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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rwbj ago
@Atko
Ads on this site were never going to be a consistent source of revenue. People don't like seeing ads, and people who run ads are only going to do so when they see some visible returns from such. Like you mentioned charity is a short term thing. People might click on and buy some ads to support the site at first, but that novelty and the funding it provided will dissipate without returns in the future.
Instead of ads, add a simple message box that can be 'gamed' for money. For instance buying a fresh message in the textbox that lasts for a minimum of 'x' minutes/hours costs $y. The price to replace that message goes constantly down eventually making it $0 after some fair period of time, perhaps 24 hours. Now everybody is looking at the messages, not only because they'd probably be entertaining, but also to see if they can grab the free message spot. Somebody who wants to get in on top of everybody else can pay a nominal fee to do just that.
Or integrate some sort of post/thread bumps and visibility for currency, similar to Reddit Gold. They tried a bunch of random ideas to monetize the idea and that's one of the few that actually worked. Learn from their many failures and copy their few successes where it's not detrimental to the ideals of Voat. Reddit Gold actually helped on Reddit to bring some gems to life once they were buried or brigaded.
Basically make funding Voat FUN. Merchandise will likely have the same issues as the donations. The profit margins are tiny and you'll get a huge burst of initial support followed by a rapid decline down to a trickle where the opportunity cost involved in shipping everything out getting close to make the whole thing actually end up costing, rather than making, money!
Vailx ago
I like the idea of voat gold, but understand that it has serious opposition. The preferential flaring of posts in that manner, and the direct tie to money, really sets a lot of teeth gnashing. I'll point out that the current situation over on reddit- where their CEO edited posts in childish rage, leaving no trace, and then fessing up to it- ended up with his post fessing up to the editing with just a zillion Reddit Golds, and thousands and thousands of downvotes. The golds show that some people approved him (or hated the group he trolled, Trump supporters) enough to donate money to the site, and the site portrays that permanently, and on a dimension that is orthogonal to the normal upvote/downvote mechanic that normally represents their community standards. To me, that feels funny to look at.
Still, for less controversial things, it can be fun. I'm just saying, it's a move with a lot of consequences.
guinness2 ago
I propose those people with gnashing teeth come up with a better solution if they don't like Voat Gold.
potent1al ago
No not really. The thing that pisses people off about gold mostly is Reddit. For instance, Reddit hates some of it's users. the_donald specifically tells people not to gild comments as we shouldn't support Reddit... but then people from /r/politics guild them anyway. It's not the gilding people have a problem with, it's the contributing to Reddit part people have a huge problem with.
I remember Reddit initially had a lot of money problems and were desperate for donations until gilding came along and really saved them in a clutch way. Gold doesn't really hurt anyone, it's almost like a super vote that is outside the realm of whether something has a big vote or not. I think it's good, I think this should have been introduced on this site a long time ago. Between the decision of the site going away and adding gilding, easily easily add the gilding. You cannot count solely on donations to support a site like this, especially with the following context: a lot of Redditors are looking for alternative platforms. The server issues and weird downtime bugs of this site hold it back from becoming that legitimate competitor. So just consider that.
vertex ago
Maybe some microtransaction stuff. I have no idea, but I'm just throwing ideas out there.
Let people buy credits, and let them spend those credits on fun stuff. For example:
In addition to up/downvoating you can give medals to posts/comments, like "goat", "gold", "turd", whatever.
You can mute a comment for 5 minutes using credits. Muting doesn't mean that it's actually muted, just that people have to click on it to see it, a minor inconvenience that's still fun.
You can highlight comments (including your own) or maybe even sticky them using credits.
Maybe cosmetic items next to the username, like hats :)
Let people donate credits for submissions/comments, subtract a small processing fee for donations.
I think there should be a fine balance with something like this. Just enough to make it fun for people, but not too intrusive to make it obnoxious.
riggington ago
-Cosmetic comments? :D Fancy borders? Different font?
-Colorful username?
Ina_Pickle ago
That would be hilarious!