this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
145 points (98.7% liked)
Lemmy
12524 readers
21 users here now
Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.
For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to [email protected].
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
yeah, the 2014 exodus to voat was all pissed off nazis, but now the nerds are pissed off so I think you’re right
I was recently sharing Lemmy to some people and how the entire Reddit blackout is stupid considering everything the platform has done in the past and the mindset of the CEO.
Someone brought up Voat and they were lamenting how that failed, and I decided to check out the WayBack Machine captures for it, and Christ, nothing but antisemitism and racism.
OH BOY VOAT
Yeah. Free speech absolutism does not attract a good crowd, and once you attract that crowd you will not attract any other crowd because the content output they produce is repellant to any normal person.
I spent a bunch of time on Voat as a kid, thinking I could be a free-thinking free speech absolutist who simply disagreed with the things other said around there.
What I observed is a crowd of people of an extreme ideology, who would try and one-up one another with further extremes, moving the overton window within the platform further to the extreme. As it continued, some would hit their breaking point and simply leave due to the toxicity, while others opted to continue the "who can be more offensive" game. The userbase, as it was, was doomed to forever become worse and worse, and smaller and smaller.
I believe that in the later years of Voat, the actually closed down the public-facing site and user registrations. I'm not sure what the Voat devs thought, but it's pretty clear it didn't go the way they'd expected as they had to pretty much hide their users from the greater internet.
This is discussed in this video about creating clones of existing platforms.
I went to VOAT in 2020 just to check it out. I kept clicking the random page and I shit you not it cycled through about 20 Qanon/maga subreddits and one random bird watching community.