[djsumdog]

Voat has a couple of issues.

First, it took in a lot of people from banned subreddits (/r/coontown, fatpeoplehate, etc.) Unlike the great Digg 4.0 to Reddit migration, they didn't a huge chunk of Reddit. They just got the most controversial.

Second, It tried to be a full Reddit clone with tons of subverses. Reddit started out with just a few categories and slowly expanded out to user generated subreddits. That has to grow slowly over time with your userbase. Since Voat started with that, it has a ton of abandoned subverses that one one posts in anymore.

Voat is a pretty bad cespool of hatred right now. There's occasionally good stuff on there, but a lot of it is conservative garbage. People who have tried to turn it around are so outnumbered that they just leave.

With that said, Voat is open source (written in C# I believe), just like Reddit.

[sf_rob]

The problem is a "Reddit alternative" will naturally attract the groups that no longer feel at home on Reddit. It seems inevitable that any alternative will be more toxic and/or hyper-moderated.

[CM30]

As will almost any site specifically marketed as an alternative to a major one. You market your site as a freer, more fair alternative to another social site, and yes, you'll likely draw in the people that were hated/seen as controversial on the original. See also a lot of Twitter alternatives (like Gab) if you want other examples.

[TeMPOraL]

Scott Alexander recently covered this phenomenon here:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservative...

(see in particular section III of the article)

[mowenz]

Voat is actually far less moderated, though, and honestly, almost nothing is censored there.