Voat, a Swiss-based clone of the popular website, saw an inflow of users after Reddit’s website admins banned some subforums for harassing behavior. Voat copies Reddit’s design and layout, but was not ready for such popularity and even had to ask for donations to keep it running.

Voat positions itself as “a censorship-free community platform”. The site operators issued a statement, saying that they were sorry for Reddit and admitting they never anticipated such events. As a result, the website wasn’t ready for an accelerated influx of new users and was forced to ask for Bitcoin donations to keep the site alive.

We should remind that the banned subreddits included “hamplanethatred” and “fatpeoplehate”. These subforums were focused on harassing and abusing overweight people. The Reddit owners also banned racist forum “shitniggerssay” for harassing behavior.

In response, Reddit users have expressed their discontent with the new site policy to the site’s interim CEO, Ellen Pao, who took over the top job late last year. Several weeks ago, Reddit made the first efforts to clean up its very uncontrollable community: the website introduced new rules to its privacy policy, which included ban on posting of “involuntary pornography”. Today Reddit goes further and tightens up its stance on harassment. In result, Ellen Pao found herself personally in the firing line. There were a number of subforums focused at criticizing her decisions, but those were not banned despite being very offensive.

As for the rest, Reddit has returned to normal. After the users have discussed the multiple bans, the attention turned to discussion of Bethesda Softwork’s much-expected post-apocalyptic video game Fallout 4.