Most people who went to Voat years ago remember their well known resident spammer/troll, Amalek.
Amalek would generally post long incoherent/autistic rants against the Jews ad nauseam until his account got banned and he had to create a new one (this happened almost daily).
Amalek was for the most part a novelty, a person with too much time on his hands that spent every waking hour spamming Voat. He was the bane of the admins existence as he was considered the most successful spammer. Most folks would downvoat him or troll him for the hell of it.
However if you go to Voat now you see his style of autistic anti-Jew rant that would once have been downvoated to oblivion now makes up a big portion of the top content on Voat.
So did Amalek win?
I think the real winner was Sanegoat. Once you could be silenced through downvotes is when it really started to be toxic. That one week Sanegoat was literally 50% of the content, copying and pasting. Then if you were new you'd just get downvoted if you were not alt-right or racist enough.
It wasn't just Amalek though, there's a lot of white nationalist accounts that photoshop crap and no one calls them out (or if they do it's lost in comments). People read the headlines and assume it's true. It's hard for me to tell which accts are part of a professional organization, or just derranged individuals online.