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Comment by cr0sh | Hacker News Reader

I kinda agree with you; I run a personal website, it isn't very popular (and I don't update it often - hmm, maybe there's a link there!) - but it is my website, and I've kept the domain active since 1998 or thereabouts.

ie - a "labor of love"

How do I pay for it? Well, I reach around to my back pocket for my wallet, and...

I don't have ads, I don't have a sponsorship, and I don't care - what I have and what I put on my website is strictly for myself and others to use or read as they see fit; I consider it a "giving back" to others out there for what the internet has given me over the years.

...and I am fine with that.

Other sites need to realize this too; not everything is worth money, and if you really love what you're doing, you'd give it away free. Like the internet used to be - everybody doing it for the love of networking and computing and knowledge and information transfer.

Not AOL spam making money crap.

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I do too. I run PenguinDreams. I'm trying to post more, and am working on graphics so I can setup a Patreon. I'd like to be able to live off it, and I'll see how it goes.

I'm not famous, but I do love working on my own open source projects and I like writing tech posts. Last time I quit my job I lived for 11 months off my savings while travelling in over 10 countries. I got some OSS done, redid all my websites and wrote a lab manual for a friend of mine who was teaching a class based on the stuff I wrote.

My goal was to get into University and work on a PhD. I had attempted this a few years ago, but my grades for undergrand and grad school weren't all that great (2.5/3.2), and it pretty much killed my chances. I had some publications under my belt this time, but still very few professors would even talk to me about my work in sensor network research (BigSense).

I've spend over a decade in software. I do not enjoy being in industry. Even though I work remotely more now and less in the office, I still find my career choice mind numbing.

I'm going to try again soon, with more savings, so hopefully I can make it further before having to give up and having to find another software job.

Seconded. I run two small websites with hundreds and sometimes thousands of PV per day on a server I am already using for other things. The only thing I really pay for is the domain which is a drop in the bucket anyway. I might give a random shoutout to Cloudflare here as well: Not everybody agree with their way of doing.things but from my point of view they've really helped to cut out a lot of work for personal websites.

To my knowledge, most people who make money on their websites are either big enough to monetise with sponsorship/subscription, or they'd run a number of smaller sites of no consequence nor unique content anyway. The latter has no real reason to exist.

Thank you!

I also have a personal site, and when Wordpress started shoving ads into their free blogs, I started paying a few bucks to host it ad-free. I recently published a book, and people can buy that if they want to thank me, or just keep reading my blog if they don't or can't. I will not sell out my readers (or "monetize my brand," or whatever you're supposed to call it), because I believe in the web as it used to be.

You're the perfect personification of how the internet was meant to be used. Your kind of website is always my favorite.

None of my favorite websites update very frequently, but I still check them all regularly. In aggregate, theres always fresh content, and it's better content because the author actually wanted to write about it.

Thumbs up man!

> ...if you really love what you're doing, you'd give it away free.

This doesn't make sense. It follows logically that we should all not love what we do for a living. That strikes me as an absurd conclusion.

If you can't make money from it, then it's not an absurd conclusion at all.

Of course, it means one needs a day job, but such is life.

Specifically, the day job shouldn't be too enjoyable if you're making money from it. Once it is, you should start doing it for free and find a job you find less enjoyable.

That just follows in a straightforward way. Now, this may not seem absurd to you, but I dare say it will to most people.

I think that is reading into the quote too much, but I can see where you are coming from. I agree with you that such reasoning is a bit absurd.

That only follows from what he said if you completely ignore the context. I honestly can't tell if you actually don't understand that, or if you are being deliberately clueless.

I think if you add in the context it becomes false.

How so?

I think the original meaning was "if you love what you're doing, you would not mind doing it even if you're not being paid for it", not "if you love what you're doing, you would refuse to do it for pay, but only do it for free".

Signed, Captain Obvious

>Specifically, the day job shouldn't be too enjoyable if you're making money from it. Once it is, you should start doing it for free and find a job you find less enjoyable.

More specifically, market forces dictate that if a job is all sparkles and lollipops, you don't need to pay people to do it, because they'll do it for free in their spare time. Thus, every job has downsides.

Of course it doesn't make sense when you remove the context. Here's the original, with the context properly included:

> not everything is worth money, and if you really love what you're doing, you'd give it away free

Sivers had a piece recently about balance in art and work. He suggested having a job that's purely about the money, and art on the side that is untroubled by concerns about commercial viability.

https://sivers.org/balance

At some point I realized that my work situation consisted of a combination of "must do", "should do" and "want to do" -- only I never managed to get past the "must do" or occasional "should do" in my day job. So I frequently ended up with doing the things I wanted at non-payable time. It is better to invest that time in something you can carry away with you when you leave, which makes a good argument for having personal side projects -- granted you are not infringing on something.

I chose to switch employer and in the process got better control of the work items on my list -- to the cost of a heightened responsibility but also a better wage.

Yeah, I think it's the incorrect conclusion too. If you really loved what you're doing, you'd try to find a way to monetize it so you could reclaim 1/3 of your earth-time from the drudgery of wage slavery and have much more freedom and opportunity to engage in the things you love.

Of course that's difficult and not always possible, but it doesn't mean one wouldn't, shouldn't, or couldn't try.

Yeah, that's fair. I'm doing the same thing with recipestasher.com. I lose about $400/yr on it, but I really like using it and so do a few other people. No ads, no clickbait crap. But, I realize that I'm quite privileged to be able to do it.

$33 per month doesn't seem like that big a deal to me, at least for somebody gainfully employed and residing in a first-world country. Many people spend as much on a meal, or 2 movie tickets (ticket to Rogue One in 3D costs $16.25 around here).

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