Voat is as close to a Reddit clone as any website I have seen. The format as worked very well for Reddit for these years now but I'm curious to see if Voat will be able to pull it off.
Reddit has been going through drama after banning one of its largest hate subreddits and sacking a public facing employee. This has spurred a large number of users to look for other sites.
A big factor in Digg's demise was that Reddit was a smaller, scalable competitor that was able to accommodate the influx of users.
This time Voat is there but it still isn't a viable alternative; given that it isn't able to scale its technology. If they focus on fixing this, then it's just a matter of time before everyone an incident occurs that decides the grass is greener over there.
I'm surprised that community happiness isn't taken more seriously at Reddit. It's their biggest asset, and the whole Digg experience shows that it can be lost so easily.
Historically it's been very difficult to make social media sites profitable. Did Digg ever make a profit? To my knowledge Reddit is still in the red.
There has also been a large rhythmic trend of migrations especially in social. So it's very possible people are ready to move on to Voat, the question is will Voat find a way to make a profit?
They've mentioned exploring some interesting profit models, such as paid subscriptions and content sharing. I'd really like to see them make a big push with a reddit gold similar component but in a better way.
Essentially patronage for social media or content curation.
