The problem with Voat wasn't that some people were "talking politics" on the front page. The problem was that the vast majority where anti-semites, racists, and otherwise horrible. That's beyond "talking politics" in any decent sense of the phrase.
One of the more interesting lessons was how important it is to use the radiant heat from a burning piece of wood to build and sustain heat in other pieces of wood. It works a bit like fuel rods in a fission reaction. When you keep the logs separate they will burn, but not vigorously. But if you bring two glowing logs close together, you can see them mutually heat each other and drive up the rate of combustion.
I think something like that happens with these concentrated communities.
https://www.thewrap.com/daily-stormer-founder-ironic-nazis-a...
The Rule of Goats: even if you say you're only fucking goats ironically, you're still a goatfucker
In the linked post you'll see references to "Angel", an anonymous individual that was funding Voat up until - apparently - March of this year. The comments refer to this individual, in a negative light, surrounded by both three parenthesis and the star of David.
In other words, the level of toxicity is on a completely different level.
4Chan basically requires you to prefix and postfix all your nouns with certain slurs.
People are mostly the same all over so I assume like 90% of the stupid crap you see on Voat or anywhere else is just people trying to virtue signal to each other and they don't honestly believe that garbage (even HN has its own brand of this) and only a minority of users honestly believe what they type. People are very good at fitting in.
Sure, it looks bad if Reddit is your frame of reference but if 4Chan is your frame of reference then it's just the same old layer of garbage on top of whatever content you're actually there for.
The way 4chan uses suffixes like "f*g" (which is mostly jocular/memey, even if in bad taste) is not the same as the kind of outright hate speech you'll find all over voat. Voat might be more comparable with /pol/ in particular.
We aren't, because unlike a criminal conspiracy, political ideas are viral. They don't spread well in the shadows. Like with an epidemic, if you even slightly lower the r factor, those ideas lose much of their power.
If you keep them in the light, if you normalize them, they spread like wildfire - as we have seen over the past few years.
Being on reddit anchored them to a wider community and gave them rules to abide by. This meant the true nastiness wasn't on display only hinted at. People drawn in by the memes from wider reddit weren't immediately repelled by the kind of nastiness that's on display in thedonald.win.
Now they're on their own platform they have no anchor and no real rules, they'll "muh free speech" themselves to destruction.
What I'm trying to say is that the idiots you see probably are dumb enough to think they're geniuses, but there's a huge invisible support base (on all sides) of non-radicals who are fairly rational. And I think experience is the biggest difference between the groups. If you've seen a neighboring store burned you feel one way, if you've seen a neighbor threatened you feel another. The problem then is sharing experiences honestly so we can construct a mutual view of reality and then discuss the same issues.
I think it's more complex than that all (or even most) republicans are racist.
Once they take large amounts of investment money they have to begin producing a return on it. From that point on users are the product and the brands are the real users.