It's like carnivores being judgmental of hunters.
> And so many of these companies aren't even profitable, either.
It's not profitable because it's an engineering playground - the objective is not to solve the business problem described above, it's to build complexity for the sake of complexity to justify future funding rounds.
If they wanted to, they could literally consider the project done and run it with a skeleton crew handling support & maintenance, but why intentionally put yourself out of a job?
Yeah. EVERYBODY says that for EVERY single app or service that is posted on Hackernews. They could do it with even less people and funding. Yet, there doesn't seem to be anyone who actually did any such thing in a few months with 4-5 people.
Apparently, real world works differently.
What about https://liberapay.com ?
Also, keep in mind that once a well-funded player with infinite money to spend on marketing enters a market it's often no longer worthwhile for a bootstrapped player to compete even if it's possible on technical grounds.
> The problem is doing it at scale.
IMO that’s more down to support/operations than tech.
The technical problem was, and still is, making it easy, safe, legal and scaling it to millions of users. Like every single technical problem in the tech startup world.
for-profit platforms will always seek to maximize the function, the marginal value of the rent they take. any charity to creators is incidental dynamics along the way
So Ghost is not a creator platform. Its a payment platform.
For a customer who runs a small town Indiana newspaper, who may be a somewhat typical customer, it's not that complicated: They won't have international subscribers and they would pay state and federal taxes-- standard income staff stuff.
And doing so with Ghost vs Patreon could save thousands of dollars per year!