Last night Andrew Torba decided to block myself and The Krypto Report’s host Azzmador on Gab because we criticized his decisions that have effectively turned Gab into a digital wasteland.
He has blocked if not banned numerous other people who have criticized his management of the site. We’ve effectively witnessed the management of one of the bigger alt-tech sites hit the self-destruct button on their own site for reasons that are not yet fully known or explained. This is important because despite its numerous problems, Gab still hosted a significant amount of dissident content.
Torba blocking his critics is really quite ironic considering that he refused to implement a block function in the early days of Gab citing “free speech” reasons. He eventually had to implement a block function after numerous users complained that their feeds were unusable. The lack of a block function allowed Jews and other malicious actors to disrupt people’s feeds with spam posts and homosexual porn. You couldn’t just “mute” them as Torba originally advocated.
Be that as it may, Torba has shown that he prefers to block and ban his critics over substantive dialogue. His ridiculous decision to make posting images and videos a paid feature, without any sort of prior discussion with the user community, is further proof of this. He made this change announcement two days before implementing it and effectively gave zero shits about how the user community would react to it.
I could totally understand him blocking people who were engaging in non-substantive personal attacks but that’s not what he’s been doing. He’s been blocking and banning people who have legitimate questions about his weird decisions that have lowered user engagement and objectively made the site’s content worse. He has basically validated his critics by default. If we were wrong, he could have simply pointed out why we were wrong and offer a logical argument as to where we were wrong.
Finally, it looks as if Torba has purged all previous posts from his @BasedTorba account on Twitter/X. This is the very opposite of “based.”
He’s objectively been a total asshole to myself and others who helped put Gab on the map back in 2017. At that time, Gab was the only available alternative social media option available after the Charlottesville mass ban situation. There wasn’t much going on there before that. We helped bring huge numbers of users to his site. He repaid us with shadow bans, disrespect and finally ransom demands for the “privilege” of posting memes. All the criticism that he’s received is fully deserved and he has nobody to blame but himself.
