Voat's userbase consists of the members and communities who were banned by Reddit's hate speech policy.

Effectively, Voat is Reddit's "recycle bin." Judging from its content, I think the admins made the right call..

> Voat is Reddit's "recycle bin."

I definitely agree, but I also remember how Reddit was considered the dumping ground for users banned on Digg and content that wasn't good enough for Digg.

Today unpleasant content probably makes up a large percentage of Voat traffic. But if a few big subreddits moved over that percentage would be dwarfed and suddenly it's no longer a Recycle Bin.

Voat has had three big influxes of users in the last few years:

- When reddit cracked down on the paedophilia subreddits

- When reddit banned fatpeoplehate

- When reddit banned and/or hid some of the more egregiously Nazi-ish subreddits.

So yeah, this is pretty much what you'd expect.

It’s not surprising given the context in which it was started.