The hard truth is that long term, we likely need another way besides donations to keep the ecosystem alive.
lesnake
joined 2 years ago
Letting users decide where the money goes to is much better yeah.
I think they should be able to set percentages. See here: https://lemmy.world/comment/1068820
Honestly I think awards are a decent way of determining the quality of a post. If a Reddit post has a lot of awards it's a sign that it is especially helpful/interesting. I know there are exceptions and sometimes the flood of awards at the top of the post is annoying, but often it works for determining the quality.
So people will aim to make posts of similar quality to get awards as well.
Karma on the other hand is too easy to get so its leads to shitty reposts to get a lot of likes. But the people don't give awards to reposts that often.
There is a reason many YouTubers sell discord roles. Many people are willing to spend 5€/month for a stupid discord rank, so I don't see why it's wrong to profit of people willing to buy awards
If you prefer direct donation, having something like awards won't stop you but if someone wants to buy that overpriced sticker, they can as well.
I agree with @[email protected] : Giving the user the power to decide where the money goes to is the best option. This eliminates the need for a centralised account with a system to spread the money, which would definitely lead to a lot of arguments.
The user could select something like 20% lemmy devs, 30% instance of community, 50% instance their created the account on. This way the user can decide who gets their "donation"
I can understand the mindset, but I worry most people don't think like this.
The thing is, that small rewards for "donations" will likely make the people much more willing to spend money in the first place. Even if it's as small as a sticker on someone else's post that costs the servers involved like a handful of API calls. But when a 1€ award is 3x as popular as the 1€ donation, it will greatly increase the funds available to the instance and, hence better servers, more features etc
Im so glad we didn't loose the humor in the migration !
Good to know. Havent used it for years so I didnt realise it expanded outside the browser.
Also you kinda force yourself to stay in the appl ecosystem. I strongly suggest switching to a platform-independent password manager.
Edit: Looks like firefox is platform independent
notates username in case i need an account somewhere but am too lazy to create one
Same. I am bad at coming up with good passwords so I just ended using the same for 95% of websites.
Since I started using password managers, life is so much easier and secure. And bitwarden is by far the best option. Its free, premium is less than1$/months and completely open source so I can actually trust it.They also have exelent cross platform support.
Looks like donations work surprisingly well with the current userbase and current expenses. The projects on opencolective are doing quite well.
Lets just hope this stays that way for a while.
I doubt its sustainable that way forever though if more reddit users and subreddits migrate. So if donations arent enough anymore in the future, I hope they choose something like awards instead of flooding the site with ads, analytics or paywals.