As title asks. Looking to get people's take on this. As one of the few legitimate free speech sites I'm surprised it isn't more popular.
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4chan is still around, maybe not as popular as it once was but it’s still kickin. VOAT was pretty big for a long time, and my guess is, they would’ve kept their user base to this day had the CEO of VOAT not chosen to shut the site down. I remember the excuse was he didn’t have the funding necessary to keep the site up, but there were tons of users willing to ease that burden and he shut down the site anyway, which made a lot of the users feel like it was a honeypot operation or some shit. The CEO dealt with repeated DDoS attacks on VOAT, PayPal dropped them, the German server dropped VOAT, so it was an uphill battle always, probably a big enough headache to just let the site go. Obviously, VOAT was never even close to as big as the major social media sites, but it was big enough to survive a lot longer than it did if the CEO didn’t let it all go.
Indeed. While some people have talked about 4chan being compromised by glowies, the attitude of the site and much of the culture of it's various boards certainly hasn't changed, which is why I would at least partially disagree.
I do remember voat a fair bit. I think in many ways it was a forerunner to scored, even if I do remember the shutdown fairly well. And I can understand why it had to shut down due to financial issues.
It has changed quite a lot. /b/ was once fun. The news board that turned into /pol/ had leftists genuinely defending their honor in regular debates on every issue and it wasnt full of 1-sentence loaded question fallacy threads ("Why are men giving up?", "why is drumpf trying to destroy the economy?", and so on) and straight up demoralization. There was a negligible number of LARPagans, indians, and trannies (who were generally refered to as crossdressers or transvestites at the time), natsoc had not yet fully taken a foothold- it was still the cutting edge of edgy- and the word "incel" hadn't even been invented yet; the term was "kissless virgin", and somehow, not one legacy MSM news outlet anchor ever once uttered the phrase "kissless virgin", because in terms of 4chan involvement glowies mostly went after actual crazies and sex criminals instead of rotating feverishly perpetual 24/7 wide-umbrella psy-ops of questionable import and dignity i.e. dragging the the most powerful government in the world into petty and needless meme wars that it can (and does occasionally) actually lose against basement dwellers.