
Voat: What Went Wrong? - mmcclure
https://battlepenguin.com/tech/voat-what-went-wrong/
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Traster
> People with more controversial ideas no longer want to contribute content to
> a website which censors difficult topic

I'm sorry, but I just think this a horrible mis-characterization of what
reddit does. I'd encourage people to go look at the list of communities that
have actually been banned[1]. Every single community that was removed was
removed for particular problematic _behaviour_ , not for the difficulty of the
topic. /r/fatpeoplehate wasn't banned for its views on fat people, it was
banned because it was harassing the people that appeared on the sub-reddit.
And take the counter example - /r/The_donald arguably has been involved in
some real dodgy stuff including actively pushing pizzagate including the
harassment of the businesses accused to be involved in it. Reddit has gone to
extreme lengths to try not to ban it because of the cooling effect on
discourse that would have.

[1]:[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communities)

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CM30
Most practically speaking? Assumed the subreddit bans and controversies of
2015 were going to cause Reddit's Digg moment and lead to an exodus of users
to Voat (in the same way Digg's redesign boosted Reddit), but only attracted
the controversial ones due to a large majority of the site not caring.

Then found itself struggling to attract less... politically charged
users/communities as the site became known for the racism and far right views
there. That's probably the killer really, a good community site needs a large
audience of people who aren't constantly fighting over culture wars and who
can create interesting content about everyday topics as well.

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gtoast
Voat: What Went Wrong, The Summary:

Reddit didn't let racists run rampant. Reddit didn't let racists run rampant.
Reddit didn't let racists run rampant. Today, Voat is overrun with Racists and
is a terrible place. Why didn't Reddit let racists run rampant?

If its any consolation you really don't have to look too hard to find a bunch
of hardcore racists and bigots of all kinds on Reddit spouting violent hate
rhetoric so I guess it all worked out?

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waste_monk
Counterpoint: 4chan is full of racists and worse, and is one of the most
vibrant (for lack of a better word) communities on the internet.

I think Voat's failure to become notable is not due to the prejudice of its
userbase, but rather 1) it was trying to fill a niche that didn't really exist
- it was trying to be "edgy reddit" when plenty of existing communities
offered the same thing, and 2) lack of network effect - there was no reason to
go there because no one is going there. This type of site needs to reach a
"critical mass" of traffic in each reddit/subverse/board to be viable.

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Smithalicious
I'd say one of the reasons why 4chan works and voat doesn't is because /pol/
is reasonably well cordoned off from the majority of 4chan which just wants to
talk about anime.

