Voat: What Went Wrong? | Hacker News Reader

Voat: What Went Wrong?

battlepenguin.com

6 pointsmmcclure5 comments

> 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...

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.

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?

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.

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.

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