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Comment by anc84 | Hacker News Reader

There seems to be no way to donate to them, why?

Not only are donations significantly less reliable than other methods, they tend to basically amount to nothing compared to other income.

At least at the "single dev" level, I don't think I've gotten more than $20 in my lifetime through donations, whereas making a previously free app paid netted me a few thousand.

People just don't pay for stuff they don't need to, and to be honest I don't blame them.

It would probably cost more to set up than they'd gain.

And you'd have to deal with people who think they are entitled to veto any changes to the site because they gave you two bucks once.

You donate by contributing content to their sites. How (or if) they monetize this is up to them.

As a user, I feel obliged to help others out and I make an extra effort to answer some questions when I ask one, or when I find a particularly useful answer that helps me with anything work related. This adds value to the site and again, how they monetize is up to them.

Probably because accepting donations as a company is non-trivial?

Is that true? Can't you sell "overpriced" T-shirts or whatever and treat that profit as the "donation"?

Then have to design and print t-shirts, manage inventory and so on, track earnings, etc. Even when you can outsource that, it might not be worth the headspace for them.

Can you sell fake t-shirts? Or some sort of other non-tangible good?

Something I've seen on other sites, like GameDev.net, is that you can buy a membership, which for all intents and purposes is a donation, since it doesn't really get you much besides an extra tag next to your name.

Reddit Gold is pretty much this, it does grant a handful of convenient features, but is primarily a way of supporting the site and recognizing particularly good posts.

I don't know how successful it is from a financial perspective, but it seems like a model that could be applied to almost any community/discussion oriented sites.

Might not move the needle relative to their other options like jobs, ads, etc. Companies that could have, but don't seem to have, used "enhanced membership" or donations or similar for making money: Facebook (and Instagram, etc), Twitter, Hacker News, etc. I'd say there's something to take from that.

> fake t-shirts

For a while a popular way around PayPal's restrictions was for sites selling services that were in violation of PayPal's ToS to go through an intermediary site for donations/credits. So you would buy a crappy e-book for $20 or so, or maybe a couple of mp3s for $5 each and forward the receipt to have the equivalent credits added to your account.

Pretty clever as the ecommerce sites themselves had full plausible deniability -- there was no obvious link between the PayPal merchants and the (most likely anonymous) people running the service.

How about "Buy a thank you email"...

Shell out credit card, get email.

Sell receipt emails :-D

I might start doing that...

Fun story: the German parody party "Die PARTEI" ("the party", where PARTEI is also a backronym for a bunch of populist buzzwords) is under investigation because they pulled a supposedly legal scam that worked in a similar way.

They had a public campaign asking the public to "buy money", selling a hundred Euros (and two post cards) for the small price of exactly a hundred and five Euros -- effectively selling postcards for €2.50 a piece with a transaction overhead of another €100 in expenses and income.

Due to the way German public funding of political parties works (the public funding was based on revenue rather than profits) this meant they were granted funding that was hugely disproportional to the actual profits. Why it's supposed to be based on revenue or profit in the first place I don't fully understand but let's just say the authorities were displeased.

However they have a good case: they did the entire scam out in the open and had legal counsel that greenlit the campaign. It's definitely violating the spirit of the law but they may be able to make a good case that they were trying to showcase the absurdity of the law rather than simply exploit it for their own benefit -- also nobody interfered at any point and they documented everything from start to finish.

If they lose in court, however, not only would they have to pay back the money they were given (€72k) but they would also have to pay a massive fine (€384k) which would bankrupt the party instantly. Considering the party's satirical nature this would be pretty disappointing.

Stack Exchange actually had a shop at some point, with t-shirts, mugs and similar stuff. They shut it down at some point because it was simply far more trouble than it is worth.

Or more likely because if you are a VC funded company there's a certain expectation that you should build a scalable revenue stream beyond donations from passionate users.

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