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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realpatrickstewart ago
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, Focus more on keeping the site alive than Freedom of Speech. (WHAT? WHAT?! No, hear me out.)
You have what matters, a dedication to Freedom of Speech, at the core of your being. All policies flow out of that.
You need to worry more about the money side of keeping it alive. Get enough revenue to hire at least one full-time staff and pay for bandwidth. If possible, have the hired hand also perform marketing. Have him/her post about Voat on other social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Twitch, Reddit, Slashdot, etc.) in their time not being spent on technical issues. You have a "reputation" for being full of racists and pedophiles. That's OBVIOUSLY not true but you need someone actively (but politely) pushing against the lies.
Also have your hire work to get advertisers. If a YouTube channel with 10,000 subscribers can get ads, then surely a website with more users can get ads, deals, sponserships. Look into gaming and other sponsorships that focus on "viral marketing to kids". They're more willing to try non-standard venues like YouTube.
If you have to get rid of the .00001% of super toxic people, to keep the lights on. Do it. Super toxic people go where ever they can. (I'm NOT calling normal people toxic like some SJW.)
You CAN have your cake and eat it too. You just have to not eat the whole thing. You CAN have plenty of reasonable, normal, advertisers around somewhat controversial content. Just make sure you're not bending over backwards to please people who go out of their way to have the most controversial, niche content that angers 99.999% of the world.
Even then, holding onto 100% inclusion, there ARE options out there. You could even go as far as to distinguish super controversial subverses from the "normal" ones. So you have your "normal" Voat with 99.9% of content that ads show up on. And the "dark" Voat where ads don't show up so advertisers don't get angry seeing their brand next to sick shit.