Earlier quoted context omitted.
Voat isn't just what you get with no censorship. It's what you get when you're a new alternative to a large incumbent: you are populated almost 100% by people banned by the incumbent. Nobody else has a reason to join your platform. It's a phenomenon that makes it even harder to compete with an incumbent social network.
There's a great video that goes through this phenomenon (in the context of Youtube vs VidMe) [0]. It points our exactly that the people who adopt a new platform tend to be the people most toxic for the original. I have no idea how you get around this. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3snVCRo_bI
You start by courting people with an actual real, personal, counterculture message that doesn't get played in the mainstream media, and start with THAT community.
The Dave Rubin's of the world don't care about free speech. You can tell because they don't care about women's voices that are suppressed in workplaces. They don't care about Muslim or even atheist voices that are suppressed in political campaigns. They only care about white male voices and the occasional woman or person of color who happens to also care about guns or the scourge of feminism or some other primarily white male topic.
If you really want to create a bastion for free speech you would need to care about women's voices and black lesbian voices and disabled voices and fat voices and all of that.
But the Dave Rubin's of the world don't believe those voices are suppressed. You can tell because he doesn't invite anyone like that on his show. And as long as they keep thinking that white men are somehow uniquely suppressed due to "political correct culture" and that women and fat people and trans people ar just universally adulated and celebrated and welcome to speak at every occasion... As long as they keep believing that, the Voats of the world will continue to be cesspools.
I fear the reason they can't do that is they'd realize that the Dave Rubin's and Ben Shapiro's of the world are already well enfranchised and their speech is suppressed far far less than literally every other demographic.
And to be totally clear: I am talking about, for example white women at tech companies in San Francisco who are fired for honestly taking about their work, because the men around them interpret any assertiveness from them as an attack. Just to set the terms of the debate: women literally fired for taking about the work they were hired to do in a way any man could talk and receive only praise.
As an example.