When it first popped up I made an account and took a look. I liked the 'free speech' and 'all are welcome' sales pitch. But at the time it was mostly vacant, and I didn't really like the layout.
I've gone back a couple times to have a quick look, and it's getting ugly. Maybe I'm not setting up my account or preferences or something, but when I logged in and clicked on 'categories' then 'philosophy' and got a page full of images with memes and other empty content. When I clicked on 'science' I got a page filled with discussions about gender or climate change, and nothing else.
Did I accidentally put gab into voat-mode?
Also, it just doesn't have a community feel. More like being in the midst of a mob. There's no compartmentalization, it's all one big group rather than a union of smaller groups.
I don't get it.
What's the appeal, or what am I doing wrong?
A lot of the people here started using Voat around the time the Reddit sub blackout happened. Once they scaled up to make room for new users, Voat was actually pretty great for a while. A combination of "normal" Redditors going back to Reddit, the hate sub banning fiasco shifting a ton of users to Voat and the 2016 US election kind of ruined it though.
It's small here and pretty slow in terms of content but it's nice to have a place that is dramaless. Were you one of the users who browsed the gundeals, darknetmartkets etc. subs that recently got banned? Personally I was more pissed off about the fake celebrity porn being banned because that is literally the only reason I still looked at Reddit.