Moot, founder of 4chan, had some good comments about the phenomenon during his resignation:
>To single out 420chan, it’s actually one of the imageboards that I have actually respected over the years. I think that what's kind of defined a lot of image boards, even going back to the first kind of spin off from 4chan (which was 5Chan), 7chan and all these others. They tend to spin out based on a decision I make, or they don’t like me, or they don’t like 4chan, or they don’t like 4chan culture or whatever. More or less over the years, most of those sites have kind of fizzled out.
>While 420Chan started similarly to 5chan, (the admin didn’t like me), I really respect that he wanted to have a bunch of topics that 4chan didn’t have ... ["]4chan is never gonna have a drugs board, or a wrestling board, or all these other boards that I want, and so we may as well create a site that caters to that.”
>I really respect the fact that he really took it in its own direction, it doesn't look like 4chan. The other sites ... created a whole era of open source clones of 4chan that offered 4chan in a box and emulated our front page and everything.
>People, for whatever reason wanted to make 4chan that wasn’t 4chan.
Voat is just the latest "reddit that isn't reddit".
It does now, in the form of /asp/ I think :)
However I don't know how well moot's prediction of fizzling out holds for say 8chan, which has started to very much grow in popularity; granted, having roughly some of the same popular boards as 4chan (except for where moderation doesn't matter, like on NSFW boards) but with some interesting and nice top boards, like /leftypol/ which 4chan would never host.
I remember being on 4chan when the total amount of content currently hosted was listed as 50GB. And I thought it would be going down.