coordinated deplatforming by much smarter parties (null/Andrew Anglin/weev); warnings ignored. He was even advised to set up alternate methods of payment (like, say, a goddamn PO box) due to the threat of losing credit card processing; warnings ignored ("it doesn't scale").

Getting burned once can be forgiven. Showing complete inability to learn from your mistakes, or even acknowledge them, is a hallmark of either dishonesty or rank stupidity. Torba has literally raised millions of dollars in donations for gab and has absolutely nothing to show for it. The site is a ghost town with maybe a few thousand daily active users, and I'm being generous. Functionality is awful, the comment system sucks, there is no advanced search capability, and video streaming services have been MIA for over a year. On the other hand, Torba got to take a nice European honeymoon on other people's dime and gets to post snarky comments on twitter (which he's on far more often than gab anyway). So there's that.

Oh, and Dissenter just got kicked out of the Chrome extension store today. But absolutely no one could have seen this coming.

 

[Colonel J]

Kick out of Chrome and Firefox in a clear act of censorship.*

Do you feel anything could have been done to keep this from happening? You don't need apps to be in a browser store to use them btw.

 

[Null]

Before:

After:

 

[CheezzyMach]

Maybe I'm just small brained but I still don't understand how concepts like Gab and Voat burn down so quickly.

I mean the idea seems sound make Twitter/Reddit but with fair and unbiased moderation where you don't get banned for breaching nebulous hate speech rules or offending the owner's pet social group.

But without fail they always turn into either Right Wing hugboxes or attract complete speds like unironic Neo Nazis.

 

[Done]

Maybe I'm just small brained but I still don't understand how concepts like Gab and Voat burn down so quickly.

I mean the idea seems sound make Twitter/Reddit but with fair and unbiased moderation where you don't get banned for breaching nebulous hate speech rules or offending the owner's pet social group.

But without fail they always turn into either Right Wing hugboxes or attract complete speds like unironic Neo Nazis.

Because the only people who care so much about no moderation that they'd join a new website for it are people who belong in mental asylums, and whom normies don't want to interact with or see on their timelines.

 

[fishmonger]

Maybe I'm just small brained but I still don't understand how concepts like Gab and Voat burn down so quickly.

I mean the idea seems sound make Twitter/Reddit but with fair and unbiased moderation where you don't get banned for breaching nebulous hate speech rules or offending the owner's pet social group.

But without fail they always turn into either Right Wing hugboxes or attract complete speds like unironic Neo Nazis.

These services never attract the quality content creators that know how to hold back from saying anything stupid. These platforms like Gab and Voat are only useful for the speds already banned from everywhere. These platforms, especially when marketed as free speech alternatives, always end up as right-wing hugboxes.

 

[winnerofthemall]

Maybe I'm just small brained but I still don't understand how concepts like Gab and Voat burn down so quickly.

I mean the idea seems sound make Twitter/Reddit but with fair and unbiased moderation where you don't get banned for breaching nebulous hate speech rules or offending the owner's pet social group.

But without fail they always turn into either Right Wing hugboxes or attract complete speds like unironic Neo Nazis.

You can mostly blame the fact that most of the internet is accustomed to just making a new account and moving on, or simply choosing not to use the website after they've been banned/disagreed with the majority opinion. Whereas a lot of these right wing types (and a couple of left wing types too) are so determined to project their opinions to other people, no matter how much people don't give a shit, that they end up with the urge to exploit every avenue they can to make people hear them.

 

[Sondermemehandlung]

Maybe I'm just small brained but I still don't understand how concepts like Gab and Voat burn down so quickly.

I mean the idea seems sound make Twitter/Reddit but with fair and unbiased moderation where you don't get banned for breaching nebulous hate speech rules or offending the owner's pet social group.

But without fail they always turn into either Right Wing hugboxes or attract complete speds like unironic Neo Nazis.

Well because these websites generally tend to be sub-par interface-wise (like Gab, BitChute...), don't have much content that hasn't been permabanned everywhere else (or barely have any content, period) and therefore don't attract normies. I mean, many of the people on Gab aren't simply people who were banned from Twitter, but also people who've been banned from Stormfront, The Daily Stormer and /pol/ for being low-IQ autists. The kind of people that thinks The Daily Stormer is run by Mossad and that Antifa and Nazis should ally against the system in the name of Lucifer. Add to this the lack of funds and/or talent from the people creating it in the first place, and the fact that creating a new website doesn't resolve the problem of payment processors and hosts banning you from their service for not moderating your content and you get Gab.