Yes, but you need a scalable and low-friction donation solution. Patreon is the closest but it doesn’t pay the bills for most creators. Maybe some micro-tipping solution, but nobody has made that work yet.
No one has made a successful micro-tipping solution, because regulations and entrenched interests (banks, payment processors) have too much control and assess per-transaction fees that dwarf the amounts that such a system would be designed send.
Aggregation of tips and payouts would help, but that requires network effects (achievable only at scale) to be viable. I believe this approach has been tried in recent years, but I am not sure where those efforts went.
If someone puts a donate button beside their name or in the corner of their webpage, and that button leads to a payment page, I think that's good enough.
The point of paying creators is so that they can focus on creating content instead of making other things. Giving money to a creator is basically saying "you're so good at what you do, and it has so much cultural/intellectual value, I'd rather have you make content instead of stocking shelves or making food". But this should be reserved for people that publish good content because they can and are passionate about it, not just anyone putting out slop with the instrumental goal of paying their bills. If the friction of clicking a button and filling in payment details is enough to deter people from paying them, then maybe their content isn't worth paying for and they should find some other way to make a living instead.
It’s really becoming desperate and counterproductive.
I’ve had an Alfred command since 2013 where I type `wiki something` which then opens Confluence and searches for `something`. I use this to quickly search our company wiki for terms without breaking my concentration and flow.
Atlassian decided to add an AI summary at the top and intentionally disable the rest of the results until the AI summary has finished rendering fully. It’s insane. How is this making me more productive? It’s just shearing off one other layer of familiarity and value I’ve enjoyed for 12 years and pushing me away from their product.
Forced adoption rarely works out unless people really want the feature and don’t know that they want it. At the very least, let us disable it.
You are describing exactly the Dunning-Kruger Effect[0] in action. I’ve worked with some very bright yet less technical people who think the output is some sort of magic lamp and vastly overindex on it. It’s very hard as an engineer to explain this to them.
"Profit"? Who cares about profit? We're back to dot-com economics now! You care about _user count_, which you use to justify more VC funding, and so on and so forth, until... well, it will probably all be fine.
And even if they were smuggling drugs, what if there were children on board? Do they deserve to die because of the crimes of their parents? What if they kidnapped someone and forced them to pilot the boat? Does that person deserve to die?
Imagine the US instead pulling the ship over and shooting every person, regardless of age or guilt, in the head—and then leaving. This is no different.
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