it was indeed, an amazing feat truly.
I genuinely believe we could have grown by leaps if putt had been savy to it. As i think back now, he almost quarantined us these last few years.
i would very much like to know why
Because running a top 1000 site is too much work for one person, but he absolutely refused to ask for help or delegate.
Bingo. Running the farms is going to kill Null and he knows it. DDOS, law suits, DMCAs, financial attacks, media attacks, host/registrar betrayal. Voat was constantly having hardware/scaling issues (among other problems) but we embraced them as features, features to slow the growth of and therefore prolong the life of the place. Also if you think about it who can you trust with access to delegate to? Are you going to make time to build gated access controls while also struggling to keep the site up?
The only way to have real speek on the internet anymore is in obscurity.
A lot of it could readily have been delegated without gratuitous risk of someone going rogue. e.g.:
1) DDOS. That's what Cloudflare is for.
2) Lawsuits. Give someone well-known on Voat access to read inbound legal requests, then have them do the legwork of reading, researching, and providing Putt a to-do list. "The Eff Bee Eye sent us a subpoena for X thread to pull IP, email, and post history information for user Y" would save Putt a bunch of time of wading through dense legalese.
3) DMCA. Give someone well-known on Voat access to read inbound DMCA requests, evaluate them, and either delete the offending post (remember, moderation logs were public) or at least give Putt a yay/nay on whether to respond to the DMCA request.
4) Financial attacks. It would have helped Putt so much for him to delegate some work on the income side of the house. He was utterly terrible at that, and there'd be no shame in admitting that he was a better programmer than accounts receivable guy. e.g. if he had a volunteer who would continually research payment processors, find ones which hadn't blacklisted Voat, and then provided Putt with a running spreadsheet of where to setup an account next...it would have provided a steady flow of income vs literally nothing.
5) Media attacks. Ignore them.
6) Host/registrar betrayal. Similar deal to the financial side of the house. Delegating to someone to keep a running list of registrars, hosts, and migration plans would help. "My 23rd DNS provider cucked out, let me open the migration plan for DNS provider #24 and walk through that" is much more manageable than "CRAP MY DNS IS GETTING BLACKHOLED WHAT DO?"
7) Scaling issues. Putt occasionally accepted some input on addressing scaling issues and would have benefited from asking for more help. Voat had enough people with programming or IT infrastructure backgrounds who'd be happy to help him.
I'm a major fan of the concept of a "minimum viable product". While you're correct that setting up gated access controls would be time-consuming, none of the ideas I suggested would require gated access controls. Even at the bare bones level they'd have helped Putt immensely by saving his time and allowing him to focus on "doing" rather than reading through mountains of input.
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