I’ve been on reddit for a long, long time and i’ve seen all the changes that have happened in the past decade. I spent a lot of time on Reddit, and have seen the slow infestation of bots, karma whores, and guerilla marketing disguised as posts.
I’m genuinely excited for the fediverse - it seems like an actual improvement over reddit, and not just a clone. There’s a learning curve, but there was one when joining reddit too.
I participated in the migration to Voat, and saw how/why it failed. I’m more optimistic about the fediverse for various reasons, and I’m dedicating my time to helping this thrive.
I was a lurker on Voat, but I’m trying to be active here. I don’t like modding, but I’ve even created my own community here, which is saying a lot given how lazy I am. Hope to interact with y’all more!
And if you’re still reading this, i hope you don’t mind a shoutout to my new community, maliciouscompliance - recreated this as it was one of my favorite places to lurk on reddit!
https://lemmy.world/c/maliciouscompliance
EDIT: since a few people asked - I posted in this comment below why I think lemmy has a much better chance than voat did
I generally agree with your statement. In addition to the hateful community, voat was being manipulated (IMO) by external organization(s) to amplify the hate. Possible reasons were that voat was a honeypot for law enforcement and that a free voat was a threat to the already controlled corporate sites like reddit. Perhaps I’m being overly paranoid, but the antisemitism in particular never seemed entirely organic.
In the end, voat still had potential but it died for the same reasons reddit is failing - centralized ownership. The voat owner / host eventually just called it quits and shut it down. Why? Perhaps voat outlived it’s usefulness to the big three (CIA / FBI / NSA).
Or was he coerced? I Remember it being a nice clean page and idea behind it but it all turned into racist posts. I am all for less moderation but holy hell it got crazy.