Yup, I was there when voat was called whoaverse, I watched it all happen and you're absolutely right!

This is why user participation is important. This is why the pyramid of debate is important. This is why everyone who truly cares about saidit needs to voice their opinions and vote when they see something insightful or fun.

We have lots of defenses against what happened to voat, but primary among them is community.

The second thing we have going for us is no downvote. So the dedicated minority group cannot re-shape the site at large to their own desires nearly as easily. It got much worse as well after voat added restrictions where if you've been downvoted you cannot downvote others. It sped up the echo-chamber feedback-loop effect and let these extremists take over the mainstream culture of voat much more quickly. Now a dissenting voice of reason stands out like a sore thumb, and is downvoted to hell.

Saidit doesn't have these locking-out features because we don't have downvotes, and we're careful to avoid "improvements" to the algorithm that actually just speed up the feedback loop that creates an echo-chamber culture. Furthermore one group cannot brigade another, because there is no downvote, and also they must abide by the pyramid of debate or be banned from saidit. So the only remaining way to "brigade" is to argue one's point rationally.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, the admins actually care. This site used to be called antiextremes.com, specifically referencing avoiding the extremes of reddit (censorship) and voat (far-right). It's literally our declared mission to avoid becoming voat, even right in our original name.

The reason reddit went bad is because the admins turned a blind eye (or perhaps were paid to) while brigading and astroturfing groups took it over, subreddit by subreddit.

Voat however failed because the admins just let whoever take it over, as you pointed out. They had no ideological backbone, no pyramid of debate, no nothing. Just an empty space for anyone who has enough free time to go absolutely nuts and create their own echo chamber. And that's exactly what happened.

But at saidit, we will actually will learn from their failures and try our best to avoid them.

Fourthly, saidit has open modlogs available in any sub under the list of mods, it says "moderation log". Anyone can click it and see everything every mod has ever done. Voat and reddit hide this information for mods only. This transparency adds a LOT of accountability. No more secret user deletions and secret mod coups.

Fifthly, we're run by donations. Not advertiser revenue or big secret investors. This means we have zero incentive to get rid of certain messages to please our advertisers and investors, because we have none other than community donations. We do not plan to ever change this funding model because saidit is run for the community, not for profit.

So you can see our approach is multifaceted, and we think we have a very good chance at avoiding the fate that befell voat. It won't be easy, but I believe we can do it.