Voat is a great reddit alternative, to be honest, but the fact that it is small now is what it deterring others from joining, which in turn is preventing its growth. To say the owner doesn't have a clear vision for it is kind of pointless, because his vision for it is the exact same as the vision for Reddit except he plans on it being censorship-free. The Reddit community itself (not the admins, not the CEO, just the users) are a huge part of why people have been moving to Voat as serious discussion and maturity on Reddit is almost non-existent. Boat's community has a feel of Reddit circa 2008, which is awesome, IMO. Voat will be a great site once the user base grows to a decent size, but it never will if people keep looking over it because of its size. People want an alternative, but they expect it to just automatically have hundreds of thousands of users when they get there. It isn't going to work like that, and we are going to have to build the community ourselves. When Digg fell, Reddit's user base was absolutely tiny, but look where it is now.

Voat's vision is to keep it's content and community free of censorship, which makes it the perfect place for CoonTown. It is almost just like Reddit except for karma, and their changes actually make a lot of sense and really help deter vote manipulation and whoring to an extent. Nothing will ever completely stop it, but they are at least putting an effort into it. They use Comment Contribution Points, for anyone who doesn't know, which are basically the number of upvotes you receive for your contributions (comments). You get a set number of upvotes per 24 hours until you reach a certain amount of CCP, then you upvote as many times as you wish. You cannot downvote at all until you reach 100 CCP, which is a good thing because people tend to use down votes when they disagree with something instead of their intended purpose, which is to downvote only when the post is off topic or irrelevant. Their system isn't perfect, but it does work. Everything else is pretty much exactly what you are used to here, the community is just small as of yet. If more people go there and contribute instead of waiting for others to do it for them, it will be a great alternative to Reddit. With everything going on on Reddit nowadays, we need an alternative even if it's only to show Reddit that we are not going to stand for their bullshit.