Mine is that it's NSA owned and operated.
This is it exactly. Thank you for typing this out. I keep hanging on trying to figure out what is going on, but that is the nature of the psyop. So many accounts posting so many different things, all of them coordinated and controled to a certain degree.
As an exercise in psychology it is remarkable what happened. How you described the initial goals of Voat being a free speech haven to the affected of reddit, but in the end it just drew in a lot of controversy is telling of how we act subconsciously.
Still I cry.
I'm glad I was able to shed some light on it. Same here Voat was my home for almost 3 years coming up in June. Something that is going down that you may be interested in with archive links.
I heard of users not being able to delete their accounts. Is that what a global ban is?
Also, not to pick a fight with you, but could it really be as simple as overreaction? Putt/Atko do have a huge problem on their hands plus they are living a life, there might be somethings keeping them from active communication besides gag orders?
But still it is really out of character and at the end of the day, it felt like Voat was going downhill anyways.
Atko started the site just as a free speech alternative to Reddit, it was doing alright. Then it started picking up a lot of members from the different exoduses from Reddit, FPH, Coontown, Ellen Pao, etc, etc.
It became more and more of a conservative site. Pushing the boundaries through what was considered acceptable, became more of a /pol forum. He got tired of developing the site to deal with people he didn't like. So he passed it on to Putt.
Putt being more active before Atko left, slowly started being inactive and unreachable. Gave developing rights to members that didn't have the site base's interest in mind and became faux-opensource.
Voat chat got taken down without it ever being replaced, disallowing users to communicate in real time, without much explanation.
They did a massive rollover to a different site base and shit started getting real weird. People were losing hundreds of CCP and SCP in minutes. Certain people spoke out about it and their accounts didn't get deleted, but they lost access to them with being able to login.
SRS started making a strong presence with gaslighting on the boards, downvoting everything that would hurt their cause to prevent it from being pulled up on /v/all where most users browse.
Subverse transfers never got approved, blatant spamming of websites without users getting banned, only downvoated. PDFs being posted recently that has a potential to be malicious whithout the user being banned.
It just turned into a leftist honeypot IMO. Too many coincidences going on over there to be trusted anymore.