I don’t remember what caused the Voat’s origin, except it involved Reddit HQ. And then it went under in 2020.

What’s different about this time and with Lemmy to make it a feasible alternative to Reddit? Is it random chance?

  • Clbull@lemmy.world
    7·
    1 year ago

    Voat originally emerged in 2015 during the height of the Ellen Pao scandal that swept Reddit, and quickly garnered some Reddit refugees, particularly those from /r/fatpeoplehate, a subreddit dedicated to hating on the obese.

    It almost died that year for three key reasons:

    1. Hosting morally repugnant legal grey-area content which was previously purged from Reddit, such as creepshots and jailbait. This not only drove users away but also made advertisers, payment processors and other stakeholders drop the site very quickly. /r/shitredditsays were a key player in getting companies like PayPal and Stripe to blacklist them.
    2. Server instability. Crashes were frequent and the site went through significant downtime because it had received the Reddit hug of death.
    3. The moment Ellen Pao was forced to resign and Steve Huffman was sworn in as CEO, everybody flocked back to Reddit thinking the day had been saved.

    Voat soon became a vessel for Reddit’s undesirable communities that Spez had purged. The moment he banned subreddits like /r/n*****, /r/c***town and other subreddits dedicated to glorifying racial hatred, they flocked to Voat and turned it into a white supremacist hellhole. Another thing that spurred the change was Stormfront (a white supremacist/neo-nazi forum) being cut off by their hosting provider.

    What ultimately killed the site was COVID-19. A major investor in the site pulled out during the pandemic and after months of failing to secure funding, the owner just gave up and closed the site down on Christmas Day, 2020.

    • Waitwuhtt@lemmy.world
      3·
      1 year ago

      I can attest to this. I went to Voat briefly, shit was wild.

      As a site it had merit but unfortunately it ended up scooping up a good number of the forced exiles from Reddit and not nearly as many normal users. Content had a big skew.

      • Clbull@lemmy.world
        2·
        1 year ago

        The worst part about Voat is that every single rational discussion was derailed by people throwing around slurs everywhere.

        It’s like the site operated on an alternative to Godwin’s Law, but instead of comparisons to Nazis and Adolf Hitler, the probability of a discussion descending into a shit-slinging contest of racist or antisemitic slurs approaches 100% instead.