That was also the time it was opened to the public. This shutdown appears to be a strong counterpoint against Reddit alternatives becoming an inherently successful business prospect.
It looks like Voat is not in good financial shape too:
The "goats" are also people who feel like they've been politically badgered into a corner, so I suspect they will spend to maintain their last refuge. Your will to fight goes up as the space you are confined to gets smaller.
I think there's definitely a market for a "social network of last resort" in this age of community guidelines.
Which... I think is a great thing. It's good that Twitter, Reddit, etc, are being aggressive about harassment. That promotes the freer flow of certain ideas (feminism, social justice, etc). But then that necessitates an alternate space for the free flow of opposing viewpoints (harassment filters out the weak, feminism is cancer, this woman should be raped for her opinions, etc).
I was at this event with a close friend of mine and noticed the distinctive Voat logo on her phone.
"Are you .. are browsing Voat?"
I'd classify her as libertarian-esque.
I know it's just one datapoint, but I don't think the voat userbase is as 1-dimensional is you think.
I think the only way you get there is by keeping dialog open with the people who do think it. If you refuse to listen to them, you strengthen their belief that they're seeing something other people are unwilling to look at.
And I think trying to "no platform" those people only strengthens their rhetorical position, making it easier for them to extract sympathy from moderates, which normalizes rape culture and quite possibly leads to more rapes. Which is really tragic.
But all of this is just a smaller part of a general failure of feminist policy to do anything with perpetrators besides punish them. Restorative justice is starting to catch on in feminist circles, at least in terms of lip service. But it's a tough sell, because it's completely at odds with the basic feminist methodology of "Step 1: Separate the situation into Oppressor and Oppressed. Step 2: Direct all available resources towards the Oppressed. Step 3: Fuck the oppressor up, if you can. Though you probably won't be able to. #lesigh #patriarchyamirite"
Of course, that is totally understandable. When you live in a society that systematically fails to punish perpetrators, and willfully ignores your calls to punish them, where else does that lead besides a laser-focus on self care and becoming psychotically obsessed with trying to punishing perpetrators?
And Men's Rights has a totally impoverished accounting of the situation, being able to say little more than "Not all men!" and "Women are perpetrators too!" which doesn't advance the dialog at all either. Those are orthogonal situations, and don't address the underlying issue which is that the victim/perpetrator dialectic obscures the root of violence, so it can never be pulled out.
We should all listen more carefully to the black civil rights community, who is leaps and bounds beyond the rest of us in drawing a nuanced picture of violence and ways to see through it to community healing.
Now the question I wonder is if the change in the discussion regarding crime and race was caused by the black civil rights community, or if it was caused by society in large realizing that there is better social theories to explain the statistics.
You think it's a great thing that there is less dialogue between people with differing opinions and more places that function as echo-chambers?
https://voat.co/v/AskVoat/comments/196002/579547
Not sure how it turned out, but investors were apparently interested in investing in them. And may have raised a decent amount of cash through the process as well.
There are so many viable businesses that burn themselves to the ground because they think they need to run everything on EC2/Azure and pay 10x what they need to.
Anyways, if monthly costs of a little bit more than $6000 are enough to sink the ship, then the whole thing isn't financially viable. Sooner or later you have to pay people to maintain the whole thing, and that is going to be a lot more expensive.
Edit: oh wait, that's $8M in October 2016, not 2015 - ie 8 months ago. Burning $1M a month does seem quite high. Maybe they're shutting down early to give some money back to investors?
To many startups these days just try to throw good money after bad.
The pic in your linked article shows 12 people. If they didn't have traction, they shouldn't have exorbitant server costs either.
So where's it all go?