Voat — anti-gay subverse (name withheld: anti-gay slur)
Every submission and comment that the Voat dataset of Mekacher and Papasavva holds for the anti-gay Voat subverse (its name is an anti-gay slur and is withheld here): 23,694 submissions and 194,464 comments written between 18 February 2015 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 3,075 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).
Cite this dataset at
voat-anti-gay-slur-subverse.echo.directory
Analytics
The full graph has 3,485 nodes; this view shows the 1,000-node sample the pipeline drew for display. Node size is centrality, colour is community.
Topic 0
Topic 1
Topic 2
Topic 3
Topic 4
Topic 5
Topic 6
Topic 7
Topic 8
Topic 9
Topic 10
Computed over the full corpus.
Record
- Catalog key
voat-neofag- 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
- 224,848
- Nodes
- 3,485
- Edges
- 34,088 (directed)
- Attributes
- nodes have attributes; edges have attributes
- Languages
- en
- Collected
- 2015/2020 (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, 91.4 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 (218,158 rows), threads (23,694 rows), users (3,075 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-gay subverse (name withheld: anti-gay 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-gay subverse (name withheld: anti-gay slur). 2022, doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v16i1.19382.