The more people proliferate this, the worse it'll be—frankly, we should be embarrassed that societal literacy and writing style knowledge is so poor that we jump to the "must be written by an LLM" conclusion whenever we see any sort of exotic character usage!
I'm not going to psychoanalyse the brain parasite, but I imagine that the reason to do it could be as petty as shadow banning people with Fediverse (e.g. mastodon) handles in their bios shortly after he took over.
Only signal.me links were blocked as far as I understood. Other signal links kept working. (I have no first hand knowledge as I left Twitter when the owner changed)
Unrelated most likely, signal.me is a legitimate domain used by Signal. Doubt twitter is so on top of Threat Analysis when they fumbled their own redirects from twitter.com to x.com for a while.
Not really, the domain block was reportedly due to increased spam activity from that domain and performed automatically, so it would follow that a write up would come a few days later. That is if they are related, which is not a given.
It’s still a social media platform, not every action taken is some nebulous part of Musks agenda. Odds are there was an influx of posts that qualify as spam from the signal.me domain that were marked by an automatic system as spam, because they were. Suggesting otherwise is baseless speculation.
Given that Musk has deliberately blocked links to whole other domains before for extremely petty reasons, I don't see why we should give him the benefit of the doubt.
I was doing some Exercism tasks the other day and then saw this so if only felt right that I make a donation.
Looking at some of the comments there seems to be a number of people who have also just made a donation.
Given the state of every service becoming subscription based, I can definitely see a lot of subscription fatigue.
Maybe an alternative route you could try is the annual wikipedia "We want to keep this free. Please help us buy donating".
I think a lot of people appreciate the service but a lot of the times it's easy to forget that running a service like exercism can get expensive, and would be willing to donate, given a compelling enough reminder of this.
Voluntary donations don't work. At least not for most things. The vast majority of users don't donate, and that includes the most demanding ones.
I offer a ton of free information online. I received raving feedback from people, including some that said I saved them thousands of euros. Just this week readers jokingly suggested giving me a Nobel prize or a statue. Still, donations are one percent of my revenue on a good month. They would not cover my groceries.
This is fine for me, but it's always on the back of my mind when people suggest donations as a funding method.
> Voluntary donations don't work. At least not for most things
In my (limited) experience they mostly don't work because the people/projects that need donations are way too coy about asking for money. Donation buttons get tucked out of sight and/or cloaked in twee language like "buy me a coffee!"
I like to point to https://archiveofourown.org as a counterexample. Hardly the most critical project in the world - it's just fanfiction - and yet they raise a few hundred thousand dollars a year in public donations (solidly surpassing their budget goals) because they run an actual, clear, focused fundraising campaign twice a year.
Personally I don't want to guilt trip my readers into donating. There are affiliate links on the website. It's a business and it works well enough to support me. It feels like double dipping.
Above all, There's a point where it operates exactly like an ad and annoys people just like one. At the moment, American tipping culture is taking over in Germany and it feels like another instance of that.
The nice middle ground would be to ask after doing something especially nice. "That tool sure saved you a lot of time. Donate?" I think that the link in my email signature works especially well because of that.
I'm assuming that you are talking about "All About Berlin"? (I am deliberately not linking, because you didn't, and there is probably a reason for that).
I run a number of apps and services that don't make a dime. In fact, they cost me thousands. I don't mind.
Monetization is a real pain in the ass, and I stay away from it (for these services).
I have the ability to make a lot of money, if I choose, but that's not much fun. I don't really need the money, and I like having full control of everything I do.
I am regularly approached by folks with monetization ideas. Some, are quite good. Others ... not so much ...
Maybe I 'll pursue something, eventually, but I'm in no hurry.
I agree that monetisation is a pain. It's the least favourite part of my job because it takes focus away from providing value to my readers. I don't like putting my business hat on.
On the other hand, it allows me to work on what I love full time. This would not be possible if I relied on user donations or even public funding.
> I have the ability to make a lot of money, if I choose, but that's not much fun. I don't really need the money, and I like having full control of everything I do.
Thought of handing off some of those money-making opportunities to others, after you vet them beforehand?
I could use an alternative income stream and I am very tired of the employment grind. But I never networked and that has been biting me on the rear for the last 10-ish years.
Apologies if that's too direct. I am keenly feeling the lack of freedom and the lack of "frak you" money in the bank.
Personally, I think this approach of asking for donations is the right move for a non-profit. Subscription fatigue is real and is becoming a major problem. I am now at the point where I will go without software I would absolutely pay for one time, but because it is a subscription I refuse.
I'm sure when all is said and done, there just are not enough people like me to make a difference, but I sure hope things swing the other way. Subscriptions for everything and tips for everything are two cultural things that need to die in a fire. They are ways of squeezing more out of people, especially by taking advantage of human tendencies. It's gross and at this point I think it is unethical. Maybe not all implementations, but there are plenty that are.
You could use the time value of money formula to convert between one-time prices and subscriptions. just multiply annual price by 30 to get forever price.
So my $6 per month VPS would be about $2,000 upfront.
And a $500 game console would be a $1.50 monthly subscription. (Obviously glossing over tons of differences in say, a PS2 and a Stadia subscription)
It feels easier to ask customers for $1 per month than $360 up front... Especially since I don't know if my service will be up forever
If pricing were consistent, I would fully agree with you. However, it is not. People will charge what they think the market can bear. When you're asking for it all up front, you can't charge a huge amount because nobody would pay it. When you mask the request by dividing it up into small chunks, people don't realize how much they are actually paying. In many cases now with automatic billing, people may not even realize they're still paying. The whole subscription thing is an exploitation of human psychology.
If pricing is too expensive the next month, then just cancel. It’s that simple. Monthly subscriptions simply give more freedom both for the user and the builder.
I don’t think a perpetuity is correct in this case. Software depreciates rapidly without updates and the norm was to charge the one-time price for each major version, which was always somewhat analogous to a subscription assuming you wanted up-to-date software.
This kind of thinking is why sites like this one, get into financial strain. Why do you expect to get value for free? Would you be the same kind of user who complains about ads, or a highly priced one time fee? I’m glad more products are subscription based since it filters out users who are not serious.
Subscriptions are a pain for sure, but I think a big reason for that is that they are always something like $10-20 a month. For something that people might only use occasionally that's just too much. If they were instead maybe $20 a year and easy to cancel, I think a lot of people would sign up.
In my experience asking for donations generates about 1000x less money (within that exact order of magnitude) than directly asking for money up front until you get access to the product.
Yes, but they're not trying to make 1000x more, they just want enough to maintain their existing staff and servers. They're not looking for unreigned financial growth, it's a nonprofit who wants their service to be free and accessible for everyone.
Very much this. This is the gold standard for non profits. Wikipedia does it, the Internet Archive does it. And the banners are very large and intrusive during donation month. This suggests that they must be having an effect, or they wouldn't be making them quite so large! I think if I was in their shoes, this is probably what I would try. December is generally giving month.
Donation fatigue? The only time I'm prompted for donations online is Wikipedia and internet archive in December. That's about it. I can't think of any other service that asks for donations.
Personally I find notifications on a watch to be exceptionally annoying so I almost always have my watch set to sleep mode. The only thing I use the watch for is to tell the time, track my sleep, heart rate, and steps. I'm not sure if sleep mode affects the accuracy of the tracking but it does make my battery life last for a good 2-3 days.
They are also a huge battery drain. I wish Garmin put the effort into their iOS app that they did with their Android so as to be able to filter notifications by app. Eg, I want iMessage notifications on my wrist, but I could care less about IG notifications, and I actively turn off bluetooth to save my battery life when my wife is forwarding me reel after reel...
Same. Additionally, it would be far more lethal if an explosion where to happen at the security gates rather than on an actual plan. The bottle necks caused by these security checks means there are potentially 1000s of people penned into a tiny room. On paper the checks make sense, but in reality their implementation creates a much greater potentially danger zone for passengers.
This 100ml restriction makes absolutely no sense at all. If someone wanted to carry out a suicide attack, it would stand to reason that their goal would be to maximise the damage they cause. If that assumption is correct, then it would make little to no sense to detonating it on a plane with a max capacity of 200-500, when the alternative would be to detonate it in the security hall. The delays caused by these 100ml checks create a bottle neck in airports which leads to potentially 1000s of people penned up in a small room waiting to have their deodorant taken away from them. Surly an explosion happening at the security gates would lead to far greater tragedy than the one they are trying to guard against. Absolutely absurd.
I'm not one for conspiracy theories, but if it came out the handful of companies that always seem to populate the duty-free area where lobbying to keep security checks in place, I can't say I would be surprised as I'd imagine it being a rather lucrative location to sell deodorant's shampoos, and other basic hygiene essentials.
