See the last link; I've been complaining about this since I joined Voat a year ago. As I state down the rabbit hole in the first link, I didn't join Voat while it was still whoaverse (~2 years ago) because I told them their voting algorithm was trivial to exploit and they said Atko has said he will never ever allow anyone to change the voting algorithm, so I knew this would inevitably devolve into Reddit 2.0. It's painfully obvious if you just look at the clustering coefficients (who associates with who), then you see the same people mysteriously show up to the same random posts, and how they're all mysteriously in the same IRC chats, powermod the major subs and squat on all the minor ones.