While Voat used to have some users that focused on privacy and anonymity, today the bad parts of Voat far outweigh the good parts.

Voat is now a hub for intolerant hate-based communities that have been banned from Reddit. The site as a whole is anti-Reddit, anti-immigration, anti-LGBT rights, heavily racist, anti-feminist, and white-supremacist.

To add to this mess, Voat has also turned into a gathering point for Child Pornography users, with their primary image host, Slimgur being banned multiple times by their hosts for hosting CP. Voat users like to say that "the SJWs planted CP to get Slimgur removed! conspiracy!" but one look at the google search results for Voat should disprove that.

Finally, multiple users on Voat have been doxxed, with the site owner Atk0 deciding to not do anything about it.

Voat does not have a single redeeming feature at this point.

It's strange, because while I don't typically agree with the decisions made to remove those distasteful subreddits, I find voat's obsession with them to be even more distasteful.

Yeah there's something fishy going on for this to shoot to the number one position so quickly. I hope dang looks into it if he can.

I don't know how crazy we're talking about here, but I just wanted to point out that Reddit has been doing a lot of anti-privacy crap in the last few weeks and just a couple of days ago, there was a post which got to the frontpage, originating from multiple subreddits as well, and that post pointed a lot of this shit out and also quoted the Reddit CEO talking down on users like you'd expect it from Mark Zuckerberg.

Here's the post, in case you want to read it yourself: https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/4ll9tc/it_looks_li...

In other words, maybe these upvotes are legitimate and there's just a big portion of really pissed off Reddit users here...

I looked at the vote data and didn't see anything fishy. My guess is that it shot up because people love smoking gun posts and Reddit is always a popular topic. Then it got heavily flagged and plummeted to the depths.

Indeed. Voat seems to exist for people primarily for people who don't think Reddit is toxic enough.