On December 21st 2020, the administrator of Voat announced its upcoming shutdown on December 25th 2020. Thus, I began work on this video, in the hopes for it to become a historical record on Voat's financial troubles and eventual decline. Its not as simple as "ran out of money", no matter what the faithful tell you. These people, who have faith in Ruqqus and Saidit and other Reddit Alternatives, will tell you "That could never happen to us!", but they are deluding themselves. Watch the video to see why. A bunch of articles say the founder of Voat is named Justin Chastain, but I have no way of verifying if that's true, so I didn't say it. Instead I called him Putt. This video was focused on presenting the evidence so you can build your own conclusion about Voat's decline. I encourage you to read Putt's statements in full before making assumptions. It seems like he wanted to hire people as some sort of status symbol, "Its what makes us different from the rest". On the same token, he didn't want ads on the site. But he DID want to publish all his code to Github, which he claims made the DDOS attacks easier to accomplish. It seems like Putt's whims caused this collapse when everything piled on. Hiring people, getting ddossed, disabling registration, never asking for donations or advertising, disappearing for months on end without telling anyone, and so on. It would be so easy to blame the mainstream media for this, but the fact is... Voat failed because of Putt. As captain of the ship, the blame falls on him. I want to believe he learned something, but he's always said "God made this happen", as though God has a stake in Voat or something. Its his way of deflection, of shifting the blame. And I'm not buying it. Caveat! Being censored from google search results, kicked from paypal, blacklisted from web hosting providers - made this shutdown a certainty. Still, my contention is that even in the best circumstances, Putt would have sh^t the bed.