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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lawofzero ago
I wasn't in the position to donate anything during my last round here and after all this time I still haven't made anything of myself. I have tried my hardest to live by my anti-establishment sentiments and be true to myself but it is getting harder and harder to live in this world.
@atko, sincerely, if I could I would donate enough to this website to keep it going for decades. After more than a decade of modding and tweaking and playing around with code while working blue collar jobs, I have been presented with the opportunity to study. Once I am on the roll that I know that I am destined for, I am definitely making this website a part of my payment to the world for putting up with this slacker.
I'm not sure what I really came here to say other than to praise this place and reflect but I wish that I could contribute somehow, I don't even have a bank account at the moment. And I'm at the point of drunkenness where I cannot remember where I started once I've reached the end of something. Thank Odin for gesture based keyboards.
DM90 ago
I think its because im high but the first time i read your first sentence i read it as "if it wasn't for the poison then i'd donate" then my mind created this possible scandal where voat had poisoned someone. then i re-read it. laughed. then posted this.
DM90 ago
and then this