Take a look at Voat right now, all the old users of Voat are complaining about the new influx of Reddit users flooding the site with memes and stuff. It's quite interesting to watch. Voat will probably "win", but honestly, they are winning the "who hosts the memes and annoying people" competition. Congrats.
Well, if our hypothesis is "most people are idiots" then the GCF of humans might very well be "is an idiot." If that's the case then appealing to the largest number of people would seem to imply that you appeal to idiots, whereas anywhere that deters idiots will thereby deter humanity's GCF, and yield lower rates of adoption. I built some "ifs" and "perhapses" into this, but I stand by my analysis.
Voat is turning into a front end aggregator of Imgur and other image board files that are all in a directory structure (subverses). I was kinda hoping Voat would gain some momentum and be the reddit of 6-7 years ago but honestly, Hubski fits that bill better.
Before the recent turmoil I bet Voat was fairly similar to Reddit back in the day. It was a small, community that the cat hadn't let out of the bag yet. Unfortunately large influxes of new users, especially in an exodus like this one, will force a site towards the lowest common denominator.
Voat was more or less already given the template of being a close reddit mirror quite early on, just with different community policing strategy. Interestingly even Voat users are trying to move away from Imgur, being wary of the Imgur admin's similar (not quite identical) takedown policies.
I think it's interesting that there's a lot of coverage over people leaving reddit because of censorship, and little coverage (that I've seen) of people leaving reddit because they are becoming increasingly aware of how much hate content it (still) hosts. I guess the second camp is perhaps less vocal.
I think a good number of people on Reddit don't really take it seriously. They're just there to waste time and nothing more. To them, the drama that goes on really doesn't mean much to them. Also some people just go to Reddit for the niche subreddits because Reddit is one of the few places on the Internet where you can have a thousand people or so that are interested in something quirky like abandoned buildings. That subreddit has over 270,000 subscribers. Where else can you find a community that big to talk about abandoned buildings or anything else like that?
The later is what has turned me off of Reddit. It is infested with racists and misogynists.
Take a look at Voat right now, all the old users of Voat are complaining about the new influx of Reddit users flooding the site with memes and stuff. It's quite interesting to watch.