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Voat
Voat, also known as "Reddit's 8chan", is a Reddit clone created as a platform for free speech. Used widely by people who pretend that they don't use reddit to complain about reddit, Voat is the sewer that collects Reddit's septic runoff. Within its borders, pedophiles, teenagers, conservatives, ex-fatpeoplehate members, racists, conspiracy theorists, and redpillers all valiantly fight against a privately-owned forum's decision to add and enforce rules. It was created when Ellen Pao banned a few fat-shaming and trolling subs, leading to a mass exodus repeatedly bringing down the site thanks to a combination of butthurt redditors trying to get rid of it and its staff's own staggering incompetence.
Voat: Because I'm entitled to do whatever I want on someone else's website!
Voat was created by a college student who wanted to make a Reddit alternative that champions freedom of speech and privacy. Naturally, the bright young lad decided to host the servers in Switzerland, a country with some of the strictest anti-hate speech laws in the West for some reason. Of course, the poor guy likely didn't anticipate that his forum would turn into a Safe Space for every flavor of bigot on the Internet. For many moons, the site was stagnant, populated mainly by those who were fed up by Reddit's endless sea of memes, tired pun threads and one-liners, psuedointellectualism, and mob mentality. Unfortunately for these lost souls, it was the latter feature that caused Voat to become flooded with the best Reddit has to offer and transformed it into an echo chamber filled with try-hards whose edginess rivals even the youngest shitposters on /b/.
The Reddit Exodus
Voat received little attention until Redditors began pretending to migrate there in response to Reddit admins actually enforcing their rules. This occurred in two waves. While the first was much smaller than the second, it set the stage for website to become a cesspit of memespam (e.g. "TRIGGERED", "did I hurt your fee fees?") and whining.
Wave One: SLC Daycare Center
The migration began after a Reddit user posted to /r/conspiracy about a daycare near his house that no children ever came in or out of. Naturally, the top minds of the subreddit jumped onto the case, suspecting that the daycare was a front for a drug or sex trafficking operation, a child porn ring, or a money laundering front. After calling the daycare, peering into its windows, and going so far as to allegedly take a video of children going in and break into the building, /r/conspiracy was SHOCKED to find that the admins warned the mods to cut that shit out. Fiercely protective of their freedom to bombard strangers with phone calls and break into private businesses, /r/conspiracy users encouraged their tinfoil-wielding brothers to migrate to Voat, where they were active for a couple of days before they realized that they couldn't handle living without the attention and upvotes Reddit provided. As such, Voat became a graveyard of shitposts once more.
Wave Two: The Fattening
After the conspiracy theorists returned to Reddit, Voat again sat in relative obscurity. This changed when the Reddit admins decided to ban /r/fatpeoplehate, a community where users indulged in the common hobby of talking shit about pictures of fat strangers for hours a day. Other bastions of quality discussion were additionally b&, including /r/transfags, /r/shitniggerssay, and /r/neofag. Following the announcement, Redditors collectively shit their britches in upset. Users flooded the front page of the Internet with fatpeoplehate material, nazi imagery, and photoshops of Ellen Pao, the CEO of Reddit. To these brave, principled souls, Chairman Pao was violating their sacred rights to FREE SPEECH by enforcing the rules of the privately-owned, for-profit website that users can leave at any time. Users gave impassioned, poetic speeches about how the admins were going to ban offensive subs and turn Reddit into a "Safe Space". Despite the fact that /r/fatpeoplehate was banned for well-documented large-scale harassment and spamming "found the fatty!" all over Reddit, and widely-loathed places like /r/antiPOZI and /r/KotakuInAction were still allowed to exist. In reality, the likely reason for the banning of /r/fatpeoplehate was because the users were so evangelical about the sub that their constant references to it skyrocketed its visibility and made Reddit less palatable to advertisers. Who would have guessed that a company doesn't want to bleed money?
Thus began the mass migration to Voat. /r/fatpeoplehate established a 'subverse' on Voat so they could make fun of fat people in peace, and it's subscriber count quickly rose to 10k. Outraged against Reddit's heinous violation of their freedoms, and fearing that they too would get the banhammer, Redditors from places such as /r/coontown, /r/theredpill, /r/subredditcancer, /r/conspiracy, and /r/kotakuinaction followed suit while continuing to actively whine about Reddit and its oppressiveness...on Reddit. The massive spike in traffic brought down Voat's servers for days, as they had previously been accustomed to hosting a handful of users and a piece of string.
Once the administrator managed to pull the site back up, the Voat community was established in all of its glory, forever a place for reactionaries to jerk themselves off over the evilness of the Social Justice Warriors that they act exactly like.
Wave Three: The Darkening
But the autism wasn't over yet, because soon after Pao fired the admin of r/IAMA because (according to rumors) she didn't live in San Fransisco where to company was moving and because (according to an even dumber rumor) an AMA with Jesse Jackson that week didn't go well. What does "didn't go well" mean? Anything really. Since the reddit revolters are a bucnch of racist manchildren who hate Jackson, when he misunderstood how to use the site they claimed it was an "epic win" for them and proceeded to link that to the admin's firing thanks to their massive USI.
In reality, the woman was let go for being constantly insubordinate, but that didn't stop Voat fags from displaying their maturity by spamming everything, locking down their subreddits like a bunch of babies and making more stupid hashtags.
Raped by reddit over and over
Unhappy that people were trying to leave their virgin sanctuary, redditors decided to destroy Voat via a number of tactics, the humor in which was twofold. Firstly, it was funny to see the amount of butthurt caused to reddit fags to the point they actively go out to defend the name and cashflow of a site that sees them as nothing more than living ad clickers. Secondly because, while any other site would be unaffected by this and only gain users thanks to the Streisand Effect, it was hilarious to witness what a shit-show Voat is that it got its shit handed to it time and again.
DDoS
As soon as people started using Voat it went down on its own, but even after it came back up, it didn't stay that way for long. Shortly after the new residents moved in, Voat went down and the owner reported that it was being DDosed. In a fit of impotent fury, deVoatees scrambled to find a target to blame. As creative as they are intelligent, the group settled on the usual targets: SRS, SJWs, Reddit itself, and, of course, the CEO of Reddit, Ellen Pao. Yes, they literally accused the CEO of a large company of personally aiming her LOIC cannons at Voat. The reasoning behind this theory is that Pao wanted to stop competition by preventing people from traveling to Voat. What they don't realize is that everyone else on Reddit desperately wants them to fuck off and welcomes Voat as a piss container. Additionally, the types of people who migrated to Voat are the ones who make Reddit unpalatable to advertisers and cost the site money. On the slight chance that deVotees actually do boycott Reddit and don't just pretend that they are, nothing of value would be lost.
Lost Host
After being taken down by DDoS attacks about once every two days for two weeks, Voat was taken down for good when people complained to their host that they are a bunch of racist pedophiles. Since this is Switzerland we are talking about, the host dropped them in like a minute. One of the groups that allegedly took credit for this were the feminists over at SRS.
Shut down Paypal
Next thing to do was spam Paypal with complaints about Voat and, since Paypal's entire business model revolves around the fact they make a lot more money finding any excuse to ban people and confiscate their cash than they do by charging a measly commission, it didn't take long for them to "permanently limit" Voat's account (which is just code for steal the money). Credit was again taken by SRS.
lolsuit?
It didn't take long for the retardation to reach peak lulz, and soon some retard claiming to be an employee of reddit sent an email to various news sites, claiming that reddit was planning to sue Voat for copying their entire user interface.
To Whom It May Concern: I’m sorry I can’t give you my real name as I cannot afford to lose my job at the moment, but I’ve been a Reddit employee for five years and have been disgusted by how Reddit has become more and more corporate. I can tell you that they are very threatened by Voat and potentially other “clones” punching holes in their website. They have investor pressure to stop the loss of users, even though the loss is small right now. The legal team is currently planning to sue Voat for copyright, alleging they copied the layout and functionality of Reddit, plus corporate defamation as, they say, users have unfairly misprepresented Reddit on Voat and Voat has allowed those defamatory comments to remain on their site. This is obviously a frivolous lawsuit, but anybody can sue anybody and Reddit knows they can legally overwhelm Voat and sink it fast. I urge people to leave Reddit and start using Voat and support them in any way: give them money, write blogs urging people to switch, whatever you can think of to help. It’s going to take a big crowd to fight Reddit and hopefully make them revert back to their original mission statement — or, heck, bring them down even though I would lose my job. Thanks for publishing, Anonymous
Most people who got this thing didn't even bother to publish it because the guy won't identify himself, verify his claims, correctly spell "misrepresented" or even respond to emails. The only ones who did print this thing were angry MRA blogs who pretend to be journalists and that no one reads. Generally, this is written off as a troll trying to either scare Voat or rile up people from reddit.
The Death of Jailbait
Despite the website's aim uphold privacy, the rights to not have pictures of your sexual abuse and personal info spread on a public forum were seemingly uncovered. For many months, Voat contained "subverses" dedicated to collecting dox and hosting child porn. This went by unnoticed until paypal suspended Voat's account due to its hosting of /v/jailbait. Never ones to pass up the chance to rustle some jimmies, an SRS user pounced on the opportunity to take credit for reporting the website. While it is uncertain if the user actually did the deed or if they were trolling, but the brilliant thinkers at Voat exercised their Olympic-level mental gymnastics and decided that SRS planted the CP to get Voat shut down. Despite the fact that the CP had been posted months prior to the migration and the fact that the moderator of /v/truejailbait was actively encouraging users to post CP. When asked for proof, deVoatees would deflect or dismiss the question by calling the FACT "common sense".
The controversy came to a head when a deVoatee claimed on AskVoat that they had seen pictures of naked 13-year-olds on /v/truejailbait. The user response drifted between denial that there was CP, a desire to keep the images up for political reasons, long-winded rants about how feminists are suppressing natural male sexuality by banning pics of sexualized nude tweens, and rationalization that Voat wouldn't get taken down by The Law because they didn't technically host the images on their servers. However, all parties came to the consensus that their freedom to spam racial crime statistics on a private company's forum was more important than the freedom of the victims that were kidnapped, raped, abused, and killed by the industry that they were supporting. Some argued that simply viewing an image wasn't hurting anyone, ignoring cause and effect and demonstrating the ignorance of basic economic concepts that only a libertarian can possess. Some choice comments:
—"It's fine to host CP 'cause you don't have to look at it!" | ||
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Eventually the site owner came to the realization that he was on the verge of riding the partyvan and banned the jailbait subs, along with /v/doxbin for good measure. Although many people expressed relief that their Safe Space wasn't going to get invaded, others expressed outrage at the decision. Some choice comments:
—"It's art because it's beautiful, even if I wank to it." | ||
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While it is currently unclear what the consequences will be for the site owner and Voat at large, but the /v/jailbait fiasco produced enough butthurt to fuel a decade's worth of angry shitposts.
The Average deVoatee
The typical deVoatee is what you would expect from a person who joins a hate group and demands that a site owner risk getting convicted for child porn distribution to satisfy their "principles". Their sense of entitlement is unmatched, and, just like the SJWs they loathe so much, deVoatees expect the world to bend over for them and for institutions to change their policies to accommodate their uncontrollable need to whine about some perceived persecution for hours a day. Ironically, in complaining about Reddit and Voat trying to cater to the demands of SJWs, they too are demanding to be catered to. Also a characteristic of SJWs, deVoatees have an external locus of control that causes them to blame the world for their own failures and shortcomings. Instead of blaming their poor hygiene and abrasive nature for their sustained virginity, they'll blame the feminist media for turning women into whores who only sleep with Alpha Males. Instead of realizing that the average NORP doesn't want to hear them rant about Jews and lizard people, they blame the government for beating people into complacency with propaganda. In addition, deVoatees make heavy use of confirmation bias and warp everything else they hear to fit their victim complex worldview. It is because of this that they lack the self-awareness to realize how stupid they look to normal people.
Because deVoatees have primarily come from hate groups on Reddit, they have the same profile as everyone else who spends hours a day jerking off over the fact that a group of people is different than them. Their hate group membership serves a number of functions, such as making themselves feel superior to others by nature because they have no actual accomplishments or positive qualities, maintaining a victim narrative, having a target for paranoia, or distracting themselves from the grim realities of everyday life. Like their liberal counterparts, deVoatees get off on being outraged by perceived slights and will search for, or even invent reasons to get angry. This is why the entirety of Voat is still dedicated to bitching about Reddit, despite claiming to have having left the website.
The inhabitants of Voat are overwhelmingly young white male libertarians, which makes sense because that's the only demographic of people who would join movements over shit as petty as vidya game journalism and a website enforcing its rules. DeVoatees have a completely nonsensical obsession with freedom of speech, which they've interpreted as the freedom to spew whatever inane shit you want, wherever you want, without any negative reaction or consequences. A person who objects to their race realism posts is immediately branded an SJW and told that they're stifling free speech. Any post that gets removed for furthering some shitty agenda is automatically censorship, even if it breaks the rules. DeVoatees don't believe that cause and effect exist for them, which is why any effect is met with outrage and defiance. Despite being a primarily libertarian group, the people of Voat are awfully adverse to a company exercising its freedom to change its business practices, make financial decisions, and refuse service to whomever breaks its rules. Like all reactionaries, deVoatees immediately default to some rationalization-fulled ideological speech when confronted with their own hypocrisy.
In short, deVoatees are to Reddit what SJWs are to tumblr.
Common Voat Activities
- Whining about SJWs
- Abusing memes stolen from /r/tumblrinaction and /b/ (e.g. triggered, 'i identify as an attack helicopter', I identify as ______, 'did I hurt your feefees?')
- Whining about reddit
- Jerking off to free speech
- Jerking off to child porn
- Jerking off to animal porn
- Pretending to boycott reddit
- Whining about Voat
- Feeling oppressed
- Appropriating epithets meant for people like them (e.g. autist, neckbeard, fedora, hugbox, fee fees)
- Feeling outraged
- Accusing others of being SJWs, cuckolds and shills
- Whining about feminism
- Weaving Conspiracy Theories about Reddit
Defending pedophilia(No longer cool with the advent of PizzaGate)- Whining about how hard it is to be a white male in the West
- Whining about liberals
- Whining about SRS
- Forgetting that nobody has been offended by getting called a faggot since /b/ abused it to death in 2008
- Whining about minorities
- Whining about women
- Blaming other people for their problems
The Future of Voat
With the banning of /r/fatpeoplehate and that one IAMA admin causing sustained butthurt, Voat is likely to have some activity for a long time. However, like good little attention whores, deVoatees feel lost when they're not in the spotlight and will fight hard to stay relevant. This will be accomplished by spreading the word of the website with the ferocity of a Mormon missionary and continue to antagonize Redditors in order to create the controversy that fuels their persecution complex. As soon as Voat stops being relevant and a common topic of discussion, deVoatees will create a scene so that people start talking about them again. Of course, over time this will be less effective, and Voat users will eventually slink back to home base until Reddit enforces their rules again.
The only positive aspect of Voat not being permanently DDoSed off the web again is that at least it gives butthurt redditors somewhere to go instead of shitting up 8chan.
LOL already dead in the water
The raise to fame of Voat was as brief as it was gay. They were unable to get their shit together from the moment they were hailed as the new Reddit and right up until it was already too late. Just as they got the interest of venture capitalists who could help stabilize their servers and make them able to handle the spilloff from reddit, Ellen Pao got fired thanks to the very people who were visiting Voat because of her and they no longer had any reason to stay.
Voat can now only await its slow and painful death.
The shutdown and move
Eventually, on Christmas of 2020, vote pretty much just shut down. However, it was recreated on voat.xyz, or talk.lol.
See Also
- What Reddit was to Digg
- What 8chan is to 4chan
- What TheCommentSection is to cracked.com
- What Encyclopedia Dramatica is to Wikipedia (but not a shitty failure, unlike the other examples)
- Ellen Pao
- Fat People Hate
- Feminism
- Thin Skin
- GamerGate
- Social Justice Warrior
- MRA
- Censorship
- Victim Complex
- Conspiracy theorists
- Cuckold
- Crybaby
External Links
- The hugbox in all its glory.
- Just stop wasting everyone's time and go back to reddit
- Looks like someone made an ED Voat... can't wait for them to ban links to us too
- Even Frizbee is better than Voat
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Voat is part of a series on Reddit. | [UpVote] |
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Voat is part of a series on Visit the Social Media Portal for complete coverage. |
| Featured article July 4 and 5, 2015 | ||
| Preceded by Randi Harper |
Voat | Succeeded by Salon |