Meet Voat, the website that wants to be the anti-Reddit
Meet Voat, the website that wants to be the anti-Reddit
As social-news site Reddit tries to clean up its act by
limiting some speech, an alternative springs up, promising to be more
freewheeling.
by Ian Sherr, Max Taves, and Brett Murphy
July 17, 2015 5:00 AM PDT
With all the drama surrounding Reddit, from debates over
free speech to its messy game of musical chairs among executives, it's
understandable some users might want to leave.
Now they've found a place to go. It's called Voat (rhymes
with goat), and it says it's fixed all those things people don't like about
Reddit.
The site launched in April 2014 and was originally called
WhoaVerse. It started as a part-time project of a third-year Swedish college
student and now the site claims to be run by two students who are
"currently studying computer science and economics at University of Zurich
in Switzerland." One of them is called Atif, according to the "About"
page on the site.
Voat users posted in relative obscurity until a month
ago, when Reddit's management banned five noxious forums from its service,
including one devoted to making fun of overweight people.
Fear over increasing control from Reddit's
administrators, who are attempting to turn the site into a large, successful
and profitable company, appears to have pushed swaths of passionate Reddit
users, known as Redditors, to Voat.co. "Due to the recent interest
generated by the online community," the site tells visitors, "this
has evolved from hobby into full-fledged desire to create the website that will
become the place where you can "have your say."
It's unclear how many people visit Voat. The site doesn't
publish statistics about its usage, and industry tracker ComScore said its
traffic is currently too small to track. What is known: The number of people
who visited Reddit from a desktop or laptop computer dropped by 600,000 in the
week of July 5 to 4.6 million.
So could this all lead to a MySpace-style path to
Reddit's ultimate obsolescence? Could Reddit's users migrate in massive waves
to Voat, as MySpace users did to Facebook a half decade ago?
Well, many of Reddit's angriest users aren't just hoping
for it, they're actively encouraging an exodus. "The more people move to
Voat, the better," wrote one Reddit user named TorchicBlaziken. "Voat
is the evolution of reddit, so I hope that the diversity of its communities
rivals that of reddit."
Experts say migrations can and do happen on the Web,
particularly among the volatile user bases like those at Reddit.
"A new brand can come out of the blue in just
months," said Sree Sreenivasan, chief digital officer at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art. "Loyalty is there but not guaranteed. Supremacy on the Web
is not guaranteed to anyone anymore."
Or as one Voat user wrote: "It's the cycle of the
internet. A website grows up and sells out then we move on to something
better."
A spokesperson for Voat declined to comment for this
story. "We have received too many requests from almost all major media
outlets and we can no longer respond to media inquiries individually primarily
because we don't have the manpower," the person wrote in an email.
"We are currently fully focused on improving the technology behind Voat
and that is our main priority."
Free speech: mostly or absolutely?
Voat says it promises completely unfettered free speech,
"submitted, organized, moderated and voted on (ranked) by the users."
"No legal subject in this universe should be out of bounds," the site
says. "There's no doubt we can build a better home for those of us that
enjoy aggregated content, if we simply listen to those that use it, and hold
that as an ongoing priority."
That manifesto of sorts has become a rallying cry of
Voat's users, frustrated with Reddit's tightening control over posts to its
site.
"Voat's community already feels fresh and more
respectful than Reddit's," wrote one Voat convert called boiglenoight.
Voat users' concerns over Reddit's increasing control
likely won't be swayed by Steve Huffman -- a Reddit co-founder who returned as
CEO on July 10 following the ouster of former chief Ellen Pao -- who plans to
purge distasteful elements from the online community. On Thursday, he laid out
new rules further restricting what users can post on the site.
Among the items no longer allowed: illegal activity;
publication of people's private information; anything that incites violence,
harassment, bullying, abuse; and anything sexually suggestive of minors.
"As Reddit has grown, we've seen additional examples
of how unfettered free speech can make Reddit a less enjoyable place to visit
and can even cause people harm outside of Reddit," Huffman wrote in a town
hall-style meeting Thursday known as an Ask Me Anything (AMA). "Freedom of
expression is important to us, but it's more important to us that we at Reddit
be true to our mission."
Type Voat.co into your Web browser and you'll be
transported to a website that, on its face, looks a lot like Reddit, down to
the placement of buttons and the way users vote for (up) or against (down) on
posts. Different forums, called subreddits on Reddit, are called
"subverses" on Voat.
Some of the ways to organize Reddit posts are
"Hot," "New" and "Rising." On Voat it's
"Hot," "New" and "Incoming."
Voat's very existence traces back to users' frustration
with Reddit, which was started in 2005 and has been a forum for a wide range of
discussions in the past decade. But a shift in attitude by management toward
the site -- and a $50 million investment last year by some of Silicon Valley's
most prominent investors -- suggests Reddit will need to place tighter controls
over its Redditors to ensure potential new users aren't rebuffed by some of the
more distasteful speech and commentary on the site.
The tensions boil down to the basic question: What is
Reddit?
For Redditors, the site is seen as a haven of free
speech, the home of an idealistic everything-goes message board where members
police one another and themselves through the site's voting system. Each
article and comment is voted on, and those who receive the most votes bubble to
the top.
But Reddit, the company, sees things differently. Groups
that have banded together on the site who share racist and misogynistic
tendencies have put pressure on the for-profit company, which is part-owned by
Advance Publications, the parent of Vogue and The New Yorker publisher Conde
Nast.
"We've spent the last few days here discussing and
agree that an approach like this allows us as a company to repudiate content we
don't want to associate with the business, but gives individuals freedom to
consume it if they choose," Huffman said. "This is what we will try,
and if the hateful users continue to spill out into mainstream reddit, we will
try more aggressive approaches."
For Voat, that means more disenchanted or disenfranchised
Redditors looking to its site as a new haven. "We are looking to expand,"
the site's owners wrote.
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