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.
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.