40k visits and only 1 donation. Not that I complain or that I think he deserves more or less, just interesting to see the ratio.
> Last month (Mar'21), I made a simple project
It's not like anyone's been using the product long-term or as if individual users incur a significant cost, and the author hasn't been asking to help with hosting costs or anything.
I don't usually donate right upon finding a random fun project, unless I incurred costs (by doing a significant computation or if it sent a number of SMSes or so) for the person who hosts it. I donate to things like the Internet Archive or OpenStreetMap because they have real hosting costs, or the K9 mail client because there's a lot of coding that needs doing, I would like it to be done, and someone's offering to do it for crowdfunded money. Or sci-hub, because the owner gave up a lot to make it happen and I think it has had a net positive effect in the world.
There are other projects I've donated to and more reasons I'd donate, but generally I don't find this weirdly low for this kind of project and also not representative of what you could expect if you do create something that'll require donations, provided it 'goes viral' to the same extent as this project.
My donation button (top center of page) has only been used once over the span of 5 years, even though it gets praised across various forums and communities within the niche.
An easy way to estimate this: think of how many websites you visit a year, then divide the number of donations you make per year by that.
If this number isn't zero, you're a statistical outlier.
I had much better results when I started converting my tutorials into ebooks and sold them. Obviously having a paid product is different, but I'm referring to the paid sales I got whenever I put up 'pay what you want' offer.
[0] https://github.com/learnbyexample/Command-line-text-processi...
This was also the first course in the list, so not exactly a good first impression.
The console lists this: https://pastebin.com/KQqjdCc8
Not a bad idea at all, plus the templates you already have are pretty neat. I could see applications w.r.t. professional development or even marketing to product people with the purpose of simplifying product roadmaps (and sharing with C-levels, etc.).
You have something here, screw donations. Free users suck anyway; my free project[1] has ~1500 MAU and I kind of want to stop working on it because the entitlement is unreal.
That's not an intrinsically valuable act.
This is not in itself a reason to pay for stuff.
> Also perhaps because it is useful to people and if we ever hope to keep good content coming, without having to suffer through endless ads, we should support, what we deem to be good content.
This sentence seems self-contradicting in relation to the article existing. Assuming we think that the project from the article is in fact good, it follows that good content is already coming even if we don't pay for it.
A small case could be made that perhaps this was an experiment by the author and we want to reward this to create positive reinforcement, but an equally valid argument could be made that paying for this type of aggregator content will create a mass of buzzfeed style "list of awesome X" aggregation websites. Monetization tends to create perverse incentives, after all.
I disagree with the second point though. In the end people need to put food on the table and I for one am glad, if people can do so by doing things they enjoy and that add value to society. If I like some project and I see, that it was only enabled by people putting forward effort, even though they are not paid to do so initially, then I often think about supporting them. My idea of a good future is, that more people can add value to society not in the jobs they do not like to do, but instead in the projects they would like to do and can live from that. I don't think it is a small case. In fact I think this is what should happen more often, so that we get away from a model, where everything is measured in how much it costs and towards a model, in which people show how much value things brought them, by supporting creators.
I think this would help reducing gaps in society. Someone who can not afford to give a lot can still make use of things, while someone who can give a lot is able to support more people.
It reaches into every area of our lives. Currently we have social media networks, where the users are the product sold. Instead we could have social media, where users, who can afford to support, give in order to keep the service alive and running. There are already people, who crowd-finance their Mastodon instances and work (time working on) those and similar projects.
Maybe this is something that is quite far from our reality right now, but at least I am seeing some cases of it in projects, that I support.
What exactly would qualify as "added value" in your mind?
You are reading these posts on such a thing right now.
It's literally a con to pull on tourists
Not saying you are personally doing this, since you specifically said you're not complaining, just my feelings on the matter.
Donations just aren't that common.
Think of the market value for some of the open tools you use and how much they would cost you that you instead get for free.
To me, that's the payment you get even before you contribute.