Fair warning: this will be a long post. I STRONGLY suggest if you wish to remain on Voat, please read it. I can't rightfully say I speak for everyone, but I do know I speak for a lot of current and veteran goats. At the risk of looking like a self-fellating narcissist, I'm going to quote a lot of my own posts here in the effort to compile them into one large post explaining why the Voat auto-immune response backlash was so harsh and continues to be that way. I do this because I've spent hours trying to articulate the opinion of Voat's zeitgeist so newfags will understand, and rather than fractured disconnected posts here and there, I'm going to combine them into a megapost so you can get the full picture all at once.

Hopefully, enough people see this and give it exposure, so we can get the message out. Too many newcomers are thinking we're anti-newfags. We're not; we are anti autocratic moderation, and anti-reddit. You do not do things here like you did on reddit, it defeats the purpose.

All these posts will be broken into their own quotes, and they're all posts I've written as a response to someone talking about the current 'theawakening' mod debacle.

The mods run this ship how they see it. If we don't like it, we know where the other Sub is

This only works with a healthy, small amount of regularly incoming users who take the time to assimilate into the site culture. If you have a moderator whose goal is controlling information and behavior, and they make a sub for a topic for which there already exists one, and they establish ridiculous Draconian measures of moderating that run counter to the spirit of Voat, any users who agree to these terms and stay in that sub become accustomed to such rules. They begin to think this is how things should be run, while most of the other non-sub users in the rest of the site disagree. And when these new sub users, accustomed to such horrendous modding behaviors, come to this site in giant droves, it threatens the rest of the site because then they could take that cancerous mentality of tolerating such horrible behavior to other places. They start unknowingly changing the fabric of how things are done here, and the traditional way of how things are done here are precisely why this place is so much fucking better than Reddit.

Anything that seeks to bleed this site into a plebbit clone needs to be rejected and refuted, with great prejudice. I know you would absolutely fucking hate it if thirty Chinese suddenly came into your house and started changing how people live in it, what the culture is, and how things are done.

(This post chain is from a new Q user)

One of our central values is unity

Right, and as a unified, cohesive group of people, you yourselves can determine whether you want to downvoat something into oblivion for whatever reason you choose as a community. You don't need an autocratic moderator or five. When you do need one, you as a community ping one of them with reports and say "get this crap off our sub."

& another is reasoned discussion & debate

Which the two main mods on here seem to be pretty hard against, especially with the subjective "help the cause" rule, or the ridiculous "dividing the base" ban rationale. Moderators are not meant to lead, they are meant to be like the ideal politician, they are servants of the people. They are not despots who get to tell people "don't like it, leave," they are supposed to be justicars of the community's will.

Give us a little time to get our shit together—we'll adapt

The issue doesn't have a whole lot to do with you, but with the moderation. Indirectly, this involves you, and what kind of asinine, totalitarian bullshit you're willing to put up with. If you don't demand your free speech stop getting fucked with by power tripping mods, you don't actually have it.

I want a board that discusses a specific topic

Nobody fucking cares what YOU specifically want personally [[user note out of context here: this is in an argument talking about the new Q sub versus the already established 7 month old sub]], as I previously established. You don't get to do whatever you want at the cost of something we hold dear. You assimilate to site culture, or you fuck off to where you like it better, based on your own logic. You do not dictate TO US how things on this site work here, you fucking newfag. Go make another sub on plebbit and goddamn stay there. If you don't, and you persist in such insufferable anti-Voat faggotry, all the real, genuine goats are going to shit on you and laugh while angry.

They arent banning to control information flow.

Yes they are and your excuses ring hollow. Nobody deletes or bans for anything other than illegal stuff or outright spam. If it's offtopic and the community agrees it doesn't belong, the community downvoats it or doesn't engage. Otherwise, it isn't free speech. I don't give a fuck what your smooth brained rationalizations for such shitty moderation are, it IS control of information and you're either a gullible dumbfuck or a shill for claiming otherwise.

This is unacceptable behavior...on this site. None of this "if you don't like it go somewhere else" no. No, you don't do it, period, anywhere on Voat. It is the entire point of Voat's existence. Fuck off with this shit.

If you don't like it, stay in your safe space

This is what we call both "irony" and "projection." You must need some pretty insane glasses to deal with such short sightedness.

Probably more then this site had subscribers before yesterday.

Yeah, and I fucking miss yesterday. This place is better than Reddit because of free speech, it IS NOT reddit 2.0 no matter how much you wish it was. There are specific lines that are not acceptable to follow, like banning and deleting things because you simply don't like what they say. No, "if you don't like it go somewhere else" does not work here, it doesn't matter if they remain contained to their sub, it is unacceptable site behavior. YOU do not get to flee a site that kicked YOU off of it, and show up to an alternative and think YOU get to dictate to others how things work.

We're not talking about the users, we're talking about the mods, who hold power to directly shape a sub. There is absolutely no redemption for that new sub unless 1) the mods are removed or 2) the users all leave. There is no other path to a better future. It's been proven to be compromised and that the mods do not hold free speech in any regard; what little good faith was given to them by default has been instantaneously ruined. I repeat: as long as those mods control that sub, said sub is utterly irredeemable. It doesn't matter if all the mods suddenly wised up tomorrow and promised never to be so Draconian, you simply cannot take them at their word.

Personally, I think Q is a fucking joke and you're falling for stupid, vague bait I myself could easily create. But that doesn't mean I think you're a shill or controlled op. THESE fucking mods are definitely that, they've made that point pretty fucking clear.

I'm quite impressed with how well voat is organically fighting off this infection.

Some of us have seen this scenario play out on other sites. Several times. The fight needs to happen; if it doesn't, it's like a cancer. It only progresses, it's a downhill slide from which there is no coming back, without invasive measures to excise the tumor. As I explained at length in another post, if you allow so many users to sit contained in their sub and foster a mentality of "this is okay" with utterly abusive and power tripping mod actions, that mentality and tendency for rationalization WILL bleed into other parts of Voat, and it WILL change the site for the worse.

It cannot be allowed, any step down that road is not one we can un-walk.

I'll stop it here. It's taken me far too long to do all this, but the point is that I hope newfags who are confused and don't understand the hostility comprehend the reasoning behind it. Assimilate with site culture, or you're going to have a bad time. Site culture of holding free speech on a pedestal is the entire point of its existence. Don't mistake our hatred of what's happened here with the goats hating newfags; you wouldn't like it if three families just barged into your house, took up a couple rooms, and started dictating terms about how they're going to live and you're going to need to deal with it. We're not pushovers here.

Apologies for the book and congrats if you got through all of it. If any of you have any issue with what I've said here, feel free to exercise your free speech without fear of being banned for wrongthink. I'll provide my counterarguments to your problems if you argue in good faith.