I Won't Buy You a Coffee

cornhole

i was reading the "i am not a reverse centaur" post and then the article ends with him asking for money. that man does not seem like he needs me to buy a coffee

Waterluvian

What an unmonetizable blog post.

jasonlotito

Counterpoint: Why don't people ask for help? If they put a donate button on their site... > This irks me primarily because I'm so tired of ... constant advertisements. And yet advertises on their site. Shame.

enraged_camel

To me, "buy me coffee/beer" sounds like an invitation to meet up, which makes sense if you find someone's content interesting and engaging and think they might be fun to hang out with. Sometimes people include payment links though, which is odd, I agree.

bluGill

Creating a useful, correct, well editied blog takes a lot of effort and such people should be rewarded. Sure hosting is cheap, but creating is not free if you want it to be complex. This is not capitalism. Any system of society needs to have some way of determining who did something worth doing and ensuring those people get rewarded enough that they can eat and get other basic necessities of life and ideally some luxury. More importantly, any system of society cannot function if there's not some way of saying you are not doing your fair share. Now there's nothing wrong with society of saying certain people are disabled and can't do with the same fair share as some other people, but if nobody is doing their fair share, society will collapse. A simple though like this post is low effort. Once in a while a quick blog post not a big cost. However, these relatively low-effort posts on Hacker News are not a particularly great value to society.

kazinator

> Look, I also think that creatives should get compensation in the same way as everyone else, but that doesnt mean that every instance of creativity should be a venue for profit. Someone getting the odd coffee money is hardly operating a "venue for profit"; they are just trying to get by any way they can.

microsoftedging

Interesting take, but I don't agree with it personally. Personally, messages like the aforementioned: > Did you like this post, please buy me a coffee? are completely okay! I don't interpret it as 'begging me for my money'. They are not nagging, and you do not have to buy them a coffee/pizza/metaphorical food item. You can go on with your day. But maybe someone thinks that the post deserves a token of appreciation, and tossing someone one, maybe two euros doesn't hurt. Just like tipping. Good = no tip, exceptional = tip. > I know how much 4€ is, that's about two icecreams, or three beers. Off topic, but is OP finding these? Are certain countries in Europe really this cheap??

jmclnx

I use to buy someone a coffee via github once per month, but github required my cell # so I left github. I wish that person has another way of doing that. But it depends upon what the person is doing, I found value in that project so I had no issue. So, for the article's author, it depends upon what the person is doing or writting :)

thepryz

I agree with the post, though I have to admit I was tempted for a split second to send them an email offering to buy them a coffee.

jgbuddy

This is how you end up with paywalls and ads, calling people greedy for providing a way to donate is crazy. Does the same argument go for open source software / organizations funded by donations?

mixedmath

I find a link to "Buy me a Coffee" to not at all look like an ad. It's a funny-shaped "donate" button. And I much prefer it to actual ads.

giancarlostoro

Meh. So op is fine financially, but people who are asking for money usually tend to be doing "free" labour and sometimes not employed, or maybe they are employed and would like any additional financial aid to offset their personal costs (time is also a cost, you could be consulting for $$$ instead). I help admin a Discord that receives a few hundred dollars monthly in donations, and we're still way in the negative in terms of what we've spent on the community. I would not make foolish assumptions when someone's asking for a "coffee" that it "costs" them nothing, the same argument applies against me and my friends, sure Discord itself costs us nothing, but the bot hosting does, the game server hosting does, there's a cost to a lot more things that might not be immediately obvious to everyone. If freenode asked to buy them a coffee, I think any of us who used IRC long enough might "buy them a coffee" because we know the infrastructure is not free, the time invested by the maintainers, etc.

kokanee

I'm surely not the only American reading this and being flabbergasted at the wildly low consumer prices mentioned. I had to double-check the post date to see if this was from 1990 or something.

catapart

this is the whiniest of whines. 'do not even ask for compensation, because I am tired of being advertised to'. you're not even willing to see an advertisement. one without sound or graphics at all. could you be more high-maintenance? the simple fact is you, you'll never get what you don't ask for. I hate when youtubers ask me to like and subscribe, but I'll never hold it against a single one of them. You never know which person you convinced that time and that time alone. The tone in your voice, the season around the viewer, literally any number of factors change people's decisions to do something kind for a relative stranger on the internet. if you don't give them an easy way to do it, and a reminder that you would appreciate it, the likelihood of it happening is a lot lower. if it helps, you can think of it less like using capitalism to support hosting the subject, and more like your free speech to give tangible support to a subject you appreciate. some people don't have any commentary or judgement that isn't more succinctly said with cold hard cash. no reason not to make your blog accessible to those people.

warumdarum

What is needed is a private attention tracker that syms up what you spend your day, week, month on, then asks you for a fixed donation per month to the percentage presented, transfers the funds annonymously and only donates to addfree media. A open source media patreon system.

personjerry

Entirely misses the point. You're not contributing $4 to help them host. You're contributing $4 because you liked their ideas and are contributing to fund more. The author writes: > Look, I also think that creatives should get compensation in the same way as everyone else, but that doesnt mean that every instance of creativity should be a venue for profit. I think it's shameful that programmers get such higher compensation compared to artists, but this is not the place to equalize it. Then proceeds to offer no mechanism of such compensation for blog writers. Many people put in a not insignificant amount of time into their writing, and if it was worth our time to read, maybe we should consider showing our appreciation in a material way.

raincole

It's quite a crazy take. A high school classmate of mine has a band. It's their hobby and they all have jobs in they day. But their album is still monetized on the Spotify local equivalent. If I told him that it "irks" me and "it's a hobby so he should not make money," and he punched me in face, I'd totally deserve that.

1123581321

It’s a rant; I accept that and understand its point. I look at the tip/patronage soliciting differently because there are some people who really feel the costs of their hobby or side project hanging over them. It can be due to tight budgets, or how they were raised, or perhaps their significant other objects. Asking for tips justifies their efforts, whether people give or not. I want to see their efforts, so don’t mind that they ask. The “coffee” thing specifically is a bit annoying, and often asking too little. I suspect few people tip, and if they will tip, they’re just as likely to give more. A smaller number of people tip a lot so do want to give small amounts each time. Most don’t. I’d be happy to hear if occasional tipping of a few dollars is more widespread than I think it is.

readthenotes1

"This irks me primarily because I'm so tired of rampant capitalization and constant advertisements." Asking for donations has nothing to do with "capitalism", and asking for one on your own blog nor is it "advertising". If the author is tired of capitalism, he should give up direction of his blogging to hire authority. Otherwise, he's engaging in rampant capitalism. "an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market" https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/capitalism

noosphr

OP is paying their ISP to access the internet. Even at the most fundamental level reading blogs isn't free. So that point is right out. What's left is the friction of paying the fraction of a cent that needs to be paid to the content creator to keep the lights on. This is a collective action problem. There is no reason why there isn't a monthly fee processor for accessing the www that pays every site you visit some fraction of a cent for each visit. As we already covered they exist for ips, we call them isps and they deal with all the payments in the background required to keep the wires maintained for all the bits that flow through them.