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
view the rest of the comments →
3dk ago
If you don't want to give away personal info online, Localbitcoins.com is one option I know of. It wasn't available in my area, but I was able to find a similar site. You could also try selling something on Openbazaar. For example, I bought a steam giftcard with cash at a store, then sold it for a slightly cheaper amount of bitcoin. Look up how to find a trusty escrow for OB, if you do this.
Reminder: Read up on basic use, always double check everything, don't mess around with lots of money and use common sense to avoid scams.
Getting bitcoin is the hardest part, after that it's awesome. You can send it to anyone who accepts it or you can make your own "cold storage vault" that's more secure than most bank accounts, just in case bitcoin takes over the world...
psymin ago
I'm a BTC guy who keeps a client and a blockchain locally. Is there a way to buy and sell BTC anonymously that doesn't need the full blockchain?
3dk ago
You can use the electrum wallet and sell steam giftcard codes on openbazaar. It's tedious, but it's the only way I know of. I'm sure there are better ways. I'm enthusiastic about bitcoin, but I'm not exactly an expert, I just like messing around with it for fun.