Edit:
I'm simply blown away with you goats. I was expecting a somber farewell in this thread but instead you've done the exact opposite; pulled off a rally at the bottom of the 9th. On a personal note, and this may seem sentimental, but you have given me a new hope for Voat at very dark time for me.
All I can say now is: Let's do this! I think your message is clear. We have a ton of work to do, a short window in which to do it, and I fully understand I can't do it alone. We will need all hands on deck if Voat is to have any chance at survival.
I will post the plans I have for Voat as well as a status update on your contributions by Monday.
P.S. Old goats, be nice to the new kids. ;)
Original Post
As I sit here about to write one of the most difficult announcements yet, I was just reminded that my account is one month shy of three years old. Nearly three years ago I came here from Reddit when the vote counts disappeared and I felt I could no longer trust what I saw. Nearly three years ago I met @Atko and started contributing code because I believed in him, his mission, and what he was doing. So much has happened during these last three years.
I know a lot of you are new, but Voat has been through a wild ride, and never at any point was it an easy one. My memories are bittersweet when it comes to Voat. I’ve sacrificed the best years of my life for Voat, 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. I still see the dire need for Free Speech in this world, I fear a world without it, and I still will do anything I can to continue providing it.
But alas, I am powerless to keep Voat running without financial support. As of right now Voat has no solid commitments. Voat has always needed a financial partner whom had balls of steel and backing deep enough to give Voat the capabilities to run as an actual business (being able to hire staff and set itself apart from its competitors), not just a one man show. Potential investors have one or the other of these traits, but we have yet to find one with both. In this day and age, this is Voat’s unicorn.
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. These programs have since expired and we are now paying full costs. Last month was our first non-discounted month on Azure and the usage was $6,600.90 USD. Donations, ads, and merchandise only put a dent in this and this is the primary reason why we have not launched another merchandise run. And begging for donations was always something we hated doing.
I’m writing this announcement to prepare this community, and the Voat family, for the possibility of a closure. I’m not certain on timing and I have too much invested in this place to give up just yet, so I cannot provide any timelines. In the meantime, I will soon be scaling back all Voat’s servers by at least 50%. I will also turn off some features that are resource intensive.
Voat needs funding. Without it, Voat will be no more.
Voat needs an Angel
Canary
https://voat.co/v/announcements/1330806
view the rest of the comments →
Rummel ago
Any chance Voat could use a blockchain type of deal to keep alive if the worst happens?
I think it's possible to have a website running on a blockchain, but I'm not sure of the semantics.
I would gladly host a node if so. This is the last place on the Internet that doesn't fucking suck. One thing about this idea is voat would not operate on the clear Internet any longer, I believe there are browser plug ins that you need to access .bit domains so it could be as simple as that.
Edit: shameless headline for visibility
@puttitout
go1dfish ago
I've been considering looking into ethereum development to do something like this. But I'm not sure if it's really practical for comment oriented discussions.
Any goats more well versed in ethereum that could speak to the feasibility of this?
I love Voat, and I will donate more to help keep it afloat.
But I've always seen it as a temporary outpost at best, until a truly decentralized uncensorable crypto-anarchistic forum arises.
RiverWind ago
EtherBBS is a forum based on the Ethereum blockchain.
go1dfish ago
Does it have any traction? Web clients?
RiverWind ago
One interesting aspect of the EtherBBS system is how it makes the users pay for the cost of the processing. The "price of gas" varies according to the value of Ether at the time.
"--------------------------------------------------
EtherBBS is a decentralized, antispam forum system.
Reading EtherBBS is free. But to post, a user:
1) must pay a fee plus one-time gas costs for the creating a user account. The account fee will will be automatically calculated from tx.gasprice to account for ether price volatility. 2) must pay gas costs for posting, plus a nominal system maintainance fee that is used for garbage-collecting understaked user accounts. (more on that in #3). The maintainance fee will be automatically calculated from tx.gasprice to account for ether price volatility. 3) must maintain a "staking" ether account balance above a floor, to prove that they have stake in the well-being of the Ethereum system. In most cases, this should be a different ether account than the one the users pays for posts with. Floor is decided by vote every 6 months, which brings me to.. 0) A voting period to decide the initial staking floor will occur in the month leading up to the launch of EtherBBS. When the voting time is up, the floor will be set and the BBS will become active and usable."
go1dfish ago
Yeah that's about how I expected something like this would work.
I'd want to build a web frontend at least for reading and preferably for writing as well though.
The idea being anyone could spin up a web frontend to the discussion boards, and possibly even let people participate freely on the network through those servers and limited by IP.
RiverWind ago
Hosting Voat and keeping control of it in its earlier stages was vital and has helped a lot. Now is time to progress.
Politicians love a crisis, as it is the perfect excuse/opportunity to do what they really wanted to do. Voat should try and think the same way.
The reason why Eddit's costs are so high, are because it is Centralised. Eddit likes that. They want to keep it that way, as in so doing, they keep power, and can censor.
Voat is quite the opposite. Instead of wanting power, Voat wants to empower. Voat would, I think, love to decentralize: Less costs for Voat; Less hierarchical; stronger; more Free.
The way news and discussion evolves means that not every part of Voat and every user needs to be all looking at the same Voat at the same time. It is a bit like the world.Some places are more advanced than others. Some cities get Fibre Optic before others. Eventually, hopefully, everybody will get the technology or hear the news. That could ease Voat's burden too, as there is less time pressure. Processing work and file transfer could take place when it suits Voat.
Anyway, using the Ethereum block chain would be terrific. I hope that /v/ether gets active in this.
It will be great, go1dfish!
go1dfish ago
I love your enthusiasm here but to keep things grounded in reality you should know that distributing such a system actually will likely make it more expensive on the whole.
So expensive that it may well require actually spending small amounts cryptocurrency to post on such a network.
What it does do is distribute those (likely larger) costs widely enough that they don't fuck with anyone's golf habit, and tends to force people to contribute in proportion to their use of such a network.
Using ethereum lets us piggyback some of those costs onto the rest of the ethereum network which is kind of the point of it.
Looks like there are a few projects with similar goals already that could prove to be a basis for this sort of thing:
https://github.com/kayagoban/etherbbs
https://github.com/yep/eth-tweet
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivkBxkSTCMQ
@puttitout parent comment is part of why I keep bugging to ask you what makes Voat expensive.
This sort of tech could spread the data layer out across a wider network (all ethereum miners) and geeks like you and I would spin up frontends to this network that would exist as HTTP sites.
Federating the content so that if any single web frontend goes down, the data is still there for anyone to pick up and keep spreading.
Federating the content so that no single frontend has absolute censorship control, though it would be possible for each frontend to implement their own content filtering to censor things like CP links which could end up being a very real problem with a system like this.
It's kind of pie in the sky, but if our goal is the long term preservation of a strong free speech in an internet commons I think this is the right approach.
RiverWind ago
The EtherBBS system has micro-payments to post, as you mentioned. These are considered advantageous.
1) A one off charge of Ether to establish an account.
2) Micro-Payments for each comment.
3) A sufficient balance in the account.
Little in life is something for nothing/a free lunch. An Ethereum based system acknowledges that. The people who run Voat using Ethererum, could take a percentage of the payments to make things worthwhile for them and in compensation for less time on the golf course. The payments also act as a good deterrent against spam and "shitposts". It wouldn't deter all spam, but you would be getting some payment from it.
Of course, 100% gratis is great, but even now, there is a need to ask for donations. It doesn't work.
You have a lot of good will behind you. If you make a request to the community, I am sure that they will donate some time, money, skills, energy, knowledge.
speakoutforamerica ago
Another dev here - I'd learn up on Ether and help you with it if you get serious.
go1dfish ago
None of those projects I linked to even has a solid frontend that can be used without extra software.
So as a first step I may try to set up a gateway to either etherbbs, eth-tweet or both to get started.
Truffle seems highly relevant to my interests:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPP6uAq15d8
The youtube video I linked to is very promising but i can't find any actual software or site, I'm trying to reach out to that guy to see if any progress has been made on it.