Voat says that it accepts donations only in Bitcoin for now after a battle with PayPal, and that it will “never sell your data.” It is suddenly receiving interest from investors while being run by just two people: Colo, who recently graduated from the University of Zurich in Switzerland, and co-founder Justin Chastain.
Voat used to ask for donations all the time.
I subscribed to donate each month. There were many of us committed to donating each month. I had little to give but I was happy to give it.
Did they stop once they got the "angel investor" or before that point?
Putt decided to pull the plug after the angel investor pulled out. Fund raising wasn't considered because previous attempts at fund raising had had only moderate success, bringing in only enough to run the site for a few months. As well since then costs had increased significantly. They had been getting a break on Azure and Cloudflare (I think it was) but those stopped and it was now costing something like $30K a month to run the site.
People who have never run a site have no idea how much trouble it is. Add into that all the extra trouble of running a site like Voat and I'm amazed Putt lasted as long as he did.
30k? Is that right? That seems nuts.
I think someone figured that Putt probably signed the source code away for funding from the angel investor. Then they backed out and Putt was left with nothing and couldn't talk because of the NDA they most likely signed.
Seems to make the most sense to me anyway. People came out of the woodwork to give money at the end. Could probably have floated it for a few months at least.
That or Putt was just straight up done dealing with Voat and didn't want to just come out and say he was sick of all our shit and the target on his back.
Didn't one goat figure that the voat bit coin wallet had $3 million in it? Not a bad reason to take the money and run before getting mossaded.
I honestly don't know - I don't remember if they had an investor as I was leaving or not.
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