Look at this graph: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/voat.co It shot up to its current rank in almost no time. That is a lot faster growth than both reddit and HN experienced.
Of course it did; there was a big hullabaloo that led to some people migrating to it. That's not really a sign that they did anything right, or that they'll have similar momentum in the future.
I don't think minimaxir was "dissing" voat.co, just stating facts. As for voat's success, I can't see how it can ever hope to supersede reddit - or even come close to competing with reddit - given that it is indeed a blatant clone. There's no real redeeming qualities of voat that are not already present on Reddit.
I personally am not using voat yet, but think that the fact that ModLogs are totally public and open instead of being hidden away and largely controlled by a couple of cabals of users is a huge plus.
I don't see voat as being a long term viable thing though, since it's just one kid in college and the recent surge of users was largely driven by an exodus from reddit over banning politically incorrect speech.
In fairness, I will admit my recap was more terse than my usual HN posts. Mostly because this particular startup deleted-then-resubmitted their Show HN multiple times yesterday.
