Voat has barely needed any money to run so far. Voat could have easily covered today's costs as well as future costs via only bitcoin donations. It basically only serves HTML; it's a glorified text server. This means bandwidth costs are not an issue in the slightest. The server rental pricing therefore only factors in much cheaper things such as processing power, RAM, disk space, etc. A single $150/month server could have handled each one of these exodus waves perfectly. If Atko has been paying more than that to keep Voat running, then he has made some terrible choices on the server-side, or his code just scales poorly.

Again, for context, look at 8chan: It gets roughly double the page hits voat gets on any given day (judging by alexa stats for the global rankings of each site, yeah yeah they aren't totally accurate but what else can I point to?), and 8chan also frequently has to serve massive webm files on top of everything else. 8chan's costs are mostly due to its bandwidth from large images and webm files, which Voat doesn't have to deal with; so 8chan probably costs 5x-10x as much to run as Voat does, and yet 8chan doesn't need venture capital.

Let's be real clear here: WE created Voat's success. If it wasn't for KiA, then the number of people who have heard of Voat would be zero. ZERO. Atko owes us everything, and yet after this first whiff of success, before his site is even in working condition, he's already sold out to the highest bidder. He's selling out to some fuckheads with money who are trying to claim for themselves all that success and momentum WE CREATED with our sheer collective fury. Their goal is to squeeze even more money out of all of us in the long run; to squeeze money out of other people who want to advertise to us, brainwash us, or both; and to ruin the site in the process, exactly like what is happening on reddit. Most infuriating of all is that he's throwing it in our face as if we should be happy about it. Where is the humility? Admit you sold out, don't couch it in self-praise and faux-positive "Our Incredible Journey" doublespeak.

I do believe Voat is our least worst choice for now, but I think we need to preemptively already be making plans to exodus away from Voat and toward a site owned by someone with a spine. I wish we could all make some sort of pact with each other and agree in advance to unanimously exodus to another destination if and when certain unacceptable conditions arise on Voat. It's just tiresome to witness how our collective behavior keep defaulting to an embodiment of the boiling frog scenario...