All people do in reality ... if for some reason you choose to disregard the huge number of fairly autonomous communities on Reddit?
If I used that ultra-broad brush for HN, I'd say that all commenters here seem to do is post links to xkcd 927 and the wiki page for ad-hom.
If Reddit was more like, say, StackExchange, or Wordpress.com, or Discourse—a hosting site for "communities" which happened to use the "Reddit engine"—then it wouldn't have nearly the PR problem it has now. Nobody blames Wordpress.com for the content of somebody's blog hosted there.
There is a reason WordPress has the .com/.org split, and it's not just that large customers demand to self-host. That could have resulted in something more like GitHub Enterprise, but instead you see a well-supported FOSS offering. Why? Because this split allows WordPress.com to maintain a very strict TOS that disallows many types of content, while still allowing other people who don't want to adhere to those policies to "run on WordPress" easily by using the WordPress.org software either directly or through third-party hosts.
If Reddit was smart, the "Reddit engine" would be a well-supported, easy to install FOSS offering like WordPress.org, and there would be a healthy ecosystem of third-party hosts running that software. Voat would just be "Yet Another Reddit-as-Service Provider", instead of a competitor and political statement.
As it is, the Reddit engine is an effectively-unsupported blob of code that needs tons of other heavy dependencies to get it running. The only site I know running a copy of the Reddit engine is LessWrong—and they've heavily forked it for their own purposes.