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.
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.