> That ends in a cesspool that nobody is willing to spend money on or do business with.
That's not quite right. Voat was populated by the fringe that was evicted from other more mainstream platforms, Reddit in particular. So the primary demographic of their userbase is "people whose content isn't allowed on Reddit". Which given that Reddit is fairly permissive compared with many places results in an incredibly skewed userbase. Without a compelling reason for users that are more mainstream to switch I think this result is unsurprising.
The "free speech" side of fedi suffers from this dynamic as well. There's a growing contingent that's there simply because they were removed from Twitter.
This is all a great example of why deplatforming doesn't work at all. In seeking to silence various groups they instead get concentrated in specific locations which results in a greater degree of polarization.
That's not quite right. Voat was populated by the fringe that was evicted from other more mainstream platforms, Reddit in particular. So the primary demographic of their userbase is "people whose content isn't allowed on Reddit". Which given that Reddit is fairly permissive compared with many places results in an incredibly skewed userbase. Without a compelling reason for users that are more mainstream to switch I think this result is unsurprising.
The "free speech" side of fedi suffers from this dynamic as well. There's a growing contingent that's there simply because they were removed from Twitter.
This is all a great example of why deplatforming doesn't work at all. In seeking to silence various groups they instead get concentrated in specific locations which results in a greater degree of polarization.