Comment by nemomarx
9 days ago
I do some volunteer time on a small web forum, and we have subscription options on there. It pays for server costs reasonably fine, if not dev time for new features or anything. Users come from lots of places around the world, although the discussion is still mostly in English. It is optional, but the number of power users willing to pay for it covers the rest. You could also look at SomethingAwful as a reasonable strategy?
If people love a community and like spending time on it, they'll be willing to help keep it running and avoid shutting down. You don't get any real profit, but do you need that to run a website? And if people don't love it enough to pay for it, you do have to wonder if it really needs to exist.
I think Reddit could get away with their reddit pro and paying for awards deal, honestly. They would need to rely more on volunteer labor and volunteer development, but a site could exist like that. I assume it's how Lemmy and Lobsters run?
This sounds great, but can you lay out for me how people on Facebook and Instagram are going to volunteer to get access to it for free? What are the mechanics of this?
What I mean is something like those sites could be developed and moderated by volunteers, to be clear, to cut down on operating costs. The users would be a good pool to draw from for this and if you like, the site can dole out subscription features to them in exchange for that?
In my view the problems are that we scale past the point of volunteer moderation being practical, we want to pay for full time devs and so on for the sites, and we want the operation to somehow also make a profit. If you view it more as a hobby that you sink some money into to keep it alive, the economics on a small site can be much more reasonable. Think of an individual blogger and their comment section - the blogger might naturally pay some hundreds a year for hosting on their own, as part of that hobby impulse.