First of all I would like to suggest to @ernest to take a day or two break from working on kbin and in general to not overwork himself.
Secondly, some sort of Patreon should be setup to streamline the donation process. I, probably like many others would like to just set up a recurring donation and forget about it.
Thirdly, I think it would be great we also have something like https://beehaw.org/post/428209 to keep this as transparent as possible.
I really think there will need to be ads/sponsors at some point, and soon. Donations won’t be enough when you need to support a few full time workers.
Idk, Mastodon is much bigger than kbin (I think we’re talking 10x at this point), and as far as I know it’s still running fine on donations through Patreon or the like.
But as long as it doesn’t change the way content is moderated/handled in the site, I’d still be fine with a sponsor or with ads (as long as there’s an option, even paid, to disable them).
Almost like the need to be highly profitable is the real problem with… everything.
No, being profitable isn’t the problem. The problem is the expectation to be ever more profitable than the last time, and to be as profitable as possible in spite of everything such as a decent treatment of the user. I don’t think the majority of people were against reddit being profitable, but the way they chose to do and communicate so is what made people despise them.