Voat has a couple of issues.

First, it took in a lot of people from banned subreddits (/r/coontown, fatpeoplehate, etc.) Unlike the great Digg 4.0 to Reddit migration, they didn't a huge chunk of Reddit. They just got the most controversial.

Second, It tried to be a full Reddit clone with tons of subverses. Reddit started out with just a few categories and slowly expanded out to user generated subreddits. That has to grow slowly over time with your userbase. Since Voat started with that, it has a ton of abandoned subverses that one one posts in anymore.

Voat is a pretty bad cespool of hatred right now. There's occasionally good stuff on there, but a lot of it is conservative garbage. People who have tried to turn it around are so outnumbered that they just leave.

With that said, Voat is open source (written in C# I believe), just like Reddit.

The problem is a "Reddit alternative" will naturally attract the groups that no longer feel at home on Reddit. It seems inevitable that any alternative will be more toxic and/or hyper-moderated.

As will almost any site specifically marketed as an alternative to a major one. You market your site as a freer, more fair alternative to another social site, and yes, you'll likely draw in the people that were hated/seen as controversial on the original. See also a lot of Twitter alternatives (like Gab) if you want other examples.

Scott Alexander recently covered this phenomenon here:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservative...

(see in particular section III of the article)

Voat is actually far less moderated, though, and honestly, almost nothing is censored there.

Lead developer says it has nothing to do with voat here https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/5qhz99/...

'The whole thing is based on voting which is why it has "vote" in it. It has nothing to do with voat.co. I guarantee that'

Ah. The article drew a connection, which is why I assumed that. But googling the founders, it appears you are correct.

No thanks.