The problem with this (or any investment system for a site that will be primarily driven by investments and donations) is that investors expect a return. If you aren't careful, you might accidentally have to turn voat into a ponzi scheme by simultaneously paying out to investors whilst asking for investment money. Not only are there a multitude of legal issues with doing this, it also doesn't lend itself to stability. What voat needs is a source of income that is not dependent on donations, which are small and fickle, investors, who expect a return (after all, it was venture capital money that really fucked reddit over), or ads (since ads like we've been running simply aren't too profitable these days, and the userbase would react VERY poorly to anything more intrusive than a static image that links off site). We need the holy grail of website income, basically. My thoughts on how voat could do this are as follows.

Merely hosting content doesn't generate income, it costs server space. Sadly, this is the purpose of voat- to host discussion

Therefore, we either need to give people a reason to pay to access that content in some way, or get other entities to pay for people to view said content.

The only obvious ways to do this are a subscription of some sort, or ads. Again, the nice, unobtrusive ads will only get us so far. A subscription based model to accessing voat content seems a sure way to kill off the site, but it doesn't have to be. I'll explain in further detail below.

An alternative option would be for voat to develop another service of some variety, one that's easier to monetize, such as eCommerce, or a service of some variety that people are willing to pay for (and that makes sense to charge for). We're making headway in the eCommerce department with the store, but voat merch, while helpful, is unlikely to be able to support our operating costs long term- eventually, everyone who wants merch will be satisfied, so unless we can continually grow ad infinitum, it won't be a viable primary income source.

My proposed solution(s): Look at both the community, and sites that have had to overcome similar issues in the past.

Getting back to how it's possible to have a subscription system that does not kill the community, I submit as an example, hackforums.net.


This place is up to this day, despite a good portion of its content being very much in a legal grey area (which means outside companies are unlikely to want to advertise there). They overcame their legal issues by simply cooperating with the US gov on any data requests, as such, it was mostly script kiddies hanging around there, but the point still stands. They had to keep servers up, despite significant load (until recently, the site sold booters. Guess where people always tested them out?), and being simply toxic for major brands to advertise on. For monetization, they relied on both a premium user system not unlike reddit gold, where people willing to donate can upvote and downvote individual users, have special badges by their name, and hang out in private sections of the forums. They also had a system to pay for a stickied post in a particular area.


While a few of these things would work within the format of Voat, most of them would be MAJOR turnoffs for the userbase, and some simply impossible (such as the pay for sticky system- Without the admins taking control of user owned subverses, this isn't really possible). We do, however see that the site owners were able to provide perks without spending all that much more money. Voat could badge recurring donors. I'm sure there's other ways we could incentivize users to donate on a monthly basis without compromising the democratic free speech this site is built on, say special events like gaming nights where participation is subscriber only. A donation meter might also help with ensuring that sufficient donations are given to the site.

We could also look at providing some other type of valuable service that people are willing to pay for, such as filehosting, archiving, or backups. The problem here is that we aren't that beefy of a site, so such services would quickly expand our overhead, and would doubtless be more expensive than other, dedicated services, unless we leveraged Voat's community in some way- many people might find it easier to donate computational resources than to donate money. We could get a P2P fileservice going; I'm sure many people on this site have a seedbox- people could send a file through a web browser, to be encrypted and then stored by a P2P swarm with a bunch of other files, all saved and hosted by voat users.


Finally, I have one large scale plan that might work well, where voat could draw upon our dedicated community to improve itself:

Partner with our community made free speech services such as gvid and slimg (which likely face similar trouble), to share hosting costs and development work. Once we have a group of these services, we could look at using distributed/ p2p hosting for much of our content (though we should always be easily accessible via a standard web browser). As a larger force, we could likely register as a nonprofit group dedicated to ensuring free speech is always available on the internet, use this as a platform to take donations from those not on the site, and see if you can get larger entities such as Fight For the Future, the Internet Archive or the Electronic Frontier Foundation involved. An endorsement going out to such charity's mailing lists might attract a good number of donors.