JWZ's DNA Lounge now accepting donations on patreon | Hacker News Reader

JWZ's DNA Lounge now accepting donations on patreon

patreon.com

36 pointsasicboy14 comments

I'm really on the fence about this one. I think the DNA Lounge is a great venue, have always been impressed by the creativity of their events (for example, the night(s) he turned DNA into Cyberdelia, the club from "Hackers"), enjoy reading jwz's blog posts, and of course would really like to see the place stick around. As a developer, I also appreciate that they have one of the few night club websites around that's actually pleasant to use; it's trivial to find any event on their calendar, and their ticket checkout process is hassle free.

All of that said, I'm still having a bit of trouble justifying the jump up to giving the place free money. I already feel like I'm being pretty generous with our current arrangement: they provide a venue, and I pay for too many $12 drinks and $7 slices of pizza on top of whatever it cost to get in the door.

Its made a bit worse even by what seems to be an ideological stand that a Patreon patron should get nothing in return (except DNA's continued existence). At least Borderlands put your name on a wall and invited you to a few members only nights.

I'll have to think about it a little more, but so far I'm leaning towards just trying to patronize the club as much as possible. Did anyone else take the plunge?

Not surprising. I stopped by one evening to see what it was "wow, THE DNA lounge, started by that guy!" When I showed up the place was empty, looked like the music part of building hadn't been used in a while, and some stoned employees making pizza. Pizza was okay, but worth keeping around? meh.

There's a lot of great events and talks there. JWZ frequently allows the EFF to use the space. DNA is more than just a dance club, it's an important community space.

Post with more details on the financial situation: https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2016/12/19.html

It's quite candid and interesting to read. For those of you that don't know jwz, you may know:

- He was one of the first employees at Netscape and came up with the name Mozilla

- He maintains XScreenSaver

- jwz's law: Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

- Originally maintained XEmacs.

Clicking the link leads to some balls.

If he really doesn't want his stuff to be seen, why is it being posted here on this site? There are way too many interesting things made by people who want them to be seen for me to waste my time fighting someone to see the stuff they've made.

Ah yeah, forgot about that, sorry. jwz really does not like hn at all. He's clearly a really smart guy, and all of us on hn benefit from what he's done. But at the same time I wish he'd take maciej's approach to criticizing the bad parts of HN (with snarky tweets and great writing, two things HN loves) as opposed to a redirect to a picture of testicles.

Are there a lot of "finance-obsessed man-children and brogrammers" here? Yeah. But this is also one of a few places on the open Internet where there are a lot of really interesting, really smart people in one place, and rejecting it wholesale would be sad.

I suspect he set up the redirection before HN was opened up beyond the ycombinator set.

Note that JWZ blocks links to his site from HN; if you click on the link in the parent, dnalounge.com redirects you to a childish NSFW image with an insulting phrase about Hacker News.

Cutting and pasting the URL into another tab works.

From https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2016/12/19.html (copy and paste link into address bar):

> I know that with this level of transparency and vulnerability I'm setting myself up for a bunch of wisecracks from people who are all too eager to tell me what I did wrong and how they totally would have done it differently, having created nothing of lasting value themselves. How this situation [could have been avoided] or that was "obvious" [that it would happen]. Haters gonna hate, I know how it goes.

I really hope this will work out for the proprietor. They're asking for $110,000 recurring donation per month to meet monthly payroll, San Fransisco rent, utilities and unpaid bills (without offering a tangible reward).

While that amount of money ($1.32 million annually) arguably could be better spent on more worthy causes, it will be incredible if the recurring donation business model turns out to successfully fund relatively niche content of this magnitude.

Their Patreon goal is $8000 per month. The blog post indicates they are losing $380,000 a year. It's hard to know where you're pulling those numbers from?

There are multiple goals on the featured Patreon page. The arrows on the goals box allow scrolling

> $8,000/month -- You paid one month's liability insurance!

> $30,000/month -- DNA Lounge is in the black!

> $50,000/month -- You paid one month's rent and utilities!

> $65,000/month -- If we hit this per month, then in 12 months, not only will we be in the black, but also you will have paid off all of our unpaid bills and debts so that jwz doesn't have to!

> $110,000/month -- You paid one month's payroll and payroll taxes!

Thanks. I'm pretty sure if they make it work, it won't be through Patreon, but I guess you never know...

NB: HackerNews-referred requests to JWZ's sites will be redirected to a picture of a man's balls.

Copy and paste all URLs that might be his.

Maybe they should instead consider accepting credit cards, and otherwise being a less customer-hostile venue.

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