>Receive funding to work on personal project of a website

>>1816636
Keklel is that you?

If all you're offering is legible content with minimal curation, people can find that literally anywhere.
Either readers like the content or they don't. No one is going to continue reading solely because they agree with the editor's hands-off philosophy.

>>1816755
my site doesn't censor even under unpopular opinion.

>>1817811

That may draw in writers, but not readers. Not the normie ones, anyway.

>>1817811
so 4chan then? or is it more like voat? desu sounds like you need to ditch what sounds like a memesite

You don't need to spend 5 minutes explaining it, you just explained it in a sentence: "It's like Medium except the admins aren't leftist-fascists."

Your people are in these places:
Voat
Gab
8ch
Encyclopedia dramatica authors?

What I would recommend to start is to try to find authors on Medium who have written the type of thing you want on your site. Contact them and invite them personally to write on yours. Actually read their articles and mention them when contacting, or else you'll look like a bot or copy-paster and they'll ignore you.

If you can manage to find people who have been banned or whose articles have been removed, that's perfect. (search on twitter for something like "medium removed my article.") These are the types of people who clearly have something to say and are eager to say it.

I realize you're out for strange things and contrarian or weird opinions, not just marginalized political voices, but it's a good start that's popular right now and you can always expand later. Snapchat's initial userbase was kids sending nudes, and no I'm not joking. They didn't encourage people to "download our app and send disappearing nudes!" but they were aware of it and advertised it in places that had that kind of person until they were ready to expand beyond it.

If you're looking for straight up weird articles, maybe venture into some weird places of the internet and interview people or just ask questions, then write articles yourself. Lots of startups create a bunch of fake accounts in the beginning to give the impression of activity on the service because no one wants to be talking to themselves.

But with all that said, you do need to figure out what your angle is. Like I appreciate the free speech thing, but I feel like Gab, trying to be twitter-but-emphasizing-free-speech, doesn't have enough going for it to compel people to jump ship. With that said, it's been successful enough so far. But I think it's 1/

... not enough of a "unique value proposition" and your situation is a bit different. As >>1817828 correctly noted, you need readers as well as writers, and you need more readers.

Another possibility: maybe don't worry so much about advertising the site to authors; try putting together some good articles and advertising those to READERS rather than advertising the site to writers. Like something like Vice maybe, but all first-person stories written by regular people instead of journalists.

These are just some possibilities. But try to imagine your site after it's established. What is the one thing it does well and is known for? Is it being a reliable place to publish an article that will never get removed no matter what the opinion is? Then go the first route I mentioned, study Medium, try to copy as much of what they're doing as you can, and figure out what you can offer for writers/readers that Medium isn't willing to. Find the disillusioned users and invite them over. Talk to youtubers and do some kind of partnership or something where you write text versions of their videos, expanding on what they talked about and have them direct their users to your site (huge opportunity here). Sure Medium has way more resources, but you have the advantage of being able to talk 1on1 with people. Their audience is too big, they can't do that anymore, any suggestions or requests are lost in some feature requests form.

I'd love to see the site personally, it sounds like something i'd be into as I've written shit on medium and just wanted a place to broadcast an idea, i had no idea they censored shit or whatever, that's really annoying. if you don't wanna post the site here i understand, maybe post it with privnote.com or something.

Good luck!

Also, just wanted to mention...

I just realized you said you've been paying people to write articles. Are they writing about topical things other people are talking about? If not, they really should be. And for something like facebook ads, THAT's what you wanna advertise, because that's what's already on people's minds. Of course, you can't turn a profit with that at this point, you just want users on your site, and your conversion goal is getting them to share your articles, so you should have Google Analytics or Piwik or something and be optimizing to try to get as many shares as possible. If you're not ready to do that, save your ad money until you are. There are also lots of places to advertise, and facebook may not be right for that kind of thing, especially not anymore now that they seem to have really come down hard on clickbait and stuff.