Too bad most of the community there is made up of the worst of reddit. Maybe if enough normal users moved there it'd be worth it, and maybe that will actually happen if reddit doesn't figure out how to salvage this, but until then, there's nothing on voat worth wading through the sewage.

If I recall correctly (it's down right now, not a big surprise) about half of the users are subscribers to voat's fatpeoplehate.

Those excellent people are the grassroots of the community you'd be joining.

You may be forgetting that Reddit was built on the same 'shit'. A huge portion of the real content of Reddit was porn and other repugnant topics. The admins of the time faked a huge portion of their posts to form communities around them.

My experience, having actually used Voat, is that this is not the case. I've engaged people in the /v/gaming, /v/programming subverses and everyone's been friendly and polite to me thus far.

Agreed. People move from one site to another because the other site is better, not because the first site is worse. There's a difference between push and pull that makes a good or a bad community.

It's why reddit and digg and facebook and twitter grew - they were better than the other sites, they pulled users in.

Voat is being used because reddit is pushing.

They need a kickstarter or patreon for more servers :(