Voat — anti-Black racist subverse (name withheld: racial slur)

Every submission and comment that the Voat dataset of Mekacher and Papasavva holds for the anti-Black racist Voat subverse (its name is a racial slur and is withheld here): 41,816 submissions and 361,356 comments written between 21 June 2014 and 25 December 2020, with the author's user name, upvote and downvote counts, the submission each comment belongs to and each comment's depth in its thread. Voat (voat.co) was a news aggregator in the style of Reddit that shut down on 25 December 2020; its communities were called subverses. The package also holds 8,332 user profiles (registration date and the subverses the user moderated or created) of the users who wrote in this subverse or moderate or own it, and the profile of the subverse (description, subscriber count, creation date).

#Icwsm#Platform migration#Racist community#Subverse

Download data package README Original files as received BibTeX JSONSimilar datasets

Analytics

The interactive network needs JavaScript.

· graph.json

The full graph has 9,111 nodes; this view shows the 1,000-node sample the pipeline drew for display. Node size is centrality, colour is community.

9.1K
Nodes
112.8K
Edges
1.36e-03
Density
4
Components
-0.236
Assortativity
11.7%
Reciprocity
2.9K
Bridges
Most central nodes
Splooge0.2039
SubSaharanBeast0.1996
voatuser11280.1322
CognitiveDissident50.1214
1Sorry_SOB0.09286
DirectPressure0.0888
CANCEL-CAT-FACTS0.08847
1Icemonkey0.07761
mralexson0.07552
eagleshigh0.07398
Content metrics

403,172 records scored · min–maxmean ± 0.675 σ (the interquartile range if the values are roughly normal)mean

x upvotesμ 4.202 ± 9.354
min 0max 313
x downvotesμ 0.217 ± 0.925
min 0max 103
x depthμ 0.883 ± 6.466
min 0max 3.3K
6.7
Flesch–Kincaid grade
US school grade level
7.3
Automated readability index
Frequent terms
niggersniggerlikewhitepeopledonblackknowshitthinkfuckinggoodtimefuckwaywantrightgoingmanwhitesblackssaidgotneedlookthingyearsracedidnjewsdayletworkoldwomenhateworldbetterracistsurelifeactuallynewyearpolicedoesnmoneyprobablyafricastupid
Topic clusters

Topic 0

nigger
kill
like
dog
niggers
know
good
think

Topic 1

police
cop
shoot
murder
gun
arrest
charge
officer

Topic 2

jews
jew
jewish
israel
europe
people
country
hitler

Topic 3

good
time
happen
hear
day
yes
nice
sure

Topic 4

fuck
faggot
fucking
kike
stupid
read
retard
shit

Topic 5

dat
sheeit
wuz
nigga
beez
kangz
dey
muh

Topic 6

think
know
point
truth
idea
good
guess
username

Topic 7

pay
money
dollar
buy
toll
tax
price
sell

Topic 8

nigger
fuck
stupid
fucking
music
fatigue
rap
shit

Topic 9

africa
african
south
send
slave
slavery
country
water

Topic 10

delete
account
user
author
fail
system
accountability
accusation

Topic 11

eat
fry
meat
chicken
waffle
drink
cheese
grape
Show all 24 topics

Topic 12

monkey
ape
chimp
gorilla
zoo
chimpanzee
monkeyshine
like

Topic 13

racist
white
black
people
racism
race
live
liberal

Topic 14

trump
know
woman
argument
hoax
fact
president
think

Topic 15

laugh
funny
joke
hilarious
humor
thank
good
hard

Topic 16

comment
link
post
forget
upvote
sorry
reddit
downvote

Topic 17

white
people
race
privilege
fault
black
haiti
racist

Topic 18

video
watch
time
vid
movie
find
like
cut

Topic 19

hand
look
clean
piss
head
toilet
neck
water

Topic 20

nigger
white
black
people
fuck
like
racist
shit

Topic 21

automate
message
youtube
imgur
link
non
twitter
hooktube

Topic 22

animal
dog
breed
feed
nig
feral
pet
equipment

Topic 23

user
delete
Top hashtags
#1315
#blacklivesmatter113
#2112
#f58
#350
#blm41
#6440
#430
#imgrc21
#chimpire16
#backtoafrica14
#metoo14
#t14
#selection13
#s11
#justlikeus10
#88
#98
#alllivesmatter8
#isalutewhitepeople8
Top emoji
😂1.6K
🤣817
🏿531
🐵286
🏾267
🏻264
💩252
👍209
😎190
👃179
🐒159
🙉155
😆136
👌119
🙊109

Computed over the full corpus.

Record

Catalog key
voat-niggers
Authors
Mekacher, Amin; Papasavva, Antonis
Year
2022
Source paper
"I Can’t Keep It Up." A Dataset from the Defunct Voat.co News Aggregator
DOI / arXiv
10.1609/icwsm.v16i1.19382
License
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) (CC-BY-4.0)
Records
411,060
Nodes
9,111
Edges
112,835 (directed)
Attributes
nodes have attributes; edges have attributes
Languages
en
Collected
2014/2020 (2010s, 2020s)
Tasks
From the graph: link prediction, community detection
Region
Global (inferred: the platform is used worldwide)

Provenance

Originally published at
https://zenodo.org/records/5841668 link checked
Original files as received
The source files, unconverted, kept for reference: mirrored on echo.directory on 2026-11-03, 152.1 MB across 5 files. Checksums in MANIFEST.json. For use, start with the data package below.
Data package
Version 1.0.0 of this dataset as an ECHO Data Package: posts (403,172 rows), threads (41,816 rows), users (8,332 rows), communities (1 rows).
Structure
Temporal (timestamped), Node attributes, Text, Threaded conversations

How to cite

BibTeX

@misc{echo2026,
  title  = {ECHO: Exploratory Compendium of Humanity Online},
  author = {Switzer, Braden and Zafarani, Reza},
  year   = {2026},
  url    = {https://echo.directory},
  note   = {Syracuse University}
}

@article{Mekacher_2022,
  title     = {“I Can’t Keep It Up.” A Dataset from the Defunct Voat.co News Aggregator},
  volume    = {16},
  issn      = {2162-3449},
  url       = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v16i1.19382},
  doi       = {10.1609/icwsm.v16i1.19382},
  journal   = {Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media},
  publisher = {Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)},
  author    = {Mekacher, Amin and Papasavva, Antonis},
  year      = {2022},
  month     = May,
  pages     = {1302–1311}
}

APA

Switzer, B., & Zafarani, R. (2026). ECHO: Exploratory Compendium of Humanity Online [Data repository]. Syracuse University. https://echo.directory

Mekacher, A., & Papasavva, A. (2022). Voat — anti-Black racist subverse (name withheld: racial slur) [Data set]. https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v16i1.19382

MLA

Switzer, Braden, and Reza Zafarani. ECHO: Exploratory Compendium of Humanity Online. Syracuse University, 2026, echo.directory.

Mekacher, Amin, and Antonis Papasavva. Voat — anti-Black racist subverse (name withheld: racial slur). 2022, doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v16i1.19382.

BibTeX · RIS · CSL-JSON

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