That feels dumb, but people's willingness to pay is affected a lot by their perception of what they're paying for. I payed for 3 reddit apps, and never felt like paying for reddit itself as they went downhill. It always felts like they're accepting users like me despite their personal convictions, and I'm half abusing their platform by looking at decent content instead of the flaming hell of subs they had as default and then as prominent subs.
Their handling of many of the most public issues has been botched to no end, and their relationship with the mods has always been adversarial.
As a counterpoint, people donate to Wikipedia, pay for patreons, push money on Youtube. None of these corporations are perfect, and they have their controversies, but not spitting on the community at every turn helps a lot, to the point where the calculation on what you pay for what you get can be more skewed, or even negative, and it still works out.
PS: I see the same dynamic for Twitter, there's no way I'd pay for anything on Twitter at this point, when paying for better instances of Mastodon looks like a long term positive action.
Because it is dumb. Reddit is and has always been for profit company. To justify its valuation of $10B, it will need to generate at least $1-2B of revenue. Wikimedia has $165M revenue in comparison. No board member will be content with such small return.
Give the image of a decent company.
That feels dumb, but people's willingness to pay is affected a lot by their perception of what they're paying for. I payed for 3 reddit apps, and never felt like paying for reddit itself as they went downhill. It always felts like they're accepting users like me despite their personal convictions, and I'm half abusing their platform by looking at decent content instead of the flaming hell of subs they had as default and then as prominent subs.
Their handling of many of the most public issues has been botched to no end, and their relationship with the mods has always been adversarial.
As a counterpoint, people donate to Wikipedia, pay for patreons, push money on Youtube. None of these corporations are perfect, and they have their controversies, but not spitting on the community at every turn helps a lot, to the point where the calculation on what you pay for what you get can be more skewed, or even negative, and it still works out.
PS: I see the same dynamic for Twitter, there's no way I'd pay for anything on Twitter at this point, when paying for better instances of Mastodon looks like a long term positive action.