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Why don't you accept donations?

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Re: Why don't you accept donations?

#161

Post by matheusmoreira »

VRay wrote: post #158
matheusmoreira wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Monero is a good currency but a really bad investment. That's probably a good thing too. If its price remains stable relative to USD, we can start developing the habit of pricing everything in XMR instead. I've gotten paid in XMR for writing some quick code, it works pretty well. Now we just need to get people to sell oil barrels for XMR.

Man, that's really interesting Looks like Monero hasn't been pumping or dumping quite as much as other cryptocurrencies, maybe that means its creators actually care about making it useful as currency rather than as a medium for ~~scams~~ "investments" I'd love an ad-free future, but something tells me that there'll always just be too much pressure to make more ads. Hell, Amazon is pumping $10,000,000 per episode into…

Yeah. The cryptocurrency space does have a lot of scams, especially coins created on top of ETH and BNB. However, there's a lot of good projects as well. Monero is everything bitcoin was supposed to have been. I think it's insane how people are wasting energy on bitcoin mining. That energy would be better spent securing Monero.

There will always be pressure to advertise. No matter what product or service you have or how profitable it is, you can always make even more money by selling your user's attention. That's why we need technology that makes it impossible to advertise to us. A browser extension that deletes elements, a video filter that deletes brands, augmented reality glasses that deletes billboards.

Re: Why don't you accept donations?

#163

Post by hoseja »

dkdk8283 wrote: post #148
fartcannon wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Greed doesn't stop. It doesnt say, 'this, but no more. our shareholders have enough'. We'd be here with or without as blockers. It would just be worse without.

I liked the old internet where people posted content out of passion not for money. The quality has suffered and many think they have a right to get paid.

Blame existing in an universe where evolution (that is, proliferation of whoever survives) happens.

Re: Why don't you accept donations?

#164

Post by ropp »

pictur wrote: post #30

There are so many people who are collecting donations and advancing all their projects according to their will. they don't even take suggestions seriously :D but I like your point of view.

Isn't that the idea of donations, though?

Re: Why don't you accept donations?

#165

Post by sgjohnson »

asiachick wrote: post #129
nocturnial wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the opposite viewpoint about ads. I don't think we should reward a business model which relies on the premise that humans like to watch ads. I never had someone tell me to drive slower because they wanted to take a closer look at a billboard. Never had I had to rewind a video because someone missed an ad. etc... etc... Let's be honest. If someone told you to do any of the above things regularly and consistentl…

Plenty of people like watching ads. Just go to youtube and see all the ads posted. There's whole channels https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUBpIWz6bPk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTcV-7Ubzpg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYFyruOvAnM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVwvmozG6-A&list=PLjHdPL8MeP... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdCYe4FoMRA I had plenty of friends that hated Football but would throw a party to wat…

The only ads I like watching are the Mafia City ones. It’s peak comedy.

Re: Why don't you accept donations?

#166

Post by elzbardico »

dkdk8283 wrote: post #148
fartcannon wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Greed doesn't stop. It doesnt say, 'this, but no more. our shareholders have enough'. We'd be here with or without as blockers. It would just be worse without.

I liked the old internet where people posted content out of passion not for money. The quality has suffered and many think they have a right to get paid.

Probably there is even more content like that as there are more people in the internet. But we can't find the good content in the mountain of trash that we are drowning in. EDIT: can -> can't

Re: Why don't you accept donations?

#167

Post by fregante »

lwouis wrote: post #144
fregante wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kind of weird to work for free though, isn't it? Sure it's something we like doing, but I really see no reason to reject free money. For uBlock this free money would be a fairly large amount, I'm sure. Even if that'd require some legal setup, I assume those fees will be largely covered.

Money as the end-all-be-all is pretty new. I notice it a lot in American culture in particular. People have dedicated their life to all sorts of endeavors in the past, and still do of course. Big religions are a prime source of people doing large amounts of work for no money. It's quite odd to me to think that any activity i engage in should be to accumulate these tokens. Something i do stuff for the process itself.…

Yeah but… money. You can’t pay rent with smiles. Accepting donations would probably mean having to work less at their main job. Or they could re-donate it.

There are people willing and able to pay, leaving those money on the table is pure waste.

Re: Why don't you accept donations?

#168

Post by owenversteeg »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #74
munificent wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, there is real psychological research behind this. If you charge people for something, it kicks their perception of the act into a different category. That in turn effects how they think about the interaction and what their sense of entitlement and expectations are in ways that can be counter-intuitive. A famous related study is: https://freakonomics.com/2013/10/23/what-makes-people-do-wha... They found that when…

What you're skipping is that it was a tiny fine. $3 per incident! Small amounts of money can be really distorting that way. Paying a full day's salary for the consultation is not the same, and it's pretty likely it would increase the company's respect of their time.

Sure, it was a small fine (NIS 10 per incident per child) but keep in mind:

- Israel has the highest fertility rate in the developed world (3.1 children per mother on average)

- The average gross monthly salary at the time of the study was NIS 5,595

- If the average parent comes late 4 times a month, that's 4 * 3.1 * 10 = NIS 124 = 2.2% of their monthly salary, or the majority of an entire day's pay (!) - that's not nothing.

That said, there are two interesting conclusions from the paper. Firstly, the well known one:

> Parents may have interpreted the action of the teachers in the first period as a generous, nonmarket activity. They may have thought: "The contract with the day-care center only covers the period until four in the afternoon. After that time, the teacher is just a nice and generous person. I should not take advantage of her patience." The introduction of the fine changes the perception into the following: "The teacher is taking care of the child in much the same way as she did earlier in the day. In fact this activity has a price (which is called a ‘fine’). Therefore, I can buy this service as much as needed."

But there's also this:

> The behavior in the third period, however, is still difficult to explain. Now the first social norm would predict a low level of delay. We may think that a period of 4 weeks is not sufficient to bring the behavior back to the appropriate level. But considering that 2 or 3 weeks had been enough to double the level of delays after the introduction of the fine, we should estimate that the learning rate of the parents is too fast to justify so much inertia. Perhaps a third social norm is needed: "Once a commodity, always a commodity." This norm and second clause of the first norm explain the behavior in the final period: a commodity at zero price is bought in large quantities. Overall, three norms seem necessary to explain three facts.

Re: Why don't you accept donations?

#169

Post by account42 »

binwiederhier wrote: post #67
approxim8ion wrote: post #3

I can't think of too many pieces of software that have improved my life as significantly as uBlock Origin in the last decade. It's been an absolute godsend.

I have never used an ad blocker and have resisted installing it many times. My thinking always was: I'd rather have a web with ads than a web in which I have to pay for content and sign up to 800 different websites with 800 different accounts. A website that I've frequented a lot, the German news website spiegel.de, has converted to pay only mostly, and i now can't use it anymore. I am not saying that's the fault of…

I on the other hand would prefer that all the commercial websites were honest about what they charge instead of trying to profit off manipulating me into spending money elsewhere.

The idea that there would be no open content on the web without ads is ridiculuous. Most content on the web, like the comments in this discussion, is "user"-generated and the users generating it are typically not paid at all. While less visible in search engines, there are still many websites - personal or otherwise - that have no profit motive and are provided without any charge or ads. Its not uncommon for them to get posted here.

And even for content that you'd want to pay for, ads are a bad way to pay for it because the cost to you (or the average person) is much greater than what the content creator gets out of the deal. Meanwhile, the incentives for ad-supported content creators and users are not really aligned payment is based entirely on engagement rather than any judgement of what value the user gets out of the content. There is so much spam that provides no value to the web (e.g. because the content is literally copied from elsewhere) but still exists because some people may land on the page and end up viewing ads. So many user-hostile features designed to keep users spending as much time as possible on ad-laden website.

Now back to spiegel.de you say you frequented it a lot. Does that not mean that you got any value out of it that you are willing to pay for? If not, is not being able to use it anymore really such a problem?

Re: Why don't you accept donations?

#170

Post by account42 »

elzbardico wrote: post #166
dkdk8283 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I liked the old internet where people posted content out of passion not for money. The quality has suffered and many think they have a right to get paid.

Probably there is even more content like that as there are more people in the internet. But we can't find the good content in the mountain of trash that we are drowning in. EDIT: can -> can't

It doesn't really help that the biggest search engine is also the biggest ad provider. Not exactly a great incentive to surface ad-free content.
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