Voat: the 'free speech' Reddit clone built from banned communities
2015–2020
After Reddit's 2015 harassment bans, users of r/fatpeoplehate and r/CoonTown flooded Voat, a 'free speech' Reddit clone that became a haven for communities banned from the platform — and a real-world test of whether deplatforming works, before it collapsed for lack of funding on Christmas Day 2020.
What happened
When Reddit banned five subreddits for harassment in June 2015 — most prominently the roughly 150,000-subscriber r/fatpeoplehate — many displaced users decamped to Voat, a near-identical Reddit clone launched in 2014 (originally as WhoaVerse) by a small team that marketed it as a 'free speech' alternative. The sudden influx temporarily overwhelmed Voat's servers, and the site rapidly accumulated reconstituted versions of communities Reddit had pushed out, including v/fatpeoplehate and the explicitly racist v/CoonTown, alongside other communities that no mainstream platform would host.
Voat became, in effect, a live experiment in the consequences of deplatforming. Researchers who studied the migration found that the bans did not simply transplant communities intact: a relatively small share of r/fatpeoplehate's users actually followed to Voat, while other movements — notably QAnon's GreatAwakening community after later bans — migrated at much higher rates. The finding cut against both the claim that bans accomplish nothing and the claim that they cleanly eliminate a community; the effect depended heavily on the nature and cohesion of the group.
For Reddit, Voat served as a convenient pressure valve and a rhetorical foil. Each time Reddit removed a toxic community, defenders of unrestricted speech pointed to Voat as proof the users would simply go elsewhere, while critics argued that concentrating such communities on a marginal, poorly resourced site was itself a meaningful harm-reduction outcome. Voat's own existence depended on the steady supply of Reddit's castoffs.
That dependence proved fatal. Voat struggled financially throughout its life and relied at the end on personal funding from its operator after a key investor defaulted in early 2020. On 22 December 2020 the site announced it would shut down, and it went offline on 25 December 2020, with its operator stating bluntly that it had run out of money and could not find anyone willing to finance the site's content.
Voat's six-year run is a notable adjacent chapter in Reddit's moderation story: it is the clearest case study of where Reddit's banned users went, why deplatforming's effects are uneven, and how a 'no rules' alternative funded by a larger platform's overflow can fail to sustain itself once the novelty and the money run out.
Impact
Voat became the canonical destination for Reddit's banned communities and the central real-world test of deplatforming, generating widely cited research showing that ban effects are uneven — some communities largely dissipated while others, like QAnon's, migrated nearly wholesale. Its 2020 collapse for lack of funding suggested that a 'free speech' alternative subsisting on a larger platform's castoffs struggles to survive financially, complicating both the optimistic and pessimistic narratives about banning toxic communities.