Voat

» see voat.co as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

voat started in april 2014 as a side project. atif colo, a swiss developer with the handle atko, built a reddit clone called whoaverse because he thought reddit had become too aggressive about moderating speech. justin chastain (puttitout) joined later as the operational co-founder. the project was renamed voat in december 2014 and the company incorporated in the us in august 2015. the stated reason for moving incorporation to the us was that american first-amendment doctrine offered better protection for the site's content profile than swiss or any european law would.

voat's growth was entirely reactive. each time reddit banned a popular subreddit, the displaced users would migrate to voat and create the equivalent subverse there. the first big wave was june 2015 after reddit banned fatpeoplehate and four other harassment subs. voat servers crashed under the load. additional waves followed through 2016 and 2017 as more reddit communities were banned, and the 2018 wave brought in qanon material after q-related subs got removed from reddit. by 2020 the site had hosted pizzagate documentation plus neo-nazi imagery and other material that triggered escalating actions from payment processors.

the financial story was visible from the outside. paypal froze voat's account in june 2015 citing sexually oriented materials. host europe terminated its hosting in late 2015 citing hate speech. the site moved infrastructure to providers willing to take the contract and survived on patreon-style donations plus a small ad-share program. in march 2020 a key investor defaulted on a funding contract. chastain self-funded the site through the rest of the year, posted on 22 december that the money was gone, and shut everything down on 25 december 2020.

i never made an account on voat. by 2014 i was already on twitter for tech and on ekşi sözlük for the turkish-speaking version of what reddit was for english speakers, and the voat profile was specifically downstream of reddit's moderation decisions, which i had no stake in. voat was also one of those sites you read about in news coverage before you read it yourself. by the time the new york times was writing about pizzagate documentation living on voat, the platform had already self-selected for an audience i had no path into. the closure was reported as a relief by most outlets that covered it.

~ the case file ~

~ what was on it ~

the technical surface was reddit. subverses instead of subreddits, upvotes and downvotes, threaded comments, user profiles with karma. the early ui was a near-pixel clone with a softer color palette. what differed was the content moderation policy, which was effectively zero at the platform level beyond what us law required. moderators of individual subverses could enforce their own rules, but the platform did not remove content for being objectionable in itself.

the visible subverses ranged from the same harmless stuff that exists on every reddit-style aggregator (photography and gaming hobby subs) to the displaced subreddits that the site became known for. researchers who later analyzed the 2014-2020 voat data dump (arxiv 2201.05933) found that the average voat user posted to a much narrower set of subverses than the average reddit user, and that the politically extreme subverses dominated activity in 2018-2020 in a way they had not in 2015.

~ what really happened ~

chastain's 22 december 2020 announcement was unusually frank. an unnamed investor had agreed to fund voat through the 2020 us election cycle and then defaulted in march. chastain had been paying server bills out of personal savings for nine months. there was no fundraise possible because no investor would touch a site with voat's content history, and there was no acquirer because the brand was a liability. shutdown date was 25 december with no ceremony.

part of the user base migrated to other reddit alternatives. poal got the qanon migration the day voat went dark. ruqqus picked up the politically diverse free-speech crowd before its own 2021 shutdown, while gab welcomed anyone who would make an account. the displaced subs kept moving across platforms in a slow diaspora that ran through 2021-2022.

~ the long tail ~

voat is the kind of grave that exists more as a research dataset than as a memory. the academic paper "i can't keep it up" published a full crawl in january 2022 covering the entire 2014-2020 lifespan, and it is now the canonical source for moderation researchers studying what happens when reddit bans communities and they migrate. the actual website is gone. atko and puttitout disappeared from public discourse after the shutdown post. the lesson the wider platform industry took from voat was not about free speech but about advertiser risk: there is no investable version of a reddit alternative whose differentiator is hosting what reddit banned.

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