Shove your face into a fireplace and die writing in pain after your eyeballs burst shit eating asshole.

https://i.imgflip.com/1plws8.jpg

JUST PLEDGED TO PAY $5 A MONTH FOR ONE YEAR WITH MY CREDIT CARD. Wish I could do more, but I have a Handicapped brother to care for. If everyone on voat will just give $5 a month I am sure you would be OK.

dammit. just got here & I like it. that's a lot of shekkles.

EVERYONE - If you came here from another, similar site, then you probably have had ad block enabled for quite some time. Please be sure to whitelist voat.co and lets ads through. It's a small way to show your support and it costs you nothing.

hey palmer lucky where you at bro

Can you send me a quick e-mail to [email protected] so I have your e-mail. I'd like to help Voat survive. I know some people in the industry that may be able to help out. I archive Reddit comments and submissions and do other data sciencey stuff.

One thing I have been meaning to discuss with you is making public comments and submissions on Voat available via Voat's API. One of the things that will help Voat survive is making it developer friendly through a fully functional API.

I'm not sure if comments and submissions are currently available via Voat's API and I know your primary concern right now is keeping Voat afloat, but let's keep the lines of communication open and discuss going forward.

Best of luck to you -- please reply if you have time.

(I tried to PM you but Voat yelled at me for not having enough credits)

https://stream-seo.com/best-google-adsense-alternatives/

Can you give the community an idea of what features of Azure you are running? How many instances etc. There are a lot of us who work in the IT industry that would be able to help you find solutions to getting off Azure. I am sure we could greatly reduce costs by purchasing licenses of the microsoft products you actually need and finding servers for lease or co-location and having you install owned licenses. then we can look at what can be moved to open source and what has to remain on .net. Anything Azure or AWS will kill you in costs I bet this site would run on less that $2000 a month in equipment and could be tuned for $1000 a month over the remainder of the year. The only way that can happen is to know what your real needs are.

You talk shit about this site being about free speech, but you have code that limits speech when people don't like what is said. Negative karma causes a 3 post and 10 comment per day limit.

Fuck you liar.

Enjoy telling your future non-employers that you ran a massive hate speech website for three years.

Switch to opensource!

It is a wild ride, internet is both good and bad. Voat will and has to live on :-)

A site created only out of paranoia that deliberately rips off a more popular site without adding more revenue streams can't find investors? Shock horror.

In all seriousness, Best of luck.

If anyone is generous enough to make a reoccurring monthly donation then please let Goats4Voat know because they are keeping a ledger of recent reoccurring donation... and they will treat you like a king!

Maybe you could decentralize it so that it's open and owned by all?

just shut this cancerous website down

I am drunk, how much money do you need?

Really hope a way can be found to keep us afloat!

Work on another server, create a new code base so you're not shackled, and go from there. I can help. PM me...

What? No Angels for Nazi sympathizer sites?

That's a surprise!

This is my first post, I just joined. My life is too busy and I have too many responsibilities to stay active in any given forum. However, I think Voat represents something pretty cool. I have children and I worry about their future. I'm worried that the rest of the worthless fucking world along with liberals will destroy this great place. With the propaganda and total government control of our schools, our media, and the internet... Where will my children find solace with other non-third world shit stains? Reading this post and the replies, gives me hope. I'm tired of the world and the current assault against what my people have created.

For the past however many hundreds of thousands of years men like me have been hunting, gathering, and procreating while those liberal faggots stayed in camp and drew pictures and complained. This is how they fucking repay me? Fuck them. Fuck all of them.

I want to help.

I’ve lost my business partner whom I miss a lot, I’ve lost people in my life, I’ve given up golf which was my passion, and even with all this I still believe in Voat.

No offense, but that doesn't sound good.

Voat needs to purge the Nazis... and then maybe an Angel will appear.

The goofs were fun, but now I'm older and I'm fully committed to Voat and everything you guys stand for.

[Tries to downvote some idiocy.]

"Denied - Cannot downvote more than you upvote (Submission Voting Meanie 2.3.1)".

Interesting definition of "free speech," @PuttItOut. Which is why this announcement was made three days ago and I'm just getting around to seeing it now. I wouldn't miss Voat, since I pretty much stopped using it already. On the other hand, I suppose driving off the people who actually do believe in free speech is one way to address an overuse problem. Probably not coincidentally, a post I made about this almost two years ago is still my second-highest rated submission ever.

Fuck this place, you guys got saved by the T_D fiasco. Voat is a shithole full of fucking racist bigoted neckbeards who hide under the guise of free speech while acting like assholes. You fuckers wanted the T_D folks to go back to reddit? Fucking done. I can't wait to watch this dumpster fire go ass up.

A Tweet or message to the site heads and personalities would likely get their attention. And don't forget InfoWars. They could get a lot of people to help.

incoming funds. good site.

1. Try to lower operating costs

2. Put up some sort of monthly progress bar to show donations for the month / expected operating cost, so people will know to donate.

buh-bye shrug

How can I donate without providing my street name, phone number, and email? I understand paypal is controversial, but that's the level of information I'm willing to provide for this type of donation. I am not set up for bitcoin nor do I have a good comfort level with it (old guy here.) There's $50 in it for voat if I can find an alternative. Thank you for any help.

Sent in first donation...more to follow next month.

Looks like T_D might end up being voats saving grace if lots of them donate!

You ok over there?

Trump is raising funds for his campaign in 2020. Get with the fucking program, idiot. While people here complain about money, Trump is filling his coffers. He's doing something right. Or this place is doing something wrong. Probably both.

This site has a funding problem because people do not want to be associated with not make-believe racism, but actual people calling people kikes and niggers and meaning it. Just saying.

Sorry Trump triggers you, snowflake. Get used to it.

The angel's name is Spez

Wow, it's...been a while. Voat seems like a cool place, sad to see it go under.

Looked around and didn't see a "Donate" link. Perhaps I just overlooked it, but if anyone will point me in the right direction I'll contribute.

In addition to switching to an OSS platform, you should consider having available Voaters (I will be available to help next Feb. I'm booked til then, I hope you can survive) put together some Supermicro based rack servers, and just get a half rack in a local data center. You'll save tons compared with those cloud services.

I just donated $50 + $15/month for a year.

But seriously, switch your infrastructure to Linux.

Right. That's why Trump can raise record funds for an election that is more than 3 years away, meanwhile this place is begging its users for money.

Fuck autism. You're just plain stupid.

Donated a fiver. Spread your wings and fly, Voat!

Have you considered open sourcing the code? That way a bunch of us could help migrate it from .NET to something platform neutral like Python.

Can someone slap together an app displaying the amount of funds needed regularly? And how about reaching out to advertisers? The owner of Red Bull is very based. And they are yuge on advertising and product placement (formula 1, football etc.). If we could propose to them to become the free speech champions that would be big.

I won't give you my credit card number, but the moment you accept a crypto like Bitcoin, I'll gladly donate.

EDIT: Someone pointed out your Bitcoin donation address, will donate tonight.

Trump's campaign racked up a single day record for donations. A little over $300K. In a SINGLE DAY.

I would wager all the "Kike" and "Nigger" talk around here is going to scare off investors. I enjoy a racist joke just as much as the next person, but I'm far from racist. Problem here is it's hard to tell if people are joking.

Please add more payment options in the store. Preferable paysafecard or at least paypal. I'm still sitting on the paysafecard I bought to donate last november.

Edit: Yeah, I know about bitcoin but it's too much hassle right now.

@puttitout hit me up. I can help you get funding.

I wanted to add my 2 cents to the situation (former entrepreneur within the education industry but minimal IT experience). I am not too sure about the advertisements and other things such as that but you could certainly generate more traffic (who don't like traffic?) by holding a "VOATSYOURQUESTION" from specific celebrities. Considering the recent immigration from Reddit (I am Kekistani refugee, notice me senpai), you could hold that segment with a conservative? Bags of publicity, and that will trickle down to Reddit?

Hey Putt,

Can I get an email to contact you on? May have a solution for you.

Hey you put it out (pun intended) and we did our best. I will budget in a donation soon enough. Money in a envelope save away.

How to i support Voat or how can i donate?

Can't you do a Patreon or something like that? That way everyone could give what they can, even if it is just $1 per month. Just so you can pay the expenses.

or you know, you can start a fake project on patreon. Have putt/atko draw some doodles or anything, just dont mention voat there, then any voat member can be a patron

Hey, I know campaigning for donations might not be your favourite thing but when you're considering closure and there are so many people that believe in a free speech platform who don't know about you yet, you have to at least entertain the idea of convincing a few people over to your side. For instance, if you tweeted at or messaged a cognizant artist who makes music about these values (basically all of them) then you're bound to get a positive response, those guys have obscene amounts of money that they have no idea what to do with. No one likes advertising but please don't accept defeat in the face of a drain on funding when the market you represent is so desperately sought after in pop culture and beyond.

Is there no way to donate anonymously...?

Why'd you close lmao no

Why don't you set a kickstart account to generate revenue by small donations?

I'm mourning the loss of my old place. I'd already been kicked out of the big house and was stuck in the shed on the property out back, but living there was somewhat comforting, nonetheless. I never said much while I lived there, although I found a ton of shit mixed with occasional red pills, and I ate it all. Imagine my surprise when I came home from work and found that the whole fucking thing was surrounded by police tape, inaccessible. The rest of that place is real nasty so I started moving in another direction and found myself here. Howdy all. I'm a transgendered lesbian woman who was born a man. Go put that in the faggotry generator, you fucks.

P.S. I tossed in ten bucks for a start. Never paid a cent a my old place, but I'll pay more rent here if better Kekian chaos ensues.

Setting up a bitcoin wallet. Will contribute as well. Need to answer Reddit's demise with something constructive and uncensored.

Thanks for the update Putt!

You've made yourself king of the reddit faggots, take the money and run boy!

I highly recommend doing an Wikipedia/NPR fundraising on a regular basis. Disclose how much money you need, and how close you've gotten to reaching that goal. Maybe do a special event if the goal is exceeded. I'm happy to toss a few bucks every once in a while at a service that I appreciate. It's just a matter of knowing that those few buck are needed is the problem.

Donated 25K bits (US$50). Let's geeeaaauuuu!

Is the Voat coinbase page down? Does the site list the official bitcoin address anywhere?

The_Donald MUST be transplanted as a homeba$e to voat lets make it happen NO FEAR MAGA

The new reddit migrants (aka me) might bring about this angel. While the Donald did have it's drawbacks, according to reddit the ad cost for it was the same for a subreddit with 6,000,000+ subscribers. If that's the case and say, 10% come to voat, then that's an influx of 0.6mil. In that group there may your angel.

The other case is that reddit scammed tD advertisers in which case there should be charges filed.

10% may be a high figure, as Voat wasn't pushed heavily on reddit

FPH female swimsuit calendar. That'll bring the guys to the table.

I donated $50 dollars after seeing The_Donald going private . Please do not go anywhere. I need this in my life.

You need to make this visible as hell. Have a counter somewhere that shows the current monthly costs per month and how much have been met via donations / merch / ads .. I'm sure that will motivate the fuck out of a number of us to donate what we can.

Also where can I find the bitcoin address? I feel like making an angel donation

New user. Just donated. Deleted my Reddit account. Happy to be here.

Oi! I'd like to help out. Any chance of a paypal option during check out?

I got $25 on it. Seriously tho, get some more voat gear in the store, I would pay way more than a hoodie or hat is worth...

Azure and AWS are really non-sustainable business models unless you are doing a lot of e-commerce. There is a reason most enterprises that try "cloud" go back to on-prem in a hurry.

Looks like Spez is your angel.

Too bad. Though the white trash racists came through only because of their pay day loans, this place will be shuttered come Labor Day.

This. AssBurger reporting in. I fucks with PHP, MySQL, and Linux.

JSP / PHP developer standing by.

So maybe i missed it in this post, but where is a link to donate?

Don't be shy or humble about reaching out to your community. You built a great platform for the community. We want voat to continue and flourish. We want to invest in the future and of voat. Voat will be in the history books of the future for the right reasons!

Well, to all the folks who said that Reddit was going to die and Voat will prosper:

Ready to bite your tongue? <3

Voat needs more than an angel; it needs an actual business plan. As long as it supports free speech it'll probably never be marketable. Too many companies and advertisers don't want to be associated with groups like /v/niggers and /v/fatpeoplehate

I'm new here, but just wanted to add:

Hell yes to that update

I refuse to help this site in any way until you START ISSUING REGULAR FINANCIAL STATEMENTS AGAIN.

There is literally no reason for you to randomly decide to stop being transparent with your finances and I find it insulting that you are here with your hands out begging while you keep all of voat's financial details under wraps.

Eat a dick you won't get a penny from me.

I opine that free speech is no longer free anymore. Joe bray-Ali is a good example of this.Many readers are reluctant to contribute to open forums for fear it will bite them in the ass. (leaves tracks back to the contributor).What is needed here is a way to contribute (that isn't complex ) where no tracks are left. We know the libtards will make an example out of anyone they can identify. I'm all about owning your opinion but it isn't pragmatic in the current zeitgeist.. They will win until they are bound by their own restrictions . what goes around comes around.

start a gofundme

Only if we get the better end of the deal and we don't have to see that mug

Your Bitcoin wallet has $7.7 Million dollars in it

Why do you need donations?

But Voat has a triangles in it's logo and I've been told those are for predophiles.

How funny would it be if Putt froze comments on this thread when the number reached 1488?

Create a donation button on this site. Job done ;)

WOW THE TIMING ON THIS IS JUST OUT OF CONTROLLLL LOLLLL

Definitely would like a keychain!

take a look at proboards.com or myBB.com

these are free forum software packages, and while we/you may lose some bells and whistles, it would allow for continued operation of the VOAT domain. Also, maintaining the site would be a whole lot easier than custom code.

I could go $25K or more if I could get some equity in the company.

...Gofundme would work, I would happily donate. Keep us posted and as Needlestack commented, please do not let this slide, be transparent and ask for help, it will be provided.

Appreciate your donation and hope you get the badge soon so it will look appropriate when you begin to talk about donating and how other people should be helping

I didn't say I didn't believe you

Watch this

Look much I donated: https://imgoat.com/uploads/f4922f4556/17329.jpg

See how that works?

Bit of a noob, but with that kind of throughput surely google adwords or something would provide revenue?

Then just go get a prepaid card

I honestly believe you; its just you can't really go around talking about donations w/out proof right?

It'd be like telling the IRS you donated to charity but you havw nomway of proving it. For all intensive purposes, you did not even donate

Not for it to count, but for you to be able to speak freely about donations ans such

I would happily contribute to a Patreon.com thingy.

Duh.

Do you know how many new shills claim to be three year old accounts that gave hundreds of dollars to us?

It's the Internet, people aren't gonna take your word for it.

Thats a nice sentiment and everything, but go donate.

I just told you that I think putt isn't all that and you go into a page of how we stand by his decisions. I might not like him but I have my little badge, I donate.

You should help us out?

Agreed

Unfortunately putt came in and dropped a bomb and has checked in on us once or twice.

It's not a popular opinion, but I don't like him very much. The hell do you have such a popular website, and give such little effort

Certainly.

https://www.techworm.net/2017/05/microsofts-windows-10-block-downloads-kodi-pirate-bay-kickasstorrents-others.html

They're planning on blacklisting sites that they disapprove of due to piracy. I'm not sure if this is just in IE and Edge, or if it goes down into blocking lower in the TCP/IP stack (I'd imagine it might involve IP blocking at least, with evasion dealt with through forced updates). Extend this to whatever else displeases Microsoft, whether it be piracy, business, political, or carry opinions that Microsoft shouldn't be doing this. Once the code is in place, it's not difficult to add different addresses to it as well.

You can call it any number of things. I call it censorship, and that's a nice way of putting it. More realistically, it's not only censorship, but it's also gross abuse of a monopolistic position. In fact, that's what a lot of this Windows 10 push is about - so they can have an OS that they can control remotely, that spies on you, and when someone complains, their response will be, "OK, so you hate it, what are you gonna do about it?" And while many will embrace Linux, for most people who might not be so fortunate (e.g. owning hardware that isn't locked out), the answer is going to be, "nothing, sir, sorry for wasting your time." My guess is that Android and Apple will eventually follow suit, if current trends remain unstopped.

While at least Chrome already does this to some extent - that is to say, blocks attempts to access addresses with known malware - it also allows you to override the browser's judgment, and it presumably does not try to use it against you at some point, whereas who knows what Microsoft might do if (or rather, when) it phones home? Although from the way it's handled, that's all a hypothetical on Microsoft's part, since I seriously doubt they'll let you override it in the first place.

It's also arguably a pretty slippery slope legally, since if they're censoring some of it, they may be accepting legal blame to interfere with anything that they think is even remotely possibly connected to illegal activity, which would only mean far greater snooping and intervention, along with even more censorship.

So yeah. I expected this, but I'd have figured they would've waited a few years.

What's the database - postgres or sql server or something else?

My suggestion- Set up a donation link (prominently displayed) at the top of the page with a bar showing how much is needed this month, how much raised so far etc etc. Put links for credit card, bitcoin, paypal. Make the process EASY to donate. Voaters like me are more than happy to contribute to keep this place running and growing.

PuttItOut, please add a donation option for reoccurring monthly payments that continue until we cancel them, rather than cease after a year. That way you'll avoid the heartache and loss of income when donations expire and people are too lazy or too busy to purchase them again.

Honestly I would have supported you to the bitter end if VOAT didn't start censoring us just like reddit did. But since VOAT decided it would rather stand inline and censor it's users it lost it's purpose. We can go to reddit and be censored, so there is no need for VOAT to exist. This kills me to say because I love VOAT but it is the dark truth we all know in the backs of our minds but won't speak.

Donated :)

WTF are you doing on Azure? You should rent or lease a dedicated server on OVH or hetzner, you will be paying much less

Have you looked into how 4chan stays funded? I would think you are in the same boat

Dont know what to say, that was such a lovely message but also not so good for you and your life. Sometimes you have to stop and give up what you dont what too, only to have something much better and if that is your family I understand. Family come first. I am new to Voat and this is the only site I have found that will not over run a thread and remove their guests from truth or what some see as truth. I talk and come out with many ideas and thoughts and I do so not for me but I know you dont have to remember every word in a book you read, or a sentence, sometimes it is just one word and that alone is enough. Voat will remain online for many years as the good remains and so does the truth. I believe there are a few on this site that will be happy to take over and continue your work,, just screen them all as there will be a few that will destroy it if they take over. No names there . for you you gave up so much and lost to much. I understand that so you need to take back your life and I am with you on that. you cant run a web site if the love in your heart is no longer there. too many good poeple on this site that alone and their good thoughts will keep voat alive. take time out for youself and your family. most people who come to a site like this have lost family and friends, why the 6 o clock news and the tv soap that runs after it makes them stay as if it is desert. my insites tell me there is 1 one this site that will do you good if you were to hand it over. but you yourself comes first. Voat will stay online ... heads up. go do what you have to and come back and make your comments. sorry I do go over the top.

Just don't take any money from Soros. :(

Hope a cashed up patriot comes by soon.

Have we looked into alternatives? AWS, Rackspace, or other cloud providers. It doesn't feel good to think that this site is hosted on Azure and providing money to MS. Possibly one of the others would be cheaper.

As a cloud engineer, I understand the effort of moving to a new provider, but still MS.... There are other options than the greediest corporation in the world excepting Oracle.

What are our current bandwidth requirements?

What is the average and peak throughput that Voat experiences on an average day, in Kbps?

Honestly? For the best. You guys clearly have talent, and this website has unfortunately become a cesspool for assholes and the ignorant. Let this go and focus your talents elsewhere.

Done!

Goats, please do the same!

Don't let SaneGoat win!

Edit: and please let Goats4Voat know if you're making a reoccurring monthly donation because they are maintaining a ledger of such recent donations!

Voat needs an accountant

Voat needs a choir, one angel ain't gonna cut it.

Voat needs to find a better hosting service, and to cut a better deal with cloudflare.

Voat needs to ditch Microsoft.

Voat needs to start monetizing on it's page views.

Voat needs to start reporting where the money comes from and where it goes. Transparency.

From 10 votes we now have 300-500 votes per post, that was quite a journey, i always hope this site will be the site for actual right wings discussion, please don't let all those effort goes in vain.

Voat donation is not good enough of a system.

1, User base needs to improve, not just reddit stranded users, we needs more from target audience, by putting ads at the right place, we can improve the contents, pulling even more people to the sites, also increasing ads revenue. Doing ama for people will never go to reddit is also a thing, just 1 tweet is tons of exposure.

2, System needs to be self sufficient. We don't know anything about this information until now, the reddit gold bar is there for a reason(you can share some of the payment information if you want). Users also don't have any incentive to donate without closure reason. Need to think of somethink i guess(4chan pass)

Until that point, things like this will keeps happening, it also prevents voat future improvement.

Azure? really? sigh

I kind of wish you assholes don't close down simply because it'll cause an influx of assholes back into Reddit.

But on the other hand. Die, bitches.

Seriously you can all go fuck yourselves. You're horrible people and every single one of you deserves to have your testicles hammered in. BYE.

@PuttItOut, all you need to do is display a tiny heart next to the goats who donated... and people will donate!

Like this!

Perhaps make the decoration duration based on the donation amount or for 12 months if it's a reoccurring monthly donation.

It needs to be highly visible because people are have egos: they want everyone to know they donated and are therefore a better class of person.

People will also ask "what is that heart thingy and how can I get one?".

Profile overview badges are good, but they are almost always hidden.

Edit: Allow goats and purchase this as a gift for other goats (i.e. Reddit Gold).

Dunno what to say. I year ago I'd have contributed. But as a site you have to be more than just a "platform of free speech". You need to have an actual community worth supporting. And what were you? Donald Central. And anybody else was a "cuck". I'm a cuck, according to this site. Why would I give money to that? I mean, let the Donald users puts their money where their very loud mouths are. I have no pity.

I am interested in buying Voat.co outright. Given that Statshow.com/voat.co shows 163,000 daily visitors, what price would you ask? Thanks

We don't know that it's bandwidth. This is not a media server, it's pure text site which compresses extremely well with gzip. That $6000 figure is suspicious and no offense to Putt, but we are not getting the full truth. He spoke about licenses being the main cost. I don't care to press him on it, but let's not forget this.

Free market at work!

I think you could just make people pay for it times like this when there's a bunch of new accounts all the time, then just shut down the option to sign up once in a while like documentingreality.com does, it wouldn't be visible to nonmembers during that time which would be great because you could have fewer people complaining about constantly. People would pay for it maybe not everyone can, but they can still see the headlines.

@PuttItOut, How we doin' on the cash? I can give again if needed. And then again again.

What does the site cost per day to run?

sad you couldnt see this coming but its been going on for a while

People try adding thoughtful content but get downvoted for asking real questions just adds to the futility of it all.

I feel bad for being inactive for so many months, I hope Voat recovers from it's financial woes. :(

I don't know how online donation works (I personally don't trust websites like PayPal for security reasons) but the best I could do is share this announcement post on other social media websites hoping that more people visit Voat.

How much money do you need? I might be able to kick in some cash.

Can you create a Gofundme campaign, I'm sure that a truly free speech platform would gather much attention.

I know for a fact that A Lot of Youtuber are looking for news homes, where free speech can live.

They are also disgruntled reddit user like you, if you create the campaign, I'm sure that those who can't pitch in, like me, can do a lot of noise.

Why can't Voat use Patreon or something like Youtube channels do? Styxhexenhammer has done well there and he says it's pretty simple. Someone on Voat ought to be able to upload Youtube videos about Voat and use Patreon etc for funding.

Could you do a subscription model where for say a few bucks a month you get some extra functionality?

$1 a month memberships? donations = fucking patches? ads, Ads, ADS!?

4chan doesn't take as much shekels as voat because the chans are ethereal platforms and store far less data in terms of user account into. They also delete all the old crap that's more than a few months old, so they don't have old cruft sitting around. That said, their bandwidth costs are probably pretty high.

This is why you don't use Microsoft.

I was warning you about this shit almost a year ago, and you retards didn't listen. I knew this would happen, and it's not hindsight.

Sanegoat warned you. You didn't listen either.

A fitting death for a proprietary software supporter :-)

Asspie 3, reporting in. Put this shit in PHP / Python / [insert non-MS open source language here], and I'm in. Also, Azure seems super expensive. AWS seems to be much cheaper, though I haven't done a full analysis on a large production infrastructure.

Dockerize everything to simplify ops, and use free 'nix tools for development. Operational and development costs will be cut by at least half. @PuttItOut: If you're interested, I'm glad to hop on it and help out wherever I can.

D::::: Hey bro im new round here looks like the gym is this way

@puttitout this is colossally frustrating. I'm on mobile and trying to PM/DM/VM you and I'm at the point where I want to throw my phone up against a wall.

I'm an asspie who would dedicate help!

In addition to porting over to Linux and the other ideas mentioned here, something minor to do that might help is to put a donation meter on the donate page. It really does help.

good, hope this place burns

Get off of Azure. Seriously the major cloud services are designed for massive and quick scaling, and they charge a premium. This place if it scales somewhat in a controlled manner would be find with Colo, good code, software redundancy, and some used hardware.

Not sure if you are aware of this, but there are some who have offered advice on the scalability issues (which factor immensely in the cost of running voat.)

http://www.aaronstannard.com/voat-scalability/

According to this blog post, he said he was willing to offer at the very least, advice. Speaking from professional experience, design issues can drive cloud costs through the roof.

Donation made. Time for everybody who loves free speech to step up.

Getting off Azure really should be number 1 priority for longterm survivability.

We need a running total of how much we need to donate per month to keep this place going (like the Shiny metal total from that other place). Obviously add in whatever you need to put by for reserves as well. How about various voaters raffle off or auction items like digital artwork, writing a piece of music, Skype chats or whatever.

I'm sorry but you guys seem to lack basic business skills and the ability to take decisive actions. Seriously, waiting for venture capital to materialise is ridiculous. Let me spell it out for you; YOU'RE NOT GETTING VENTURE CAPITAL FUNDING. You need to look at innovative methods for revenue generation beyond begging for money every time you're about to go bankrupt.

Why not look at some sort of community ownership and funding? You could set up a system in which users could own a percentage of voat and have to pay it's running costs in proportion to their ownership. So for example if a user owned 1/6000th of Voat, they'd have to pay $1 a month. Users that wanted a bigger share could buy more, so if they owned 1/1000th of Voat, they'd have to contribute $6 a month.

Shareholders would get to appoint a board, and each shareholder would get one vote per share they owned, so if they put in more money they'd get a larger say in the people who ran Voat.

You could keep say 10% of the company in regular shares for yourself. The only real argument against this idea is not wanting to give up your 100% ownership of Voat, but as you admit in this post, you will essentially soon own 100% of nothing, so why not try something different?

I just came here from Reddit, over the whole The_Donald thing. Going to wait a day before donating anything, just to make sure I'm not hyping this out of proportion. I like the site and the idea behind it though.

Political Correction is cancer. Lethal injections are too good for SJWs.

Where do we donate?

I will be donating this weekend. I like this platform, and I think the voting mechanism is much smarter than reddit. I didn't give voat a chance before, but I will now.

Why is there no merch in the merch store?

I think we might've found our angels with the pedefugees

I'm pretty skint as far as donations go, but I can offer my labor and I learn on the fly. What can I do?

One of reddit's larger communities (r/The_Donald) is in progress of starting up over here (v/ThePedes). We already have pleas going out to help keep this site running.

This is exactly why voat is failing, it became a hangout for extremists, which turned off rational people.

I funded Voat before and felt good about it, but then Voat turned away from free speech by banning /v/jailbait and other "controversial" subs.

Re-enable free speech and I will support you financially on a regular basis.

@puttitout A discussion has been running for a good while on slack with ideas being tossed around as to how the community can help you reduce costs by migrating off of azure onto cheaper hosts, possibly whilst rebuilding part of the stack. Hopefully you will grace us with your insight, seeing as you have far more accurate information on the sites needs than we do.

See what we're working on https://voatrewrite.slack.com/shared_invite/MTg0Mjg2MzQzNTg0LTE0OTUwNzc4NjMtZDcwZmNiODU5Yg

The_Donald has arrived prepare for monies, we do that well.

Fine, kill the joke m8 ! :p

I just donated $10,000 in Bitcoin. I hope it helps. Please prioritize a mechanism for donation transparency if you want more in the future.

Rly ?

Not just offering... I started pricing on a few trinkets and (hopefully) by this weekend I can e-mail Putt some numbers & options.

I have goats offering their time to help with CAD desings & others with manufacturing of different products.

It's not a save-all solution, but it could be a viable merchandising avenue as well as a marketing strategy for Voat.

@Ina_Pickle, @Trigglypuff, @Empress, @Le_Squish & @I-am-me all offered to work on publishing a "Women of Voat" swimsuit calendar !

Why don't you guys make a funding page with a progress bar for the amount of money you need every month? Leave a link to it in the footer and a little mini bar. That way we know how the site is doing and can donate when you need funds.

Thanks!

Its sad to see it like this. Liberal fag bullshit sites get millions in funding, and free speech loses. I bought a shirt the first time and ill gladly fork over some cash for this place.

there is no room on Patreon for hate speech

Am unfamiliar with that site. Do they mean "on Patreon" specifically? Like in comments or whatever? Or do they mean on any site or part of any organization raising funds on Patreon? The first would be no problem, but the second makes them sound like another jewish front organization.

Ipo. Just fking ipo this site to the fucking userbase.

.01% ownership for $1000

Sell off 10% keep 90% for yourself and pocket a million dollars.

First post ever on Voat, just came here from the_donald.

I would love to either

a.Help you code whatever you need help with, I do .NET for a living now, which it sounds like you are using. b.Donate but I have no idea how to do that.

We need a free speech platform more than ever!

BUT I WAS TOLD THAT BECAUSE THIS SITE ALLOWS ME TO SAY SHIT ABOUT BLACK PEOPLE WITHOUT BEING BANNED IT WOULD BE BETTER THAN REDDIT

DOES THIS MEAN I NEED ANOTHER SAFE SPACE????

REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!

/r/the_donald is here. We will save you.

This sub was created less than a day ago ,and it's flooded by redditors from r/the_donald https://voat.co/v/ThePedes PuttItOut might need even more donations than expected

If the few hundred users in this thread alone donated $10 a month you'd be covered...

Why would you not come to the community sooner?

Do something like Wikipedia does, when they need money they just put drop down banner with progress of donations and link on top of all pages.

The fact that I've been begging you to implement BTC payment for adverts for months now................

Donated around $400 worth of BTC in total now because I have no idea of financial needs of Voat and

Offered you $500 in BTC if you could simply prove via server logs a couple of things ( a 5 minute job tops ) so I could be sure I wasn't speaking to alts.

Done the same thing multiple times.....

For fucks sake @PuttItOut I could have paid this month for 1/5 of your hosting alone, had you simply promised to implement BTC advert payment within a timeframe and that 2 users were not logging in from the same IP.

Patreon Tiers

Goat, Citizen of Voat $1/mo

A single goat makes a cute pic on /v/goats

All ye goats united make a DEADLY GOAT ARMY. (and keep voat alive!)

Access to patreon exclusve posts.

Atko's Finest $10/mo

Channel your inner kid and make loud human-sounding scream noises as you lead our armies into battle.

Access to a Patron-only discord for $10+ pledgers to discuss the future of voat and generally waste time.

+Previous Rewards

Super Goat $100/mo

You're the hero that voat deserves, the hero that we all need. Wear it loud and proud!

Voat SUPER PATRON Blue Badge to wear with honor on all of your posts/comments to the site (if enabled)

+Previous Rewards

Supreme Lord Almighty Angel Goat $1k/mo

I'M A BIG KID NOW. GET ON MY LEVEL HUGGIES

Eternal Gratitude

Voat ANGEL Gold Badge to wear with honor on all of your posts/comments to the site (if enabled)

Personal contact with Putt for discussing the future and/or direction of the site or general chat, maybe even some gaming (within reason)

+Previous Rewards

The problem is the lack of anonymous payment methods. The problem is that there's a million fucking lefitst and other filth that won't stop at anything to get our names etc. It's a risk not worth taking. It's what has stopped me from donating. If there's no electronic way of doing it, give us an address and we can send donations in cash.

Oh well

Agreed, no one I know has heard of voat but many have heard of reddit, ....but perhaps driving traffic puts up the bill/costs more? Catch 22?

At some point, you should consider charging the end users for "Premium" subverses. Not to say that the whole thing should become charged but a number of subverses should be premium. Charging something like $2.00-$5.00 a month for the volume of content is worth the price. For the extra bucks, you could also allow people to have the title option so that their name appears like powerpete - kekistani minister of tacos.

The "walled garden" trait of Voat is why many of us came here. By charging a few bucks, it'll keep out the riff-raff, strengthen the end users (feel like they are a part of a community), and hopefully encourage participation (once someone is invested, they want to see the project succeed).

Oh no! I've been away from the site for awhile, it really bums me out to see it in such dire straits...if I had any cash to spare, it would be yours :(

I didn't mean to sound cynical so apologies.

All I was suggesting was that an investor or crowd funding was needed. I've worked for a charity in need of funds and although we loved/enjoyed/encouraged our supporters fund raising it, in the end, helped a bit but not enough. As putitout said...we need an angel

I'm guessing he needs about $50K minimum a month to employ people...key chains aren't going to do it

Would it be crazy to run a massive fundraiser on R/The_Donald ? well it would be hilarious and could it work?

It does sound like we need a based patriot, a grand angel investor.

If you add a universal flair on my username in exchange for 5$/month donation subscription, I'm down.

Donation Goal Meter in the header.

Wikipedia can ask for donations in their header, you can do it less intrusive.

Fansub sites have been doing it forever.

The donation meter will let us know where you stand and what we need to do.
Make it for month, link it to a page that shows stats and goals for the past and current year.
Add lots of payment methods.

Work with the shopping and book communities and get some referrals going to amazon and such.

And like Spaceballs says:

Merchandising, merchandising, where the real money from the movie is made. Spaceballs-the T-shirt, Spaceballs-the Coloring Book, Spaceballs-the Lunch box, Spaceballs-the Breakfast Cereal, Spaceballs-the Flame Thrower.

I see lots of offers here, keychains and such.
You might of had issues in the past, but try these vendors who are offering in this thread and keep trying merchandising until it works. Maybe make it a reward for donations, but list how much each purchase puts you towards the monthly goal.

P A T R E O N

Seriously! Please start one already and make it easily visible. I think you'll find that you can take care of at least a large chunk of those expenses if you make it easy to pledge with patreon.

No worries about a large investor controlling you that way either.

And begging for donations was always something we hated doing.

You need to have a VIP membership like 4chan. And the site needs to be somehow throttled for non-paying users. (ads, captcha, etc.)

I'd buy some voat shares, if you went public. There are going to be plenty of exodus waves for the coming years, people fleeing the well controlled mass-produced consent factories. Voat will see it's users spike every so often.

I will speak to a potential partner for you guys.

Have you considered cloning the "gold" feature from Reddit?

Sell the site. Shut it down you get nothing. It has value now.

I know it's easy for me to say since I won't be giving up money, but I'd rather see it shut down than being turned to Reddit 2.0

@PuttItOut: Tried to send you a message but my CCP is too low. So here it is:

Almost 2 years ago, I wrote An open letter to Steve Huffman, reddit's new CEO, with an offer to exchange values. Perhaps I should have written it to you?

Feel free to reach out if you'd like to discuss.

$6,600.90 oh fuck, dude you need to think about some other hosting.. dude show us statistics about traffic, how much cpu/ram power it needs and we can figure something up(with DDOS protection of course, we know about the start of voat it was ddosed 24/7)

Dear Angel loving racists. Let us get some VOAT coffee mugs stocked in the merchandise section, please. I keep breaking coffee mugs and TV monitors when I turn on the TV.

I cannot live without my coffee mugs.

An angel? Oh you racist!

Can we set up a go fund me?

FOLKS! TURN OFF ADBLOCK FOR THIS SITE! CLICK THE AD'S YOU ARE INTERESTED IN!

Voats being destroyed its not failing. Suck a fat one @puttitout @atko yall dont tell us shit and i highly doubt you cant scrape up 6 grand a month especially when this is the first weve heard in a while. You let us all down but its ok its not the first time

What happens if I donate a grand

I don't have enough time now at work to read through the whole thread, all I can see is ways of donating that wont work. How can I donate? Paypal, venmo, loadable credit cards? I love this site as people will actually discuss things openly and not just upvoat shit they agree with but stuff that is actually well thought out and backed up.

post this in r/bitcoin

The_Donald is coming you're going to get traffic

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/6bx71r/announcement_we_keep_reddit_alive_but_reddit_is/

https://voat.co/v/thepedes

Hang tight

I just donated.
https://blockchain.info/tx/acdf4294bca1bcde7661ecab159192bd157d57ea8f1d7ae7ab45c4efc03b63a6

Fuck you nigger faggots! Send money!

In addition to all of the great replies in this thread, why not make a GoFundMe too?

Patreon, please.

this place is 100% corrupted with Kremlin bots.

there i said it, PS Fuck you you weren't here to see voat in it's glory days.

Seriously, just make this a pay to play, which would be awesome since even the shills would have to pay to contribute, win win.

$5 a month from just 1,400 people will keep the site paid for. Thats just 1/3rd the price of a monthly world of warcraft subscription.

This is how jews own the media/entertainment. You can't go to a bank with an idea for a sitcom and get funding. jews self fund, it's part of their religion and how they buy homes and cars with cash or a check, in full at a huge discount for doing so. Voat has the problem of being anti-semitic for the mere fact of allowing free speech. Money transactions other than handing someone cash means a paper trail in these days of The War on Terror. So becoming a Voat angel means doxxing yourself.

In these days of political correctness as OP has found out the hard way, means remaining in the Free Speech closet. Otherwise jews, sjws, antifa, sauds will brand you forever as literally hitler.

Source : Homes in Boca Raton. Know thine enemy...

Ive offered to help before. Neither putitout nor atko responded. Who have they contacted for help before? Has anyone been contacted from this thread yet?

Seconded. That sounds fucking dope.

Gave you guys .26BC about 2 months ago. That's $480 right now.

Not even a "Thank you" note.

That being said, I'm not bitter - I donated because I like what you're doing, not because I expected a thank you note ;) I think you guys have a great concept and counterpoint to Reddit. I hope you stay open and vibrant.

(Note: I'm pretty sure I donated it correctly to Voat -- I'm a bitcoin noob and it's entirely possible I donated it to something far worse, like Amy Schumer's production budget for her next abysmally shitty movie...)

I’ve sacrificed the best years of my life for Voat,

even if voat ends now it wasn't in vain.

You let us know as soon as you got the bill.

$220 per day is a big nut to cover.

I'm With Puttler http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/blogs/the_slatest/2015/04/12/hillary%20logo.jpg.CROP.promovar-mediumlarge.jpg

I just donated 25 bucks. Let's see some goats match me!

Can we get a donation tracker to show how close Voat is to reaching funding goals every month? That way folks have a feeling that their donations are helping.

why the FUCK does voat follow every other of reddit's footsteps, and not follow in the steps of REDDIT GOLD? IMPLEMENT VOAT GOALD, AND WATCH YOUR FUNDING NEEDS DISAPPEAR

A lot of respect.

Logging in to upvote this and comment that it was the first idea I had when reading this too.

He supported Rush Limbaugh when everyone was trying to shut him down by getting his funding pulled.

I admit I don't post here as often as I should, but I've always depended on it for reading about things that were being fully censored by reddit.

Can't hurt to try calling in to his show and letting him know whats up

I always said to add a guilding system like Reddit, but it never happened.

Or if you really want outrage, reach out to Putin

I like your tears :)

I donated $50.

ahahahahaha this is what u get

VOAT staff are a bunch of clowns, glad they aren't getting any money.

hopefully this place dies soon, then we can all go back to reddit where we belong

:)

Mkay. Well I'm hated, and I manage. Furthermore, so are you. And you manage. Ain't gonna hear any boohoo- bivouac, little nigga

LOL. Antinatalism? Total animal liberation? Eugenics? On demand subsidized abortion? Abolition of marriage?

None of that ringing any bells? :D

Haha, brilliant! Turns out freedom of speech isn't free, hehe.

You really need to step away from the false problem of funding via dontations.

The Value for Value model is genuinely one of the most effective financial models available to ventures who are otherwise deemed too unsavory for normie advertising
The Human Resources page for No Agenda has a breakdown of the system that has worked for almost a decade.

Getting away from the costly architecture is a major step and will take more time than many can appreciate, creating a runway and a series of milestones to achieve that will need careful consideration.

Grimerica podcast is also using this model, along with DH Unplugged.

While these are podcasts and a different product (episodic) they also have a smaller audience and reach than Voat and I believe that can in turn be very profitable if enough voat users become voat producers.

Seriously consider empowering your most motivated advocates, the users, and succeed or fail have the courage to at least try one last grand experiment.

Most importantly of all, believe that you are doing important work and that we all support you as much as we can in the myriad variety of ways that we can.

put up a patreon!

Switch your .NET BS to Mono and dump the M$ cloud for Amazon and Linux.

I would consider donating, but think about this. I have been on the site almost 4 months, at least everyday doing something here. talking or view adnroid/tech/computer/food stuff. I still can't upvote more than 10 posts a day, I can't downvote at all. Why? Because I don't circle jerk around pizzagate sub talking about how Podesta is #1 pedofile,

This site is basically just a glorified the_donald subreddit into a full site. If you have different opinions, you can't participate fully. So, no I won't donate

Not really, $6,600.90 USD is quite an amount and you should assume about 10% of all visitors ever pays attention to any donation button and maybe 1% of all visitors pay up, and not huge amounts. Merchandise also is not a huge cashcow as there is usually quite a overhead and you cant ask top dollar or it will not be bought.

Why do you keep asking for money, but you never show where it is spent? You go missing for weeks/months at a time. We never hear from you. I don't see how I'm expected to put money into something like that. We just get these desperate messages a couple times a year. Then we never see what happens with the money. There is no transparency. I cannot put my money into something like that. No idea where its going. How its being used.

Start being open with finances. Then I would be willing to put some money in. But I'm not throwing my money into the void.

@PuttItOut Give us an option to upgrade to premium accounts... i think it's better option for you and for us.

For the people who don't use bitcoin, how do we donate?

Here is list of reddit clones if we ever wanted to migrate or something. This subreddit also has some more: /r/RedditAlternatives/

What would be the cost to host it locally? You can get something like a 64 core server for one or two grand these days.

@Puttitou

What about somekind of "allopass" system on the site ?

An international number any1 can call or send sms to, from around the world, and you get paid each time a call is made or an sms is sent to it, like an over priced communication

Everybody has a phone, it's less constraining than CB or bitcoin, you just have to call or send sms, and it goes in an already locked budget (the monthly phone bill budget)

That with a gauge indicating where the funding is at so nobody forget,

like "gauge $: =====-------" "call now 0995678904678"

http://www.optelo.com/fo/micropayment/presentation

We need to get some more t-shirts in the voat store I'm sure some nigger faggets around will buy some. I know there's companies that don't charge you anything untill you sell the shirts.

The thing is though, Patreon does not really give a fuck as long as they get money. There are people on there who create nothing and have publicly stated they never intend to make anything but Patreon is still happy to have their account up because it makes them money. I think it is definitely worth trying. What is there to lose?

Your donation collection method fucking SUCKS.

1. Requires like 10 clicks, and a registration/login on store.voat
2. All this BEFORE it tells me what are the pay/donation methods
3. I bet it does not have Bitcoin payment
4. Do I get some credit / badge for it? rubs hands like a Jew

Solutions: Just fucking put a large "BITCOIN ACCEPTED HERE" sign there on top. Also on the page.

Have an admin, who

a) if messaged with signature made by the key who paid to you, will set a badge / send handshake / send nudes (girl admin) - to the guy donating

b) when asked, will create and give a custom payment address - so it's easier to know that payment is from given guy, but also increases a bit privacy (if sender does not need entire Internet to know he paid to Voat)

Easy right?

Also do simillar in Store, especially for the ADs. You need imo real commercial income source, not just donations, for longer term.

Voat needs a business plan, not an angel. Some of us more able voaters might be interested in an investment. Throwing money at the servers every few months isn't a solution.

Ask Kim Dotcom he might be happy to help with either resources or money, he is a fan of free speech so why not try?

If needed, look into ZeroNet. Users would have to run the app and create new accounts to login, but you should be able to rebuild most of the site over there and no longer have to worry about server costs. It's a nuclear option imo, but it will work. They already got a similar site up and running.

There should be a banner or something showing users how scrapped for money we are. Like how archiveofourown.com does it. Their costs are way more than voat's but they always manage to hit it in a week.

they've already wrongfully accused Bannon of being a white nationalist and that Breitbart is a hate site

And /r/Judaism has it as canon that Bannon is an anti-Semite. All the more reason for me to like Bannon, because they didn't have this reaction to Bush and other neocons.

Yeah, I don't care how "unsavory" the ads are as long as it means the site is funded instead of "bawww! Woe is me, we're going to close the site!" posts. It's like how when YouTube demonetized videos, I wanted the ads back so we wouldn't have to pay to fund the creation of content we want like MisterMetokur videos.

I think there are some simple 'clean' monetization options Voat still has not even attempted.

Why not enable users to have some silly fun for money?

• Add a user title (name appears PuttItOutt [ My Putt is Out :( ] in all posts) for a month. $5
• Add a colored user title for a month. Same as above with color. $15
• Set another user's title for a month. Same as above with some indication it was set by somebody else (and whom). $50
• Set another user's title for a month if they set yours: $10
• Make your username bold for a month. $5
• Add an emoticon by your name for month. $5

• Add an emotion by somebody else's name for a month. $10

• Bring any post to the top of a thread. $5

• Have any post appear in a slightly larger and unique font. $1 (bought in packages of 5)

Replace the ad box on the front page with a basic thread type box. Put it at the far top right on the main page, above even the search box. So everybody will see it. Allow a user to post a message there, visible to everybody for 6 hours for $5. That price linearly declines to $0 if there's no purchaser for 6 hours after the last message expired. Similarly the price exponentially doubles for every 3 messages queued. So that'd be $10/message if there are 3 messages ready to go, $20 when 6 are ready to go, etc. Suddenly you can have Amalek fund Voat all by himself. Seriously though, even if it never received commercial usage, this would add a silly but neat little feature to Voat.

There are dozens of similar ideas. Given the large audience of Voat only a tiny fraction would need to participate to make all you want for Voat come to fruition. These things would not exactly be high brow appeal, but I'd bet that they'd be more than enough to keep the site funded and then well more than that.

I wonder if you have considered finding a partner or merging with someone. Gab.ai is also a free-speech haven, competing against twitter. Maybe a one-stop shop of free speech alternative media would be more appealing to backers.

OK Putt, I just did what I can to help.

Suggestion: when we don't have sponsors, put a chart in the advertisement slot showing how far from death we are.

This is a hard thing to do, once you take in an investor he/she/they will try to control what you can and can't do on your site.

I got involved with Kr5ddit, an alternative to Reddit and Kuro5hin, that uses Bitcoins in a creative way, and the Kr5ddit for voting stuff up and down. http://kr5ddit.com/ if your post or comment gets voted down, you can buy Kr5ddits from other users to vote it back up. The Kr5ddits are sold for Bitcoin on a market, and the way to get Bitcoins out of the market has not been invented yet. But it looks like a good start. Converting it to a FOSS at http://k666.kr5ddit.com/ which sort of looks like the old Scoop program by CMF that was designed to mimick what Slashnet had back then that Slashdot ran.

ditto, please produce and sell. And to be honest, seeing as most of us fags are from/align with /pol/ and /k/, why isn't their patches for sale or something...?

Good luck a lot of the VC/Angels are liberal and won't like the fact that you allow non-liberal views and opinions on Voat, same thing that happened to Reddit actually, and now is happening at Youtube as advertisers want Google to remove revenue from certain channels, forcing people to go to vid.me instead of youtube.

GOOD NEWS EVERYONE!!! I HAVE AN ANGEL PATRON WHO WANTS TO DONATE TO THE SITE.

I just talked to my boss's, boss's, boss's, boss and George said he will completely fund this site. The only thing is, he insists on a few tiny minor almost insignificant changes.

But he has a LOT of money. Like LOTS.

I love how you all are so eager to help. Nobody has yet considered the massive privacy leak of all your IP addresses.

I hope /v/niggers is ready to have all of their IP addresses published online.

Can't we just pay a monthly fee for Voat?

Oh man, this sucks. I can probably donate some money but the problem is the brigading on here means I can only post 10 times every 24 hours, which would make it kind of pointless. I haven't even had any debates recently and it's been that way for weeks. Even Reddit doesn't punish me as much for having contrary opinions. I know this isn't the Dev's fault, but it does make me think twice. I'll think about it...

Good luck with the future and I hope you can think of something.

<3

So is it possible to donate via PayPal?

How much for an Angel badge?

It's in the sidebar, but at the very bottom, beneath the ads and stuff. Donate.

You don't want an angel you want a sugar daddy.

Short of that go out of business and start a new one that can get free shit for another 3 years :)

Oh no i love this place . Some of the best ideas i've seen in the comments are > 1-Bring the cost of operating down some how . 2 - Find sponsors Pornhub, Vape companies ,Marijuana companies ect . 3- Private rich donor someone like Kim Dotcom does the Minecraft dude hate liberals ? 4) Make it easier to donate anonymously and i bet your donations would increase by 30 % or more . 5 - Start selling Goats how much does a goat go for these days ?

You can use debit to pay for a pre-paid credit card at a convenient store and use that to donate. Not sure how feasible a system that uses debit directly will be, since PayPal doesn't like Voat.

Just donated $10/mo

Just signed up for the $5 a month thing. I can afford that.

Open up your wallets goats.

Donated! Thanks for doing everything you're doing! Hang in there!!!

Yeah actually you're right. Sorry.

Does Voat have a Patreon or something?

I know this is an odd offer to make, I usually lurk. But if you need/want any accounting work done free of charge, let me know Put. I really care about this site. I'm not done my schooling for it yet but should be able to help make the basics easy for the user base to understand.

Shut up and take my money

suspend Voat for a few weeks

Translates to instant death to this site's userbase

In all honesty, who would want to support Voat while it still allows child porn subs? It's also not like Voat has a ton of good content either. Most of the posts come from the same circle-jerk subs and once you block those v/all slows to a halt. Until Voat addresses the cancers killing it then it can't avoid death. It's now or later but it's coming.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCHE0Tjw6MA

As much as I do love Voat for its commitment to free speech, I don't see Voat getting any real traction any time soon, I've been here a while - mostly just lurking, growth has been pretty stagnant from what I've seen.

I believe Reddit gets most of its money from advertisers, and as such has to heavily moderate what content reaches the front page to keep advertisers happy - no one wants their products to be associated with hate. Voat isn't able to do the same thing because that would go against everything that Voat stands for, as such the outlook is very bleak in what comes to potential advertising revenue.

So the only other option is donations and merchandise, and for this you need a large userbase willing to depart with their money. Apparently Voat has just 650 - 750 active users, even if half of them donated $5 a month that only comes to $1875 a month tops.

Even with Reddit being the shit hole it is, very few people are willing to migrate here. A lot of them don't care about the corrupted admins, or are just completely oblivious to it happening. And if they do come here, the first thing they see is how empty it is in comparison and end up going back to Reddit where the communities are much more active.

I'm not sure how Voat can gain a larger community when the competition is so big, I can only wish the best of luck to the owners in keeping it alive.

Find Alt-right or free speech centric websites to sponsor.

There should also be a fund raising drive, I see no where to even donate.

IPO

thank you voat for offering a place for me to express myself freely. i wish you the best to all of you and lets hope for the better(i cant contribute since i am dirt poor,almost homeless dirt poor)

my deepest gratitude to chilly for offering me a chance to moderate his site and to atko and putt for making this happen as long as it went.my hope is that everything gets resolved for the benefit of us all here but if not, it has been a pleasure many thank yous!

@chillyhellion @puttitout @dancingqueen @xennios @atko

just put in for $25, first time i've ever put real $ money into a site (never did reddit, wikipedia, etc.). hoping when they process this will be proven out by an organ donor thingy on my voatness, any doubters can check back

PS - I had to provide name and address to give you my 50 greenbacks. You better respect that shit and protect it better than Target and others. . .

Donated $50. Dont be so fucking dramatic. Just ask you fucker.

Damn straight. It'll be awesome to have one.

why dont you set up a monthly donation with a merchant processor and skip patreon and paypal? thats the way the big boys do it. they dont use paypal, they don't use patreon they go with a legit merchant processor.

Just donated another $50.

I just came back from a family holiday to this?!?!?!! JESUS TAKE THE WHEEL!

set up a patreon, set up a monthly membership scheme, everyone that donates x number per month get a little star or something next to their name to feel special, there are tons of ways to monitize this site

why don't you pursue some small business lending? there are tons of alternative lending companies that will definitely lend to you at a good rate

@PuttItOut you can have my money too you fucking newfag.

Am I the only one thinking 6,000 is a bit much? Why not just rent servers and set up that way?

How many servers does this site currently take to run? Anyone have any idea of the specs? I feel a whole lot is being blown on overpriced Microsoft product s...

might be worth setting up a subscription type forum.

free to make an account, browse and allow post in the main verses, even make some of the features paid.

I donated last week and will again on friday, I'd like to see something done so that we don't have to worry about this again.

It's cool you told us this late in the game, I love a good sense of thrill and recklessness

Personally, as someone who longed for a reddit alternative, voat has become a place for racists, xenophobes, and bigots of all stripes to drool on the internet. Sorry voat, you could have been great.

Wow... so canary is 7 months old?

When this place falls, just know, it was a good decision to start this place, man.

I'm curious anyone know what would make voat a good investment? Reddit and Twitter had to sell out to politicians and companies in order to manipulate people's thoughts. Facebook has to sell personal data..These are things people who like voat want to avoid..

Before I came to voat I thought Reddit should have used their platform for something like education, research, or analytics. A stepping stone for a business instead of the primary way to make money.

But I don't believe the same avenues would be open to voat.. a lot of the users, me included, are just angry people saying angry things. If I were running a business that wanted some sort of social networking platform to communicate I'd be afraid to use Voat as the gathering point because of potential civil lawsuits for exposing people to things they don't want to hear or see.

As it is perhaps you can leverage the fact that this is a free speech platform on the internet..Focus on eliminating paid posters, bots, and bad moderation. Perhaps it might be valuable to someone to hear what people really think about things without censorship.

Sweet, any build pics to share ?

I've been telling myself I have to do a fanned fret model, I'll get to it... one day :)

Thx !

What is the best option for an anonymous financial donation?

I'm not all tech savvy, but would is save any money to not save/archive most of what happens on Voat.

Change format, so that threads older than a month that don't get any views any more are deleted. Threads that are still relevant/receive traffic can remain. I know it'd suck not to have a database of them all to go through, but it'd be better than no Voat at all.

How much infrastructure does Voat need?

Azure is a very expensive platform. You could save money - at the cost of higher labor - by using a dedicated server host like OVH.

Well, you must be interested in my money order after all. It isn't going to be traceable back to me. It is money. PM me an address to send my donation. Otherwise, you don't get one.

Just tried to give with the gift card. Must enter valid email. I have to make a new email now? Nevermind. Screw the whole thing. I'm giving. You're not taking.

There's a fork which is much more recent.

@PuttItOut I live in South Korea so my times are different from USA and others but we could use that as an advantage. I'm just a humble teacher working here but I have loads of free time. I don't know code or what it is to be an engineer, but I want to keep VOAT alive and am willing to be a project manager to help. I can't provide much but I want to help the best I can. ^^ Edit: I'll be a sponsor and will donate shortly after this, but I want to help out more than just my ￦ (Korean currency)

This is the straw that breaks this camel's back. With this post I have lost every ounce of trust on this site. I look at the numerology 6600 and $.90 cents, anyone else see the irony? I would call this a controlled demolition. You lured all the talent, all these amazing investigators to this page to only control the narrative and then shut them down in the end. That is the long and the short of it. Yes we do need A hero but not to save this corrupt site, instead to start a New site, where everyone can post comfortably and not worry about shills in control and censorship. Tata voat, ''twas fun while it lasted. So please save us the sob story no one is buying it. SHMH

Same, been chatting & posting since '95 and this is the only place where I've ever truly enjoyed myself.

Let's band together as a community & keep it alive :)

Holy shit go back to reddit.

I donated $50. Good luck with the effort.

Have you reached out to the Kekistani Boys? I hear they need a proper home. Very creative bunch. or Maybe Voat hosts debates between people from different ideologies. Add Revenue off that? The battle ground wouldn't be subject to censorship and if you are bringing bull shit you better be ready to back it up.

Let us know how much we stacked up today it would be a great motivator for those on the fence once they see how many others donated.

That's opinionated man

Worst CEO ever.

If stormfront can raise this every month, surly voat can....

LET THE SERVERS BURN! SCALE BACK 90%!

To me, it sounds like you need to find a volunteer team (and ultimately a staff ) that is willing to donate their time for free at this expansion phase and I am sure there are plenty of people here who would like to play a part in that.

I would be willing to put in as many hours a week as possible into supporting this community any way I can. I'd be more than willing to draft emails/ call lists to sell ad space etc.. I do some work in project managment/ solutions (non-technical capacity) more so than sales so I would also be willing to help research, plan, and execute any fixes to issues you see on the horizon or are experiencing in its early stage so that crisis points like this don't happen again in the future. Maybe volunteers subverse or sign up page where people can reach out when you have an issue?

Also, I know where you are coming from about asking for money. I hated to ask, yet somehow I fell into some work recently doing fundraising haha. I will say, though, I changed my opinion on asking for money. When people do give, it will not be begrugedly. In fact, it will create a more engaged and invested community who want to see what they gave to grow and be successful! People who don't plan on giving will just ignore it and I can't imagine people leaving because of it. The bitcoin option is great and at the end of the month I look forward to making a donation to voat.

It's okay to call it quits if you'd rather go golfing. You really shouldn't waste your life away maintaining a website of all things. This is the internet, you can rest assured that we fat nigger kike haters will find somewhere else to go, and that your work was not in vain. You have learned and grown so much as a person, and any future endeavors of yours will have the backing of wisdom that you didnt have before. I'd miss voat if it went belly up, but having it drag along while you miss out on grabbing titties and puking your spleen out the morning after while you are still young puts a bad taste in my mouth. Let voat die for now if you have to, and then come back to it when you're 35, divorced and have plenty of time on your hands because your wife got the dog and the kids.

You are well spoken with the written word, much better than me. That said, most of us are not the boogie man Neo-Nazi. What ever we are, we are many. I have met some good people hear at Voat some bad. Don't get hung up because I called you a kike, I said so because you are a Jew that seems to be trying to fit in. There is no room for Jews in a White Nationalist movement. We are done being the host nation, good luck to you and your people but not at the cost of my nation.

edit:I would like to add that I don't care if Voat goes down, it's the underground that is popular with the youth and they are my audience. The youth are the future and their minds are malleable.

@puttitout. Sometime in the next few days, can you push the current codebase to git? there's significant drive on the site for the community to help optimize, and move to open source platforms to cut costs. I think you should take them up on that. What's more, should the site be forced to close, such an action would allow someone else to take up the reins at a later time.

Awesome! I'll add you to a thread I'm writing now. Expect a ping before much longer.

Ask The Rothschild family.

You might want to think of implementing a Voat version of Gold. Maybe the Voat Goat, with various levels from $1- Bronze, to $5 Platinum. Bronze, Silver, Gold, Diamond, Platinum. Ad free for a month, highlights whatever post it was given to, and maybe their username on a page with a list of sponsors (people that have given the Voat Goat). Have a leaderboard for most Voat Goats.

You stand at a fork in the road. Do you go to advertisers or do you use the value-for-value strategy? Lookup the NoAgenda Show and see how they ask for donations every episode; this is meant for an overall understanding that format will not work for a web site obviously.

To get an idea of the value-for-value strategy applied to a website, look at free republic. This is one of the oldest and most fugly websites known to man (and so resistant to change as they banned me for attempting to share a plug-in to show proper threads), but every quarter they raise well above your operating costs and their overhead is far lower than yours.

The rough strategy they use is: 1. Do a mass fundraising every quarter, displaying a donation amount bar in place which is manually updated. 2. After a couple of weeks, they roll out the 'monthly' donations to the bar. 3. Until the goal is reached, native ads are displayed. The native ads are both on the page and comments telling people to cough up the money.

If you're going to be successful, you either need to sell the users or get used to asking for money. Listen to a NoAgenda donation segment or two and listen to their pitches and segues. Their arguments revolve around that advertisers seek to control the content around their ads and John and Adam have seen this all throughout their careers.

If you'd like to discuss more offline, please PM me.

Start a patreon account.

open source, open source, open source. Say it with me!

Why people choose to use MS technologies is beyond me. I would even help program, except I don't do any MS languages.... The only costs should be hosting and bandwidth related. Oh well, I hope the next free speech platform is started from a better position.

I gave before, but this doesn't seem sustainable anymore. It's been fun while it lasted

Whip up a monthly donation progress bar & tack on 30% profit.

I don't know all that much about Markus Persson aka Notch, but I know he's got money and seems to be against the anti-free speech crowd. Does anybody have any thoughts on reaching out to him about investing into Voat?

https://twitter.com/notch/

There's likely more running in their stack that isn't directly MS owned. There's also the matter of microsoft's margins when it comes to software. I've not used azure, but regardless of weather its being rolled into the total bill or paid explicitly, that's still money that voat is paying that it doesn't need to be.

I guess I don't know enough about how the internet works to understand why you would pay over $6000 a month for something rather than just buying the hardware and doing it yourself

Take some bones, soak them in a stew overnight, you have some bone broth.

I'd rather go through Voat for managing orders. Just an idea for now, let's look into it.

Still, wouldn't hurt to ask his business.

We have them. They don't get bought

In the past Voat has been lucky enough to be part of special programs designed for startup companies which gave us free licensing on various products and significantly reduced hosting costs.

The fact that they are on an azure based stack DOES lend me to believe that at least a decent portion of that is license costs. If we could switch to a FOSS stack, sure we'd still have to pay hosting, but at least a decent chunk would be taken out. Even 8-9 hundred a month would be VERY significant for the site,

Heard you guys were in trouble. I think I've contributed in the past, but I haven't made enough to pay my own bills this month yet. So I'm just here to offer moral support. If any new business comes my way I'll do what I can though.

Do a donation drive. At the very least it will buy extra time until something more permanent is figured out. I'll throw down some shekels to keep this site afloat

This whole comment section is 'Match me!' all over again. Sounds familiar.....

This seems sketchy. The pattern currently seems to be wait 6 months, ask for emergency money, get the money, never hear anything again for 6 months. Not saying money is being taken/stolen but we have no transparency on what the costs are to know.

I will donate tomorrow in the region of 30 bucks

Gotta keep Voat alive!!!

Definitely ask for sponsorship @puttitout !

Infowars, Brietbart, Heat street hell maybe Sargon, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Rebel Media, Mark Dice, Rubin, Milo or PJW might be able to help out.... It would be a terrible tragedy if Voat ceased to exist... They might be able to sustain us financially? Wouldn't hurt to ask!!

Hope this all smooths out...

Fingers crossed!

There used to be a sidebar meter showing the monthly target for donations and how far there was to go.

I may have been wrong

It looks like there may be an option to donate $5 every month for a year, automatically. If you want to pay more than that each month, buy multiple instances of that option.

I haven't explored this but it should be simple to use.

What about if you started a "daily fundraising goal" on the sidebar, with a donation link?

Could use some upvotes on Hacker news: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14363795

Can help reach a larger audience outside the Voat echo chamber.

On another note, I'd love to know how I can help? In the cloud computing space and an experienced entrepreneur in San Francisco. My VC connections aren't the best, but you don't really want a VC. Angel is the way to go, you need a whale with cash to burn who wants to do some social good which is not easy to find.

Another community to look into is the Bitcoin community, a lot of self made people with money in that community. 5 Bitcoins per month would cover your hosting costs at their current evaluation.

The Pre-Paid card I use for Online Shopping is pretty low but I donated what I could.. Be sure to keep us up to date....

Create some trivial acknowledgement for folks who donate $5/month. I'd do it.

It's nowhere near enough to properly help, but you just got $25 from me.

Doesn't seem so bad a fate, the ways things are going down here on Earth. :P

I'm just a goat like you trying to encourage donation, so "gave you" isn't the most accurate phrase, but HOLY COW thanks for that substantial donation, oldgoat! And you'll give monthly?

Some kind of subscription system for the credit cards has been highly requested today. If it's feasible maybe Putt will implement that. As for PayPal, Voat used PayPal for donations early on but because Voat started hosted controversial material PayPal froze their account. So basically PayPal sucks.

Would an ability to delete dead verses help?

Vikings

100% Libre, at reasonable rates.

Regardless of what happens, I just want to say thanks. You could have folded a long time ago, and no one would have been able to blame you guys then much less now.

Agreed on all three counts, any of them would destroy free speech on this site.

Heinlein's de la Paz was a bright fellow, to be sure.

VOAT needs to go free version limited access, and a pro version for $5.99 a month for full access.

Gofundme?

So how much time do we have? Gofundme?

How realistic would it be to move away from the cloud to a bunch of dedi's at a datacenter? They pay will go down SIGNIFICANTLY once you pay for the hardware. It is a great long term investment but has some technical challenges, but $6,6k/mo is ridiculous imo.. It can be cut by an order of magnitude after initial investment.

I can provide front end development assistance, I have experience with back-end as well and would be willing to help for free if you decide to change over to Linux. Otherwise I'll be donating some money, this is the only place I feel free to express my thoughts and I'd put in what's needed to maintain that

Just donated. It's not much, but I can't afford a whole lot right now. Hopefully it'll count for something.

Can someone tell me what to do to help?

All this talk of individual donations is nice, but there's not realistically enough of us willing/able to make large enough reoccurring donations indefinitely to keep up with the expenses of running a serious social media site. We need a mass campaign to contact someone with deep enough pockets that they could eat costs on their own, that might also share the free speech ideals of Voat. Difficult to know who if anyone would be willing to publicly take the criticism that would come with tolerating some of the uglier sides of free speech, but we should figure out candidates that might and coordinate a twitter campaign to try to get their attention. I'd nominate John McAfee to start.

I was going to wait until I found a new job to donate again but I'll go ahead and give you $25 now. I don't know what I'd do if voat shut down.

I support and applaud the effort that is voat.co (and its previous name).

However I've said it before, and I'll say it again... a site like voat cannot exist as a viable venture AND maintain its founding goals and purpose. Voat needs to transform into a portal for a federated, distributed news system with the same general reddit-like feature set (ie old school newsgroups aren't good enough for this, a new protocol is needed).

I will happily put forth effort into making this happen if we can get enough contributors to make it realistic.

Unfortunately, as is, putting money into voat might as well be burning cash in the long run. There is no way to monetize a centralized free speech platform like this in the current environment.

I'm with you on this. Putt, you have my $25.00, and my axe.