Work in Progress. Feel free to contribute.
About
Voat[1] (pronounced like goat), formerly known as WhoaVerse[4], is a open source media aggregator that features user rating system to determine which content gets featured in the site’s front page.
History
Voat started as a hobby project by a third year BSc student, known by the username “Atko”. It was officially launched in April 2014[2].
/r/fatpeoplehate ban on Reddit
Voat’s popularity was greatly influenced by Ellen Pao’s Gender Discrimination Case, because of some users from Reddit being against some administration actions credited to Ellen Pao.
The ban of the subreddit/r/fatpeoplehate on June 10, 2015 because of a new anti-harassing policy raised free speech questioning on the website and lot of users started to migrate to Voat[5]. Because of the amount of users, Voat got down for 2 days.
Voat is back up. You guys killed it and you guys brought it back to life with your donations. It was a long, hard day, but this is exciting!
— Voat (@voatco) 12 junho 2015Features
The site is divided in the called subverses. Each subverse is a community that have their own rules, where people can submit links or create self posts, that are text only. These submissions can be voted “up” or “down” (known by the community as upvoat and downvoat), and the votes can modify the position of the submission in the subverse page.
If a submission is constantly voted, it can be featured in the main page of the webpage, called frontpage.
Traffic
As for June 10, 2015, Voat has a Alexa[3] 11,119 rank in United States.
Search Interest
External References
[2]Voat – About Page
[3]Alexa – Voat’s Alexa page
[4]Voat – WhoaVerse is changing name
[5]ITworld – Reddit censorship results in mass exodus to Voat.co