I think a lot is somewhat of an overstatement. When I've looked at voat it seems to be just reposts from reddit and things that explicitly trash reddit. Voat's identity at this point is something like SASS was for somethingawful, it's just an offsite snark board about reddit things without much of a culture of its own.

I don't think it would be bad if it took off but the fraction of reddit users who actually care about reddit meta-drama(pao stuff, gamergate stuff, the new harassment policy, the "SJW cartel"/SRS running reddit, 'extreme free speech' and hate subs, etc) doesn't seem significant enough to really mess with the inertia of reddit's huge casual appeal. They'd have to do something that fundamentally wrecked the ux for a large proportion of users a la Digg imo.

At the same time reddit goes down ALL the time and I'm not a sysadmin, but we don't see that with other similarly large sites as much, I guess it's cause they're comparatively poor? I can't imagine the architecture at this point is somehow unscalable, it seems like a pretty simple system besides the scale(famous last words I guess).

edit: right now the word "reddit" appears on the frontpage of voat.co 10 times

Voat is mostly being promoted by racists who are upset that they're being banned from the default subs for posting hate speech there.

It says a lot when Voat's most vocal supporters on reddit are the populations of /r/coontown, /r/conspiracy, and /r/antipozi (all very, very NSFL). The first is an anti-black sub, the second is an antisemitic sub (yes, antisemitic: everyone should read /r/isrconspiracyracist and /r/topmindsofreddit), and the third is a Neo-Nazi sub.

interesting, didn't know voat was just as toxic, based on the many comments i saw on reddit i thought it was really big