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Comment by s1mon | Hacker News Reader

There are a small number of people/sites who I have given money/subscribed to on the internet.

Substack has never been something I wanted to help with. Anything with dark patterns to get you to subscribe completely turns me off. I respond to individuals or small groups saying "hey this stuff you like to read takes time to write, and for me to do this for a living and continue to create stuff, it would be really nice if you contributed a small amount of money"

For example: https://kottke.org/members/ https://www.patreon.com/acegikmo/membership

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> I respond to individuals or small groups saying "hey this stuff you like to read takes time to write, and for me to do this for a living and continue to create stuff, it would be really nice if you contributed a small amount of money"

I do this. I served 500k visitors this month. 20 of them contributed. I don't know what's causing this, but I imagine that the unfortunate reality is that substack's model is more effective.

I've never been in this space, but from everything I've read this is fundamentally it. It seems like so many think "just ask for people to contribute and that will work" - but fundamentally people don't.

There are cost to do that work and people don't pay. And the one person chimes in and says "hey I contribute and support x and y and z things and people can and should do it". But "should" doesn't pay the bills.

Either charge people, make money off adds or you nine times out of 9 get next to nothing for the work you've put in.

"maybe if payment were easier", "maybe if paying small amounts scaled", "maybe if this xyz tech were more robust" - and people love to respond with this. But it doesn't work now, and it hasn't worked in 30+ years of the web and there is no reason to think it will start working any time soon.

Can it? Yes. But until then, people who want to be compensated for their hard work have two options and they use them.

Here are my truths:

1. I never thought about any of this until recently

2. Even without donations, writing has provided some cool experiences

3. And yet, thinking about it, I would love to make more off my writing

4. I don't want to sacrifice the quality of my writing for my income. Placing ads (and hell, even donation links, but especially ads) creates a perverse incentive to create more content than I want to, and to make it ugly to rank high in Google. Above all else, I want to keep my writing human, even if it means I don't make a dollar.

So, with all this in mind (and to provide "advice" for others looking at this)

1. I don't want to force people to subscribe to a newsletter. I might add a newsletter, because I've been told that building trust takes time, but that's low on my priority list.

2. I don't want to add google ads or whatever.

3. I've recently (today) added Ko-fi in addition to liberapay. I thought that people who actually wanted to give me money would be willing to use paypal through a platform they haven't used before, but I'm not sure this is the case. Right now, only 1% of people who have clicked that donate link have actually donated

4. The plea is much more effective than a simple link in getting people to click

5. Corporate sponsorships are a possibility imo, but I haven't yet recieved one that didn't involve me selling out my readers somehow.

Ultimately, I think the harsh reality is that projects must place themselves on a spectrum of "make fuck tons of money" and "make fuck tons of people happy"

The more payment service you have, the more likely it is random people will pay.

I used to not really pay for content, until an author blew me away, so I set up a patreon account, just for him. Three months later, I'm now subscribed to 11 people for roughly 100€ a month (which is the ballpark of what I want to spend for internet entertainment anyway). Once my account was set up and I knew how to use it, the friction disappeared, and I realized I was more lazy than cheap.

Something else I'm wondering is if a /donate route with outlinks is too much friction? I can't imagine it would be? Just because frankly my biggest hesitation with diversifying is I want to maintain minimalism and not have links to 10 different platforms.

In my experience, roughly 1 in 10,000 visitors donates. Donations are 0.5 to 1% of my income. They would not cover my groceries bill.

This is for a website that provides undeniable value and has a ton of happy, grateful users. People swear by it, call it their bible.

They still won't donate.

I really wish coil did well. I thought interledger was incredibly stupid, but if we normalized a subscription for the web at say, $20, and divided it between every youtube channel and independent website and hell what if it was just part of the internet bill. Obviously we're well within fantasy land now, but I think coil would've been cool.

Substack creators can disable the subscription popup on their own substacks. If you notice some writers that have deliberately disabled those dark patterns, consider subscribing to them!

Can you? I tried to do this, even asking their AI support and it replied with something like, "Substack was built to help writers build their audience. If you are not looking to build your audience, Substack is not the right product for you." So lame.

"Substack was built to [100x investment for investors]. If you are not looking to [help us 100x our revenue], Substack is not the right product for you"

Writer Dashboard -> Settings -> Publication details -> Subscribe prompts on post pages (on/off).

Subscribe prompts may include modals, pop-ups, and other ways to encourage readers to subscribe to your publication.

(There are several other toggles that control similar settings as well).

You absolutely can not disable the full screen “welcome” popup. You can only change the message displayed there. This is unrelated to the in post popups.

For landing on an author's home page, that seems to be true, and I hope they allow disabling it later. For article links, you can -- when you publish an article and Substack offers links for social media, there's a checkbox to disable "show welcome page to new readers".

Wow. That is really buried. Never would've found it without your guidance. Thank you!

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