Opinion: I’d prefer an ad-free front page in favor of every nth post where N is high enough to not be annoying. While I’m amused by the NRA ads and happy to take their money, I really don’t like that being the first thing people see before we have a chance to define ourselves.
I honestly get closer to agreeing with this every day.
I’ve blocked NRA ads. Turns out my tolerance level for Gadsden flags is pretty fucking low.
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We really can’t fully fund this place with donations?
I took that survey. Wanted to give them proper feedback. Did not donate though.
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microbet’s last donation total update from a week ago had us at around 15 months of hosting fees banked up, plus it looks like we’re up to ~$75 a month from Patreon patrons, which is enough for almost 4 months of hosting at the current cost.
So we don’t need ads but if we can make $4-5 a day from them, why not? I don’t think anybody cares if you use an adblocker here so it’s basically an optional thing that lets the people who poured hours of work into the site get a few free cheeseburgers.
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Fewer NRA ads, more hot Latinas ads imo.
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When I’m reading a thread on mobile, the ad covers the top bar that I use. If I minimize the ad, the top bar is still partially obscured so the thread title has a thing in front of it allowing me to easily reopen the ad, because we need that
I didn’t like it because the top banner was blank instead of the title of the thread
I was really tempted to use that theme earlier
I’m worried that hiding ads with CSS is going to get us in trouble. That doesn’t seem like something they’d be OK with.
who’s working on the site who will get paid from the ads?
when you reach a level of payment that you feel is adequate, do we get to remove the ads? i’m sure we all prefer an ad-free site, and if one person can just decide to monetize the site as a personal income source for themselves, it seems like the definition of corruption, and is exactly the thing i warned people about when i referred to the discourse takeover as “stalinist”
Maybe we could get those issues ironed out if you would try making constructive contributions to community governance instead of just constantly being a dick about everything.
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“Stalinist” is way out of bounds. At worst it’s like Lenin’s moves to take power away from the worker’s councils in early 1918. In this case though the worker’s councils pretty much disbanded on their own. The business-modelish thing here may not be perfect, but hardly anyone was willing to take responsibility/action and yet most people wanted something done. As it is, absolutely nothing has been done that wasn’t said would be part of moving sites.
And to answer your question more specifically, beetlejuice, no one has made any claims yet on the money collected and the money collected in the future will go to people who do the work in the future. Other people may want to step up and do stuff, and maybe smk4 or whoever has been handling the twitter or someone else who I don’t know what they’re doing will make a claim and they probably should.
how about, take the money from donations that you feel you are owed (because there’s no oversight lol), and stop acting like a martyr who carried us all here on your back. or accept “thank you” and the existence of a nice community forum as your reward.
at times you’ve presented yourself as an amateur, and now you’re suddenly a mini mason malmuth making us all look at ads all day so you can get a second income out of it. you certainly made it seem like you were doing this as a hobby project to gift to the community. now with these ads that gift is revealing itself to be a grift. (hold for applause)
we left 2p2 because it was tyrannical and capitalist and now we’ve come here to create the same trough with different pigs. nobody wants to look at ads all day, nobody came here to be a product in zikzak’s small business. it’s not right.
Can’t take any money. microdaughter already absconded with it all.
Yawn.
I agree with SA’s general position about ads, but I’m sympathetic to the position of TNewPTB–many of us (myself included) were on the governance committee and failed to deliver on what we were tasked with. I think I personally spent a few consecutive weeks afk after saying I’d help square up governance, so I consider myself lucky to enjoy the results of your efforts.
Perhaps a separate thread is warranted for this, but I think we should have an honest conversation about the amount of work that went into this site–I think many of you have worked untold hours behind the scenes, and those of us that have reaped the benefits should be aware of it. Don’t be too humble–you all have pulled together an excellent site better than I and others could have expected. I think you all deserve compensation for that, honestly–thank you for what you’ve done.
My concern is about the long term approach–I find the ads annoying and unsightly already, so I’m concerned about how they’ll be if they get more prevalent in order to monetize the site. It would do us well to set some guidelines that result in fair compensation for the (ongoing) work required to maintain this site without turning off users. This solution may very well include ads, if we can’t self-fund, and I think that’s OK.
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