I agree completely with your synopsis, and I have been using voat since it was called whoaverse. It was good back then.

But the way it is now... it's hard to deny there is a serious serious culture problem. Literally praising terrorists and super-racist low-information posts regularly making the front page. Even if it is bot/shill activity, it makes the site completely suck to use.

And if you go against the voat hivemind, you get downvoted, and then you can't downvote stuff, and it makes a feedback loop that has led to this ridiculous super-hateful echo chamber where one ideology basically took over.

As soon as stormfront got ahold of most mod positions on voat about 3-5 years ago or so, it's slowly been getting worse and worse. I love voat and what it stands for, but let's not deny the character of the current mainstream voat content is very full of hate and race-based ideology. If it were intelligent debates about that, that'd be one thing, but it's 90% knee-jerk hate these days. It's low-information anger being spewed, while those in real positions of power are basically ignored and instead we get to see a "Elizabeth Warren is a fake indian" post for the 1000th time. Valuable stuff is there, but it's often lost in the noise of the culture that overtook it.

I felt like voat was supposed to be the chosen one to save us from reddit. Which is why I felt so let down when it got so taken-over. Which is why we had to make saidit. So in a way, I am kind of thankful voat got taken over or else none of us would be using this site right now.