Voat — v/politicalnews
A Voat (Reddit alternative, 2013–2020) dataset of 17,135 submissions, 9,733 comments, 1,957 users, 3,783 collaboration edges, collected by Mekacher & Papasavva (ICWSM 2022) via full platform crawl. Each record contains user nodes (registration date, moderation status), directed weighted edges (commenter→submitter, weight=upvotes+1), submission titles and bodies, comment text, upvotes, downvotes, depth. Complete dataset for the Voat subverse v/politicalnews, covering its full lifetime on the platform (2013–2020). Includes all 17,135 submissions and 9,733 comments with full text and engagement metadata.. Suitable for social network analysis, community dynamics, content moderation, platform migration studies, online community research.
Cite this dataset at
voat-politicalnews.echo.directory
Analytics
The full graph has 1,957 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
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Topic 5
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Topic 11
Show all 17 topics
Topic 12
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Topic 16
Computed over the full corpus.
Record
- Catalog key
voat-politicalnews- 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
- 26,108
- Nodes
- 1,957
- Edges
- 3,783 (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
- Hosted copy
- Mirrored on echo.directory on 2026-10-09, 26.5 MB across 4 files. Checksums in MANIFEST.json.
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 — v/politicalnews [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 — v/politicalnews. 2022, doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v16i1.19382.