Andrew gives us a rare glimpse into the driving forces behind GAB's bold move to a subscription model, revealing the intense struggle to fend off botnet attacks and the necessity to innovate amidst the unpredictable advertising landscape and activist scrutiny. He paints a vivid picture of the operational costs and the relentless commitment to free speech that steers GAB, all while offering a straightforward account of why GAB Pro is more than just a service—it's the lifeline for the platform's future. This is a tale of tough calls and triumphant outcomes—a narrative of what it takes to maintain a fortress of free expression in the digital age.
Andrew gives us a rare glimpse into the driving forces behind GAB's bold move to a subscription model, revealing the intense struggle to fend off botnet attacks and the necessity to innovate amidst the unpredictable advertising landscape and activist scrutiny. He paints a vivid picture of the operational costs and the relentless commitment to free speech that steers GAB, all while offering a straightforward account of why GAB Pro is more than just a service—it's the lifeline for the platform's future. This is a tale of tough calls and triumphant outcomes—a narrative of what it takes to maintain a fortress of free expression in the digital age.
Hello everyone, my name is Andrew Torb. I'm the CEO of GABcom. Welcome to the Parallel Christian Society podcast. So, as many of you have heard, gab introduced a new policy this week in order to save the platform. Starting on March 1st, only GAB Pro, verified Donor and Investor accounts on GAB can share media files, so photos and videos.
Speaker 1:Gab is no stranger to controversy, and this news spread like wildfire and caused a big stir pretty quickly. As I explained in previous emails, we had to solve two immediate problems in order to save GAB. The first and most essential problem to solve was the storage issue. So over the past several months, gab has been under attack, likely by state actors or activist groups, and they were forming these botnet accounts that were created with the sole purpose of overloading GAB's infrastructure in various ways.
Speaker 1:Now, for those of you who don't know, gab has our own servers. We have our own physical servers that are in a physical data center. We're not using cloud infrastructure like Amazon or Microsoft, where we can go in and click a button and get new servers or new hard drives or any of this on demand. This is something that we have to manage in-house and this is required so that we can protect free speech online. Because if we were to use cloud hosting providers as we did in the past in the early days of GAB, then those cloud hosting providers could pressure us and many have attempted to when we were using them in the past to censor and remove certain things, and when we didn't do that, they either booted us out or forced us to get additional services elsewhere, and so we have our own in-house servers and hard drives, and so that's something that we have to manage in-house. It's very difficult. For those of you who maybe are familiar with tech, managing your own infrastructure is much more difficult than being able to click a button and get cloud infrastructure on demand from somewhere like Amazon, for example. And so these bot accounts. They were creating an account and uploading 5, 10, 20 gigs worth of media in the matter of hours or days, and so, combined with authentic media uploads of actual users, this created this cat and mouse game of trying to stop the bot accounts and expand our storage capacity every few months, which took engineering time away from other initiatives. So something had to be done to stop this, because we had about six weeks left before the existing drives that we have were going to be full, which is going to render GAB either offline or just completely broken until that was fixed. And so we're sort of under the time crunch here with the storage issue, to solve this problem quickly or to at least slow the flow of media being uploaded, mainly from the bots, but also from normal free users who are uploading a ton of media, very large media files, videos and large images and a large amount of images, et cetera.
Speaker 1:So the second issue is that over the past year, gab social has been losing money. There's no sugarcoating this. I'm being upfront and honest with you guys. The advertising market tanked in 2023, combined with the attacks from the activists who go after our advertisers occasionally, this made it very difficult to have advertising as our core source of revenue. So it's become extremely clear, both with GAB and with X, that running a free speech platform simply cannot be done with advertising. Activist groups like the ADL go after the advertisers on free speech platforms, which they know is the lifeblood of the business, and so this is how they gain control of X and have Elon in the palm of their hand, despite him being one of the wealthiest men in the world. This is why X has recently started censoring again and re-implementing their pronoun policies and misgendering policies and other such leftist nonsense.
Speaker 1:So capitulating to the demands of the enemy in order to get ad revenue is not an option for GAB. It's not going to happen, and so that left us with one other choice we had to lean into GAB Pro, which is our subscription-based business model. A website of GAB size cannot exist without a significant amount of capital to cover operational costs. It costs money to host a website and to write a website as big as GAB. In GAB's case, we have the additional overhead as well of dealing with our own in-house infrastructure, which it's a significant amount of money and time and resources to maintain, and so it takes capital to operate and sustain GAB right the end of the day.
Speaker 1:That's just the reality of the situation. I know a lot of people sort of having their minds that you know these websites that they use every day for free just sort of you know exist for free. This is not the reality, right, and so most of them are powered because you are the product being sold. You are not the customer. When you go on Facebook, when you go on YouTube, you are their product and they are selling you and your data and access to your eyeballs, to these advertisers, and then, in turn, what happens is these activists and or these advertisers a combination of sort of both Pressure the platforms and say if you don't remove certain people, if you don't remove certain things, we're not gonna spend money here. And then the activists go to the advertisers and say we're gonna attack your business Unless you stop spending money on these platforms. Right, and so it's this, this, this, this feedback loop and this sort of attack structure that allows activists and and Advertisers to run the platform.
Speaker 1:You know, mark Zuckerberg may own Facebook, but he doesn't run it. You know he's, he is completely beholden to his advertisers, not to his users, to his advertisers, because they dictate the policies that are going on there. And you know, we're seeing the same exact thing unfold with Elon, and hopefully that's temporary in Elon's case, because he's doing the same thing that gab is doing right now, which is pivoting to a subscription-based model, and he's also going down the financial services model as well, but that you know, it's gonna take him a lot of time to do those things and to shift into that. You know, because Twitter's or X is is much bigger and so, but but he's going down this exact same path that gab is maybe not as aggressively because we don't have a choice, we have to do it, but he's. He's going down this path as well, and so you know, that's what we did. We let we solve two problems with with one move, by limiting the media uploads, and the results of this have been very interesting.
Speaker 1:Now, before I get into that, many of you suggested that we just delete a ton of old posts as a solution, but we sort of have to think critically about this. Right, like, what is that gonna mean? Gab is historical repository of truth from the past eight years, so we have hundreds of millions of uncensored posts, including the truth about COVID, the vaccine, the 2020 election, world War two, you know, a ton of different stuff that is totally censored, totally wiped out from the rest of the internet. It's, it's. It exists on gab in a historical archive. Right, it may be one of the only places that it exists in a historical archive, so it may be, you know, the only proof of record for the truth of these things and how they actually unfold it, and I think we need to protect that data at all costs. I don't want to just go, you know, wiping that data off the planet To save storage space. Okay. So we have to think critically about these, these problems.
Speaker 1:Another solution that that people put forth was that we should delete all free user media after 30 days, or something like this, and it's like, well, that doesn't solve the the bot problem, because the bots are still coming in and, you know, flooding us with media and you know we have a lot of bot detection systems in place. But you know, I think in many ways these could not even be bots, because they sort of have Human-like activity and are getting around. You know our checks for bots, and so this could be, just, you know, an activist group that's that's paying. You know people in a third world country to sit here and do this, which absolutely does happen, and then it's. You know, more human-like behavior and they know how to get around the bot checks and things of this nature and, just you know, flood the site with, with these very large media files or images or whatever. So you know, this deleting after 30 days solution that people have have proposed is also not another solution, both to the bot problem and also to, you know, the, the capital problem as well. It doesn't. It doesn't address either of the of the of the problems actually. And so what are the results of our decision here? Well, in in Most online communities, gab include it, and this is true of Twitter, this is true of Facebook, you know, youtube, etc.
Speaker 1:There's there's something called the 1% rule. So 1% of users are these heavy contributors. They're, they're posting, they're creating original content. And then 9% are sort of intermediate Contributors. You know, they'll sometimes comment, they'll sometimes like stuff, they'll sometimes post, and Then 90% of users in sort of any online community are lurkers. They're they're passively reading content and consuming content, right? So for the vast majority of gab users 90%, their experience remains unchanged, right, you know, they weren't posting photos anyway, they weren't uploading videos anyway, they were mainly just consuming content, and so their experience hasn't changed at all. And then the 1% of the heavy contributors most of those folks are already pro, they're already verified, they're already donors, they're already investors, right? Those are people that are sort of all in on gab and the. You know the, the bulk of those people their their experience hasn't changed. Now, where the experience has changed mostly is for the intermittent, you know, intermediate contributors than 9% of about 9% of the platform.
Speaker 1:And you know, unfortunately we had to make it a very tough call in order to save the, the business, in order to save the platform, and so you know we did what we had to do, because you know it's either you could still use gab, you could still get access to the information that's posted on gab, you can still post on gab with text, or Gab does nothing and gab goes offline for good for everybody, right, like? Those were the two choices here, and so obviously you know we wanted to save gab and we want to keep gab online. So you know, let me be clear about about something you know I'm hearing from a lot of people that they're they're the quality of the gab feed has improved dramatically now that the bots have been stopped and the subversive type accounts can no longer post. And I want to be clear about what I mean by subversive type accounts, because a lot of people that are sort of the free users, that are in that sort of 9% cohort of people that engage and post sort of semi regularly, not not like a heavy user, but sort of an in-between A lot of them thought that I was just blanket talking about all of them, which is not true, right, and so what I did not mean by subversive accounts is the people who are free users, who have been critical of our decision.
Speaker 1:Listen, I understand that there are real people out there who are struggling financially, who simply cannot afford gab. I understand that there are international users who cannot pay us With anything outside of Bitcoin because we can't process payments, you know, in foreign countries. I get that. Okay. I'm not talking about these folks. I'm not talking about folks who have been critical of me and critical of gab with this decision. That's not who I'm talking about when I say subversive accounts.
Speaker 1:What I'm talking about is the people who are on gab for the sole purpose of destroying the platform and Destroying the community. These are foreign and domestic operatives. Their only objective is to drive people away from gab, to destroy, divide and to fame Gab and me by any means necessary. Their time in our community is up. Thanks for watching. I am no longer paying to host people here who want Gab dead, who want me dead, who want my family dead. It's just not happening. I'm not doing it anymore.
Speaker 1:Many of them have left already because their operations are really no longer impactful. They can't spam. You know horrific garbage all over the site. You know videos and memes and things of this nature that are designed to drive people away from Gab. Many more of them are being removed by us as they expose themselves by breaking our policies against threats and spam and doxing, and so the quality, as a result of this, the quality of the Gab experience has gone up for everybody because we're removing these subversive type accounts or they're just self-deporting, and you know the quality of the content is coming from real people. These are real people that have gone pro or have been verified by us or have donated or have invested, and so you know these aren't bots, we know these are real people, they're authentic, they're creating authentic content and so, as a result of this, the experience has gone up dramatically. The quality, the signal to noise ratio, of the Gab feed has gone up dramatically.
Speaker 1:And so what else has happened as a result of this change? So all the bot activity, with the bot spamming the media uploads, that's done. Obviously, there's now zero porn being posted on Gab and we had very little of that to begin with. But you know, occasionally we would get spam accounts and you know people coming in and trying to cause trouble, but that has effectively gone to completely zero now because those people unless they want to. You know, pay us to upgrade and then do that. You know that has gone to zero and we're on track right now to cover our monthly expenses. The flow of data to the hard drives has slowed and bought us a lot more time to expand the hard drives and to solve that problem in different ways, which we're now working on.
Speaker 1:The subversive sort of fed posting, doxing, harassing accounts. Those have been deported or they're self-deporting and as a result, the experience on Gab is much more enjoyable for a lot of people. And then psych traffic was actually up, which is interesting. I don't know if that's because you know people wanted to see the controversy or what, but psych traffic was up 30%, which was very interesting. You know people are predicting the death of Gab and it turns out that a lot of people want to see what's going on and want to see, you know, what's going on with the controversy and people. You know people love seeing that type of stuff. So traffic is actually up.
Speaker 1:So another issue I wanted to address is a lot of you are hesitant to support Gab because you want to do so anonymously. First of all, I hate to break it to you guys but you know, after the revelations of Edward Snowden and others other whistleblowers, you should really come to the Realization that nothing is sort of anonymous on the internet. You know the government. Certainly if you're using a smartphone, if you're using the internet at all, the government knows who you are. Okay, it's just like this is just the reality of the surveillance state that we're living in. And so you know, I really I don't understand the hardcore paranoia about this, because it's something that I've accepted long ago, maybe because I'm Using my real name in public or something. But just after what snow didn't came out with, it just seems sort of you know, crazy to think that you can remain anonymous on the internet while using a smartphone or Really accessing any website. I mean, it's just, that's just the reality of the surveillance state that we're in.
Speaker 1:But I will address and give solutions to those of you who Want to remain anonymous in your support of us, at least as anonymous as you can be. So you know, in regards to purchasing gap or making a donation, again, and I do fully. On the other hand, I fully understand this right. I've been canceled a hundred times over. I've had my name smeared through the mud, I've had my family attacked and famed. You know I I've dealt with it, so I get it. You know they're there.
Speaker 1:I get the fear of being doxxed and all this stuff. I totally understand it, but there are, there are options, right, there are options to support us. So one thing that you can do Is you can create a brand new throw away gap account, and we have this, this feature, where on your profile, on any profile that's not your own, there's this little gift box and you can click that and you can gift any other profile gap pro. And so what you can do, if you want to remain anonymous and not have the payment information tied to your personal gap account, is you can create a throw away account and then gift your main account gap pro, and then delete the throw away account, and so now you have pro, which has been gifted to you, and the account that you used to do it is now deleted. Okay, and so that's one way.
Speaker 1:The second way is that you can have, you know, friends on gab that you trust who are afraid to use their payment information. They can buy you and gift you gap pro, and you know you can send them money in different ways to do so. The third way is that you can send gab a money order in the mail now. Just be sure to include your username so that we know who to apply the pro status to. But you can get a money order by walking into the post office with some cash and and turning that cash into a money order that we can then deposit. We have no idea of knowing. You know who sent us that money order right, and then you can also use bitcoin to buy pro as well.
Speaker 1:So there are options, and I hope this gives you guys some more insight into why we did this and and the results that we're seeing so far from it. Again, for 90% of you, 90% of people are just lurkers and read content passively read content and so your experience really shouldn't have changed at all. In fact, it should have gotten better, because there's sort of less content to scroll through that is coming from spam bots and from these subversive types that are flooding the fees with garbage in order to drive people away from gab. Now the media content at a minimum is is from real people, not bots, and from people who are largely not subversive, because Typically, subversive people are not going to want to pay to upgrade to do their subversive activity, and so I think that gab experience has already dramatically improved. We're on track now to have a profitable month or a cashflow positive month and cover our expenses, and we're, you know, we bought a lot more time to sort of work on the media storage issue and come up with different ways to solve that problem as well. So that's the. That's the update. That's the scoop.
Speaker 1:I'm going to continue to do these podcasts. I think it's really helpful for people to just hear my voice and to hear you know first hand what's going on from us and from me. I think it probably helps solve a lot of confusion and misunderstandings if you can just listen and hear what I have to say. So I appreciate you tuning in. We appreciate your support. We appreciate those of you have gone gab pro. You're making gap possible. Without you guys, we wouldn't be able to do this, and so you know, if you want to thank the people that are gab pro for making gab possible for everybody, that's the best thing that you can do, and if you want to upgrade to gab pro, you want to support what we're doing, you want to help us keep gab online, you can do so at progabcom. Thank you guys for tuning in. Remember to speak freely. Jesus Christ is King.