During the past 24 hours we have witnessed a large influx of new users. Current stats show that Voat has been visited by 168,213 people in the last 24 hours alone, making 9,571,200 requests and burning through 117 GB of bandwidth. We are currently running at 300% our normal volume. You can see the spike very clearly here.
Because of this, we were forced to scale up our hardware to accommodate the new users, but this will incur significant costs which we won’t be able to cover without your help. Voat gets money primarily from your donations and ad-sales, but ad-sales have so far been unable to cover the expenses. In the past 24 hours, we have received $1,085 in donations and ad-orders through our store http://store.voat.co, and $180 through bitcoin. This is amazing and we sincerely thank you for every dollar you contribute to keep Voat online, but our past experience shows that donations and ads combined can no longer cover Voat hosting fees.
Voat also has a major flaw: we have no fulltime staff. Voat is currently managed by two people who have full time jobs “on the side”, which makes things very complicated. Voat needs fulltime staff to monitor the servers, respond to support and abuse emails, process donations and keep the wheels turning. With donations alone, this has not been possible so far, resulting in poor site performance and user experience.
We have all witnessed in one way or another how a website which takes on investors can slowly degrade and become outright unusable. Given our commitment to Freedom of Speech, we have to be very careful about who we partner with. Because of this, we have rejected several offers from investors who we believe would not be compatible with Voat’s core philosophy. For the record, we have had investment offers from all over the world during the past 2 years, many of which we were either too busy to entertain or too concerned with underlying motives of the parties involved.
So, what do we do?
We want to keep Voat alive. We want to be able to work full time on what we love and do best. We don’t want to change what Voat stands for or Voat’s core principles, and thus we need your help. If you have contacts or relationships with potential investors who also believe in and support our Freedom of Speech commitment, please let us know and please let them know that we need their help.
Until we have a permanent solution, we need you to donate, buy ads and merchandise (to be announced soon). Every bit helps.
Edit 1: typos
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Atko ago
This would be a very good way to further involve the users and my gut feeling is that this is probably the best solution. Even as low as 1k should be doable. We are open for suggestions.
Escort ago
I would invest a grand or so, no question.
Uma_Thurman ago
This is a perfect use case for a dapp on ethereum.
Donbuster ago
So I had a response for this, and it turned into a crazy long jumble of ideas and personal brainstorming. To keep other users from having to scroll through a giant wall of text, I put it up on pastebin for anyone interested. I talked about issues with this in particular, and my general thoughts on funding. Warning, it's unstructured as fuck...
http://pastebin.com/aLn8UrPN
I need sleep.
go1dfish ago
You could set up something like colored coins on the Bitcoin blockchain:
http://bitcoinist.com/colored-coins-work-bitcoin-blockchain/
Basically you map something akin to a share to an incredibly minuscule bit of bitcoin and it gets tracked in the blockchain. NASDAQ and such are experimenting with this for certain types of trades as well.
With this people could invest and receive dividends anonymously. Reddit was looking into something similar with /r/redditnotes (back when they actually had a free-speech and AR15 loving troll of a CEO named Yishan) but they abandoned it partially for legal reasons (and probably because the distributed bitcoin based reddit-like platform he was planning to go along with it would hurt to many feels for Pao).
Legal hurdles are likely to be the biggest hassle with any approach to investment. Being outside of the US you might have more freedom on that front though.
Voat_a_Goat_Mamma ago
My suggestion: A PO Box we can mail money orders to.
Dereliction ago
If Voat is a US entity, you'd be restricted to a small number of investors unless you make Voat a public company, which is a costly and demanding process. You'll need a good lawyer and accountant, regardless what you choose.
flashurnands ago
I'm not sure this is the right way to go but if you decide it's what is best, well, I've done a lot worse with much more than 1k.
Bing11 ago
Mad River Glen is a ski cooperative in Vermont, USA. They sell "shares" for ~$2500 to their skiers. For the share you get 1 vote in shareholder meetings. No one can own more than 4 shares. If you are a shareholder you actually have to spend at least $500/year on the mountain.
This might be a model worth considering...
stuff123 ago
Dude, what is your exact plan for spending this cash? You're asking for donations, yet you're not being transparent about where it's being spent!? I know this is part time stuff, but you need to tell people how you're spending the cash so people can actually assist you if you're making a mistake. What if a cloud provider like Rackspace is willing to give you a discount, but they don't know if you're using AWS, Azure, GCP, etc.
You have the potential to become reddit, stop fucking around.
go1dfish ago
This is an older post but it helps put in perspective how much the hosting costs are:
https://voat.co/v/announcements/815298
shakin_my_head ago
As would I sounds like a win win.
Edit. Sounds like a headache for voat.
Robobama ago
It's not a bad idea, and its also a bad idea at the same time. I would take the time to seek out expert industry advice as well as legal advice, and then weigh the pros and cons of such a decision. I want to see this site succeed, but i definitely don't want to see it compromised from its current form.
psymin ago
I'm interested in what you come up with. I want voat to survive, I think it is a valuable resource. Valuable enough to invest in.
whisky_cat ago
I'd very much consider dropping a grand on Voat if this comes to fruition.
user1 ago
ditto.
DraxxThemSklounst ago
could be a goldmine too if reddit dies and everyone comes here.
MyNameIsBing ago
Reddit dying seems unlikely though. Maybe /u/Spez will fuck up more causing more people to come here. We an hope
ReactTM ago
I can see voat becoming bigger then reddit as they continue to fuck up. But yeah, I don't see reddit dying.
Chiefpacman ago
Same.
I don't like the idea of, give us money to throw at it for now, we'll work out a solution when we get there.
How about we work out a solution now. Hasn't this been an issue for a long time?
Edit: I hate to be this guy, but our admin pops in every 10 days. I honestly don't know how much he could be brought to care.
Chiefpacman ago
I went ahead and donated $5 to justify my complaining
SaneGoatiSwear ago
i have no problem being that guy!
people boycott video game devs for less.
the lack of communication, transparency, and growth are major warning bells.
qpwt ago
If the service is good, the users should be willing to pay for it without receiving equity in the company. When others take equity, you lose control, either by being beholden to 1 big investor or 1 thousand smaller investors. Plus, it would be difficult to parse through all of those investors. A majority of them could be from the same group of people, trying to take over Voat.
As I stated in my other comment, I would be willing to donate via recurring subscription. I don't mind if my identity is known to Voat, so long as Voat makes a reasonable effort to protect it. Supporting free speech is worth that.
Still others prefer anonymity. Understandable. Give the people what they want, eh?
EDIT: keep it simple. always the best method to ensure quality.
The_Bohemian ago
Pretty much exactly the problem with Reddit. The corporate paymaster controls the show.
Please avoid going down this path.
stuff123 ago
I think the bigger problem here is that we're running out of time to siphon off reddit. Let's say we don't get voat the investment it needs, then voat dies. Ok, now lets say voat gets an investment from some venture capital firm not related to conde nast, then voat lives but is doomed to suffer the same fate as reddit. Ok, so is that necessarily bad if voat suffers the same fate as reddit and ends up being replaced just like digg and reddit? I don't see a problem necessarily with this.
The real elephant in the room that needs to be addressed is that reddit is learning. Do you really think reddit is going to repeat its ellen pao or spez mistakes? No fucking way... Therefore, there will be less opportunities for voat to siphon off users and reach critical mass.
In other words, the enemy of my enemy is my friend for now.
Also, there are some investors out there that aren't complete dirt bags. Spez and Ohanian were mostly always in it for the monetary reward, so they took the first investments they could get (generally the worst come first in venture capital) rather than looking for an investor who shared the vision for the mission statement. Remember, these people have billions of dollars to burn through, they're not overly concerned with seeing ROI's from a couple million dollars of investment into something that has the capability of replacing reddit.