Comment by colesantiago

9 days ago

That doesn’t answer their question, like at all.

Yes it does. Hobbyists are willing to spend their own money, hence their blog doesn't need ads.

Businesses make money by selling products/services, so they don't need money.

Wikipedia is donation supported.

GP is pretty much saying - if it can only survive by running ads, let's do without it.

  • > Yes it does. Hobbyists are willing to spend their own money, hence their blog doesn't need ads.

    Until it is unsustainable which is the majority of cases due to no funding.

    > Wikipedia is donation supported.

    The majority of websites are not as big as Wikipedia, let alone having donations in the tens of millions.

    The GP talks about Mastodon which hobbyists run and users sign up to instances to have their social identity on.

    toot.community, mastodon.cloud and many others are closing down this month due to no funding.

    And even some organisations don't want to run instances due to it being expensive. (1.)

    Even mozilla.social shut down.

    Sure, these services wouldn't run ads, but they can't charge users either which leaves donations as the only way to fund it, and 9.9/10 times it doesn't work.

    Using Wikipedia as an example to prove a point about donations makes no sense for everyone else who also contribute to the open web for free.

    1. https://gfsc.community/why-we-discontinued-our-mastodon-serv...

    • > 9.9/10 times it doesn't work

      I'll concede that it doesn't work out a lot of the time. This is not very different from for-profit websites. Also, your number of 9.9/10 is probably pulled out of your ass. I'm note sure what the real number is, but I'd wager it's lower than 9.9/10.

      I'm not sure how old you are, but in the early 2000s there were so many community forums; most of them survived. Even if it doesn't, the community can go to another host at some point.

      This isn't the counterargument you think it is.

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