What greg said. I’m not going to try to block this, but my feeling is that donations are pure donations expecting nothing in return and giving money is not something that makes someone a better member.
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Wait, have we considered a nickel of UBI to every user?
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Some people felt the old site had problems. I wasn’t really one of them, but I do think this software is better.
There have been vague goals, but who knows? It’s just stuff happening. It’s not that no one has thought there’s absolutely no possibility that this becomes a big site with lots and lots more users, but no one thinks that’s very likely. Zikzak in particular wants it to be possible that people doing the software stuff can get paid a reasonable amount for their work, though he has certainly said publicly and in PMs that he doesn’t think it’s likely. I have had some thoughts that tangential software efforts could make some money - like hosting other unrelated Discourse sites, using our experience. Cuserounder has thoughts about using it to help launch some podcasting.
All of this has been discussed very publicly and more than once.
idk, did Zuck have some significant percentage of his existing users express interest in expanding their audience with an outwardly focused platform and growth? Because we have that.
We also have a few people who just want what we already have and are extremely averse to change.
One of these two groups has to lose. We can’t do both successfully.
It’s cool guys, I’m a realist.
I wish you nothing but the best of luck. (I really do like the site, w/o making any setting changes too.)
Chopstick? I think of him as being pretty political for OOT.
I think it might be a good idea to set some kind of hourly rate for work done and let it count as loan to the site when there isn’t enough money to pay it and people shouldn’t be shy about claiming hours, but that’s just me. I’m not sure anyone else would agree.
If there’s ever much money I’m not looking forward to being in the middle of figuring out where it goes.
awesome, let’s do it.
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If you’re serious let me know tomorrow. I’ll have to contact all the donors and find out if they want me to return the donations or forward them to you.
so you’re the treasurer? nobody even knows this stuff, dude. and btw “happily” would be like, “great i’ll give you the donor list and let them know”
and yeah i’m serious. i want you to completely gut the site at 3am because i told you to. so go ahead and do that because if you do you definitely shouldn’t have that responsibility
How would it gut the site? The site might lose $100 or something from people who trust me, but not you? Maybe more people will trust you and donations will increase. Yeah, happily, what do I want to be treasurer for? If people trust you, you can hold the $352.79 less transfer fees.
Just because you, and some others, don’t pay attention it’s not anyone else’s fault. There’s a donation thread and I’ve been posting the balance like every other day.
God knows I’m not going back on this even if it’s a game of chicken and have you call me a Stalinist forever and for absolutely no benefit other than maybe Zikzak won’t talk to me anymore. The site will be fine.
so as far as i can surmise, because there’s very little clarity as to what the admins are up to or even who they are, there are 3 people who have vast unchecked power to “do whatever they want” according to the charter voted 52-2. there wasn’t anything agreed upon by the community regarding the transfer of that power, but if the committee, or panel, or whatever you want to call them, of admins has unchecked power then it follows that they have the ability to transfer such power.
and now that power has been handed over to me, a person who fundamentally views this whole enterprise with 3 admins to be illegitimate. why would someone do that? it’s definitely definitely beyond foolish, and, seriously though why would you do that?
i’ll let you take it back. i’m sorry for demeaning your hard work. i would like to help the admins communicate with the community better. and nobody wants me handling their money, i would spend it all on drugs.
Fine, I’ll take it back. You can believe me or not, but not for my benefit. If I quit, zikzak gets all the more pressure and for what? So he quits and then, yeah, maybe the site does go away.
And it’s not about hard work. Not at all. And no one has demeaned anyone’s hard work. I mean, you don’t like some of the site’s features, but they’re being worked on. What’s being demeaned is our character.
You don’t see any clarity because you’re not reading the threads.
right, that’s why it was so crazy but you came to your senses and that’s good because really you should be more responsible, if you’re gonna be a treasurer.
and i believe you when you say you’re not looking to get rich through this site or are looking at it as a source of personal income.
regarding clarity, as treasurer, what can you tell us about the point of the ads? because i’ve read paying the admins pitched as an idea, and i’ve also read it’s to grow the site. idk what that means. is it a fund to post ads for unstuck on other sites? is it to buy podcast equipment?
i’m sure you can appreciate, as a treasurer, that when i read that a small group of people have chosen to monetize the site (all of us users) with ads to pay themselves without saying how much they’re going to pay themselves, it makes me nervous. and when i ask about it, and they tell me to fuck off and call me a dick, that i find that answer frustrating. that’s the position that i’m in and i again apologize for implying you are in a group of stalinist thugs, i don’t think you’re murdering people, i just enjoy having fun with language and i went too far this time.
Agree with oreo that this stuff should be broken out into another thread, but I need to point out that this is not true. Keeping this forum healthy is going to require hours of work every single week, at a minimum. More if traffic grows. That includes not just the technical stuff, but like I mentioned earlier, dealing with things like the drama in this thread.
If you want to see what happens to a forum when they decide to just cruise for years, look at 2+2. Their userbase is in a death spiral and the software is so broken and out of date that they literally can’t update it.
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I agree with micro on not letting donations get to ad opt outs.
It becomes too easy to just allow the ads to become unmanaged in such a scenario. I would prefer ads be limited in placement and scope.
People are free to use ad blockers. The ideal with Adsense would be to attract cpm advertising over cpc advertising. Also someone else mentioned it above but I support the idea of vetted sponsorships over random ads anyways. Having a couple few placements that could be sold monthly would be better in my opinion.
What are others thoughts on that? I would still favor ads run until something like that happens.
What are the current options to contact the site available at the moment? Might not hurt to have a sponsorship contact form or we could just have a thread/forum for it and can be discussed publicly. We could even set up sponsorships and donate them to agreed upon causes to help others raise money. I do not know how that looks because I think the consensus is not to get to specifically political.
We could even have one paid sponsorship and one we donate. The reason I like paid sponsorships is they can be built into the site and you don’t need to have any JavaScript running. Just something to think about for the future.
I would also like to specifically choose ads and support good work, cooperatives, and our own members.
I was surprised that ad revenue was a few dollars a day and not a few cents, but it’s still unlikely to really make money. If traffic were 100 times what it is the ads would support one full time job and there’s no way this forum could function anything like it does (where people sorta know each other) like that. Better to try to use it to help someone or something and maybe foster community spirit than worry about the money.
Well, that’s the old me talking from before it was clear most people just wanted to post and that’s all and a few people ran around accusing anyone who wanted more of being a greedy tyrant.
So I’m very anti ads, but that’s mostly because I hate looking at them.
If we really need to run ads I’d prefer they be for specific sponsors and that those ads run in specific places designed to not screw up the experience.
If we’re going to run adsense ads I very much think that patrons of the site (like 5 bucks a month or more) shouldn’t have to look at them. One of my favorite things about this site is that I don’t have advertising shoved in my face constantly.
If we are going to run ads, I’d be fine with taking on the ad sales position. That way we can keep the level of annoying the ads are to a minimum. This, I suspect, would maximize ad revenue and minimize the amount of ads we all have to look at. This site has a lot of fairly valuable eyeballs so if we’re going to advertise to them I want to keep the ads high value and relevant.
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Well you’re about to be mad at me because we’re already running ads to see how things shake out, but you weren’t seeing them because I tried making them not display for people who donated. However, that issue hasn’t been formally decided yet and there is disagreement among both the admins and the community about how to handle the issue. So I’m undoing that change for now and if you aren’t running an ad blocker you’re about to see ads.
Please direct all vitriol solely at me for this. It was my blunder.
They are the owners of the site, it’s what we voted for on unstuck.