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.
1) DDOS. That's what Cloudflare is for.
Correct but it then becomes another point of failure once they start pressuring your host/registrar/cloudflare.
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.
The someones who are proven to be capable and discrete in these matters are called lawyers and they are very expensive.
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.
It's a lot of work/trust, the problems never end, the bigger you grow the more you have.
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.
Sure but that's what I'm saying you are asking one man to do a lot of work for what I presume is his side hustle/hobby site. Plus the site is not monitizable. It would be BTC donations at best. Patreon, ads, etc. would be shut down/just another vector to influence the platform.
5) Media attacks. Ignore them.
The media attacks are just the foundation for host/registrar/cloudflare deplatforming.
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?"
Moving a sever/site is a time consuming pain in the ass.
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.
It's asking a lot for one guy. You could spend more time setting up caching layers and load balancers and AWS scaling (an especially betrayal happy host) than it took to build Voat to begin with.
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.
If you are going to have staff and moderation (or even just support) you need tools. You can't expect the DMCA guy to go into the DB and find the file, you need a viable search tool, you need editing tools, you need a process/ticket system. You have to write them or you have to pay someone competent to do it, or hand a stranger the keys.
We haven't even gotten to routine server maintaiance/updates and software updates/bug/compatibility fixes, IP bans, rollbacks and backups... I don't blame Putt, I've tried to run sites before it's a time consuming pain in the ass with very little reward. Even running brochure-ware sites and keeping those up requires a few dozen hours a year of server maintenance and software updates and bug fixes. Even in success you'll end up broke and infamous.
Sure but that's what I'm saying you are asking one man to do a lot of work for what I presume is his side hustle/hobby site. Plus the site is not monitizable. It would be BTC donations at best. Patreon, ads, etc. would be shut down/just another vector to influence the platform.
Putt claims to have solely funded Voat out of his own pocket from March --> December at an approximate cost of $10k/month. For $90,000...even a modest amount of bitcoin would be well worth it to offset that out of pocket cost.
Moving a sever/site is a time consuming pain in the ass.
It is annoying to change DNS providers, repoint the records, and move VM objects to a new host...but given how much Voat was down I doubt anyone would have noticed the outage.
It's asking a lot for one guy. You could spend more time setting up caching layers and load balancers and AWS scaling (an especially betrayal happy host) than it took to build Voat to begin with.
I agree. It was too much for one guy, which is why he should have asked for some help. Especially some of the "dumb" outages like the time the tempdb or logs consumed all available hard drive space and took the site down for days until Atko poked his head in to bail Putt out. That would be a perfect opportunity for "can someone write me a script to monitor drive space and pop out an email alert if it crosses a certain threshhold?"
If you are going to have staff and moderation (or even just support) you need tools. You can't expect the DMCA guy to go into the DB and find the file, you need a viable search tool, you need editing tools, you need a process/ticket system.
Setup relaying on the DMCA takedown email address to forward a copy to a volunteer. Volunteer reviews the DMCA takedown notice which clearly specifies the offending content, where to find it, gives it a look to see if it appears legitimate, and forwards it to Putt with "Go Delete X post" or "This is bogus". Putt then moves the original email to a sub-folder of completed requests...which he'd have to do anyway. This takes an existing time-sink and turns it into < 30 seconds of his time to act on it since someone did all the legwork.
We haven't even gotten to routine server maintaiance/updates and software updates/bug/compatibility fixes, IP bans, rollbacks and backups... I don't blame Putt, I've tried to run sites before it's a time consuming pain in the ass with very little reward. Even running brochure-ware sites and keeping those up requires a few dozen hours a year of server maintenance and software updates and bug fixes. Even in success you'll end up broke and infamous.
I hear you on that. The way he was doing it was a thankless job where he really only wanted to do the technical work without the business side of the operation (delegation, income, etc).
(post is archived)