I Won't Buy You a Coffee | Hacker News Reader

I Won't Buy You a Coffee

hakkerman.eu

73 pointsspeckx88 comments

Interesting take, but I don't agree with it personally. Personally, messages like the aforementioned:

> Did you like this post, please buy me a coffee?

are completely okay! I don't interpret it as 'begging me for my money'. They are not nagging, and you do not have to buy them a coffee/pizza/metaphorical food item. You can go on with your day. But maybe someone thinks that the post deserves a token of appreciation, and tossing someone one, maybe two euros doesn't hurt. Just like tipping. Good = no tip, exceptional = tip.

> I know how much 4€ is, that's about two icecreams, or three beers. Off topic, but is OP finding these? Are certain countries in Europe really this cheap??

A bar in my Italian family's hometown sells beers for one or two Euros a pop. The gelateria down the street charges a bit more for ice cream, though.

€4 will maybe get you a glass/ladies' pint here in Ireland smh

Italy is a very economically diverse place. I haven't seen anyone sell beer at 2 euro a glass in two decades in my corner of Italy. The beers I was drinking last night were €5 or €6 (small northern city)

It's fine to say that begging is ok. I also think it can be ok. It's even possible to call this not begging if you believe that it lacks non-reciprocity (personally I don't think so, but anyway). But it feels like you have a very weird definition of begging based on the rest of your description.

> They are not nagging

Begging and harassment are two different unrelated things that are sometimes done at the same time but not necessarily.

See the difference between

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging

and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aggressive_panhandling

> you do not have to buy them a coffee/pizza/metaphorical food item.

Yeah, that's how begging works. You do not have to give money to the person begging.

> You can go on with your day.

Yes, that's how begging works. If they had you at gunpoint it would be called robbing.

Not a native English speaker, so I may be far off on this discussion, but for me this kind of activity where you write a blog post and ask for donations is closer to busking than to begging.

I think that's certainly a reasonable view and the question becomes whether one believes busking to also be begging.

I’m not gravely irked by it, but it does sometimes distract you from the content of the blog post you just read. Similar to “you might also be interested in […]” footers and the like. I’d prefer writings to not be bookended or interrupted by stuff that isn’t directly related to the contents of the article, as to not distract one’s flow of thought from the reading.

If I want to donate, I’d look at the blog’s About page. Placing it on every article page does come across to some extent as trying to increase donations.

These "buy me a coffee" buttons make me feel guilty, similar to being shamed into tipping. I'll make a buy/don't decision when I see the cost upfront. Everyone makes choices on how they earn their living, I'm just saying these things make me uncomfortable and I wish there was a better way.

> I know how much 4€ is, that's about two icecreams, or three beers.

Yes this also stuck out the most to me haha. That's like the tax&tip for a single beer if you are sitting down to dine in NYC now

4€ will get you two (pretty small by US standards) scoops of ice cream or three beers in a shop in Germany. In a cheap bar, you might get a beer for 4€ though the average is much closer to 5€ these days.

Sounded cheap, but I just checked with my local supermarket (France, west of Paris). 70 cents for a 25 cl Heineken.

OP is off on costs, motivations and attitude. In a nutshell selfish person lashes out, assumes all side income is gravy.

Shoe on the other foot, some people are having major financial struggles... are they best to say "buy me a coffee" or "oh shit, help"?

Begging is so disgusting that even beggars are not happy to do it bluntly, until they're on the streets.

It's quite a crazy take. A high school classmate of mine has a band. It's their hobby and they all have jobs in they day. But their album is still monetized on the Spotify local equivalent. If I told him that it "irks" me and "it's a hobby so he should not make money," and he punched me in face, I'd totally deserve that.

Making music is significantly more expensive than blogging, that’s also the point of the article.

Some people put significant time into their blogs. It is not cheap to add value through writing.

I find a link to "Buy me a Coffee" to not at all look like an ad. It's a funny-shaped "donate" button. And I much prefer it to actual ads.

Absolutely. And I've done it to quite a few places.

Like it's no secret it's expensive as shit to live lately. If you're just giving away your software/knowledge/ideas, and I feel I gain value from them, I'll happily throw some cash in your hat.

Having a "buy me a coffee" link is an incredibly terrible way to monetize to the point where I highly doubt that the vast majority of these are profit motivated as the author implies.

I have personal projects that I pay >$100/mo to operate. I can afford to do so, it is not impactful to my life. People have, without prompting, offered to give me money for these projects as a way to show appreciation. I have no intent to ever make money off of these things, I don't even hope to break even, but offering some money is a material way to show appreciation for a service you find valuable and I don't think there should be any shame in it.

Usually the but me a coffee button is there because there are people that asks for it. Like, they do want to give you something, and often they ask you for a way to do so.

That button is for them, for those who want that button, if you don't just ignore it! Nothing bad will happen and the author is (usually) not expecting anything.

This blog post seriously reads like the author woke up one day, randomly decided that he/she should be angry about something, randomly decided the "buy me a coffee" links would be a good target and then proceed to conjure up some kind of ideological reasons . Unfortunately unlike the author, normal people mostly don't feel the need to be angry about every innocent little things.

Everyday I am bewildered by how different I see the world than others. I thought this was a nonissue for everyone

You could have plenty of good takes against monetization of everything, but arguing against unobtrusive "donate" buttons seems very counterproductive.

I think it's fine to ask and fine not to do it. I don't really see the point of shitting on the little guy in these kinds of endeavours. If you want to experience a world where money isn't an object for others, advocate for that. Don't just try to make small-time individuals perform as if they're free from the constraints of money because you find mention of it distasteful.

> Look, I also think that creatives should get compensation in the same way as everyone else, but that doesnt mean that every instance of creativity should be a venue for profit.

Someone getting the odd coffee money is hardly operating a "venue for profit"; they are just trying to get by any way they can.

I'm surely not the only American reading this and being flabbergasted at the wildly low consumer prices mentioned. I had to double-check the post date to see if this was from 1990 or something.

What? I'm an American living in the EU, and 4 euros is a little under 5 dollars right now. Last I checked that's still one Costco rotisserie chicken. You should definitely be able to pick up a couple Miller High Lifes for 5 dollars as well if you don't live in like, Times Square or wherever.

Even my wife's really frou frou order at Starbucks is in the ballpark. I always remember the price because with the tip, it's $7.77.

Yes, I tip at coffee shops. If you tip a bartender, why wouldn't you tip a barista?

I wouldn't tip either. Just have the price include the labour. It is not hard concept. Nearly every single other industry has managed to figure it out.

Coffee shops aren't usually a "scene" like a bar can be.

Bartenders are often the only adult in the room acting like one. When was the last time you saw fighting, crying, fainting, hit and runs, etc. on the regular at a Starbucks? Bars can be like this in even the nicest neighborhoods.

Sounds like you should be tipping the bouncer, then.

Have you ever worked at a bar or been a regular at one?

Too much or too little security will discourage customers from staying or coming back. The bartender is running the whole circus. It's nothing like serving coffee.

What an unmonetizable blog post.

Exactly as it should be

I don't think there's anything wrong with monetizing a blog, long as its not an ad infested dumpster fire.

You think that this blog post about not monetizing blog posts should be monetized?

I suspect you’re referencing this specific instance and the parent commenter interpreted you as speaking in a generalized way about blog posts in general.

It’s a rant; I accept that and understand its point.

I look at the tip/patronage soliciting differently because there are some people who really feel the costs of their hobby or side project hanging over them. It can be due to tight budgets, or how they were raised, or perhaps their significant other objects. Asking for tips justifies their efforts, whether people give or not. I want to see their efforts, so don’t mind that they ask.

The “coffee” thing specifically is a bit annoying, and often asking too little. I suspect few people tip, and if they will tip, they’re just as likely to give more. A smaller number of people tip a lot so do want to give small amounts each time. Most don’t. I’d be happy to hear if occasional tipping of a few dollars is more widespread than I think it is.

OP is paying their ISP to access the internet. Even at the most fundamental level reading blogs isn't free. So that point is right out.

What's left is the friction of paying the fraction of a cent that needs to be paid to the content creator to keep the lights on.

This is a collective action problem. There is no reason why there isn't a monthly fee processor for accessing the www that pays every site you visit some fraction of a cent for each visit. As we already covered they exist for ips, we call them isps and they deal with all the payments in the background required to keep the wires maintained for all the bits that flow through them.

they might be reading blogs at the library?

Your taxes pay for the library. There is no such thing as free.

>Do note that this is a slightly negative post

Ha. It's my personal opinion that this is an insanely negative post. I hate advertising with a vibrating passion that I can only assume other people would consider unreasonable, but even I don't blink at a "Buy me a coffee" button. In fact, I smile at the quaint notion, and I have clicked it a few times.

The idea that hosting is the primary cost of writing is so far off the mark, I don't even know where to begin.

You misunderstand the article.

His point is that if you want to be properly compensated for your writing, then you need to take the capitalist bull by the horns, so to speak. His objection is this middle place where "buy me a coffee" is only likely to make you a few bucks here and there, nothing like a proper compensation for your efforts (if you think you need that) and yet also leaves a slightly stale taste in the mouth of some readers.

Basically, cheapening the blog for nothing. Not to say I entirely agree with him, but this is his point in a nutshell.

I disagree - the author makes his unqualified disdain for "begging" unambiguously clear. He is unreasonable, simplistic, and frankly does not make the (exact) argument you generously ascribe to him (though maybe he meant to, and you can see through his miswording).

Creating a useful, correct, well editied blog takes a lot of effort and such people should be rewarded. Sure hosting is cheap, but creating is not free if you want it to be complex. This is not capitalism. Any system of society needs to have some way of determining who did something worth doing and ensuring those people get rewarded enough that they can eat and get other basic necessities of life and ideally some luxury. More importantly, any system of society cannot function if there's not some way of saying you are not doing your fair share. Now there's nothing wrong with society of saying certain people are disabled and can't do with the same fair share as some other people, but if nobody is doing their fair share, society will collapse.

A simple though like this post is low effort. Once in a while a quick blog post not a big cost. However, these relatively low-effort posts on Hacker News are not a particularly great value to society.

Here’s a counterargument to your thesis (Eva Cockcroft, 1974) which essentially rejects the premise of hippie communes, even on the internet:

“In rejecting the materialistic values of bourgeois society and indulging in the myth that they could exist entirely outside the dominant culture in bohemian enclaves, avant-garde artists generally refused to recognize or accept their role as producers of a cultural commodity. As a result, especially in the United States, many artists abdicated responsibility both to their own economic interests and to the uses to which their artwork was put after it entered the marketplace.”

So, regardless of whether you ask for donations, do copyright your creative work, even if it’s just blog posts. It’s the responsible thing to do.

The framing as blogging being as cheap as the cost of hosting a web page is more than a little strange.

The time costs for writing are highly variable.

It is safe to say, the bill for hiring a writer isn't 4€/year or even 4€/post.

This captures readers with high willingness to pay. They might only be one reader per 20,000 readers, but without the button there would be no way to capture it.

I often reflect that as a normal consumer of commercial and semi-commercial content I'm operating as a free rider propped up by the occasional whale (who is the real audience). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-to-play#Comparison_with_t...

Entirely misses the point.

You're not contributing $4 to help them host.

You're contributing $4 because you liked their ideas and are contributing to fund more.

The author writes:

> Look, I also think that creatives should get compensation in the same way as everyone else, but that doesnt mean that every instance of creativity should be a venue for profit. I think it's shameful that programmers get such higher compensation compared to artists, but this is not the place to equalize it.

Then proceeds to offer no mechanism of such compensation for blog writers.

Many people put in a not insignificant amount of time into their writing, and if it was worth our time to read, maybe we should consider showing our appreciation in a material way.

It's a tough spot - I thought about using the site to capitalize on some 5000+ careers pages I've curated. I want to help people in their job searches but don't want to give it away for free since I've put innumerable hours into maintaining it and would lose my edge in the jobsearch. The alternative is to meter it, do a bunch more work to scrape and standardize all the results, who knows whether the juice is worth the squeeze - so I've just sat on it.

I think these kinds of things are

- not monetization

- just a sort of "if you appreciate it, let me know"

that said, it is human nature to NOT show appreciation for other people.

as a matter of fact, how many people upvote (and why)?

is it because they appreciate the person writing? Or maybe "I agree" or "you confirm my bias" in most cases.

honestly, the reason I don't do the "buy the coffee" thing is the incredible friction and intrusiveness of payment systems.

Blogging is cheap if the writer values neither their nor your time.

Blogging is also cheap only for writers who don't spend time and money to gain experience, validate information, and maintain relationships in order to writing interesting words.

Blogging only costs a few euro per year if we ignore the resources that go into servers, electricity, IT folks, laptops, and the luxury of time and safety to write.

I use to buy someone a coffee via github once per month, but github required my cell # so I left github. I wish that person has another way of doing that.

But it depends upon what the person is doing, I found value in that project so I had no issue. So, for the article's author, it depends upon what the person is doing or writting :)

> but that doesn't mean that every instance of creativity should be a venue for profit

This guy doesn't know what profit means.

No one is "profiting" off one-off donations on blogs, obviously these mechanisms are simply to allow some sustainability in volunteer efforts, below break-even at best.

What is needed is a private attention tracker that syms up what you spend your day, week, month on, then asks you for a fixed donation per month to the percentage presented, transfers the funds annonymously and only donates to addfree media. A open source media patreon system.

I'd like to find a consistent source of all of these positive posts the article claims. :)

To me, "buy me coffee/beer" sounds like an invitation to meet up, which makes sense if you find someone's content interesting and engaging and think they might be fun to hang out with.

Sometimes people include payment links though, which is odd, I agree.

I believe the original post is referring to services like https://buymeacoffee.com/ :)

This is true in my case! I've had more people actually buy me a coffee after interacting with my site than to click on my Buy Me a Coffee button.

Blogs are free/cheap to host, not necessarily free/cheap to produce, and they might have a huge impact on the reader. I am happy to support my favorite content creators in a small way.

this is the whiniest of whines. 'do not even ask for compensation, because I am tired of being advertised to'. you're not even willing to see an advertisement. one without sound or graphics at all. could you be more high-maintenance?

the simple fact is you, you'll never get what you don't ask for. I hate when youtubers ask me to like and subscribe, but I'll never hold it against a single one of them. You never know which person you convinced that time and that time alone. The tone in your voice, the season around the viewer, literally any number of factors change people's decisions to do something kind for a relative stranger on the internet. if you don't give them an easy way to do it, and a reminder that you would appreciate it, the likelihood of it happening is a lot lower. if it helps, you can think of it less like using capitalism to support hosting the subject, and more like your free speech to give tangible support to a subject you appreciate. some people don't have any commentary or judgement that isn't more succinctly said with cold hard cash. no reason not to make your blog accessible to those people.

"Hobbies cost money, you need to accept it. Turning them into a net gain is a fools errand, there are magnitudes more effective ways to turn your time, effort and money into income."

Oh? Many people have turned their hobbies into full-time jobs. Just because you don't like the idea of making money, doesn't mean everyone has to give away their work for free.

I turned my hobby into a million dollar business. It's actually pretty nice to be able to wake up and make money from something you truly enjoy, instead of some crappy CRUD app (now vibe-coded). Freedom to me, means being able to make my own decisions during the day, and working a regular 9-5 definitely doesn't allow for this.

For someone who said they hate all of the negativity on the Internet, you sure are being negative.

"Let our little corner of the internet, shaped by freedom and connections, be a place where we can forget the draining nature of capitalism."

You can do anything you want, but as soon as you start making money, you are evil and we need to stop you.

It's Authoritarianism dressed up as 'freedom'.

I never asked for money, but also never "got the ick". That is a personal blog, you're free to not read.

Does the OP honestly believe that the cost of maintaining a good blog is the €4/month hosting cost?!

If the world flipped a switch tomorrow and now all advertising is independent creators asking fans to donate to their patreon, I would be ecstatic.

It's so much less annoying, intrusive, and generally dystopian than the world's largest corporations listening in on my phone calls so they can serve me minute-long ads for things I already bought that are intentionally as maximalistic and attention-grabbing as possible.

When a creator asks me to buy them a coffee, but they don't do commercials or other sponsorships, how can I be annoyed by that? Their work has value, they're not being unreasonable.

Every podcast I listen to has a member/pro plan. TWIT, MWB, GoG, Connected, Upgrade, ATP, Rebound etc. $10/month each to round up. If I paid for all, that'd be about a $100/month.

I don't feel that's worth it, so I listen to the ads. The problem with ads is that they are on repeat. Leo Raporte's ads are "obnoxious" in their length and breathiness, 5 mins long seemingly each. I don't know what the solution is, because I like his network, but I can't pick just one!

"This irks me primarily because I'm so tired of rampant capitalization and constant advertisements."

Asking for donations has nothing to do with "capitalism", and asking for one on your own blog nor is it "advertising".

If the author is tired of capitalism, he should give up direction of his blogging to hire authority. Otherwise, he's engaging in rampant capitalism.

"an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market"

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/capitalism

> Blogging should be free [...] as in speech.

so asking for money is also part of that freedom right?

Nah, I think everyone should have a buy me a coffee link in their profile.

We should all buy the guy a coffee, just to piss off "Hakkerman."

Well that's 5 minutes of my life I'll never get back

Sure, sound advice from a blogger called "Hakkerman."

i was reading the "i am not a reverse centaur" post and then the article ends with him asking for money. that man does not seem like he needs me to buy a coffee

Meh.

So op is fine financially, but people who are asking for money usually tend to be doing "free" labour and sometimes not employed, or maybe they are employed and would like any additional financial aid to offset their personal costs (time is also a cost, you could be consulting for $$$ instead). I help admin a Discord that receives a few hundred dollars monthly in donations, and we're still way in the negative in terms of what we've spent on the community.

I would not make foolish assumptions when someone's asking for a "coffee" that it "costs" them nothing, the same argument applies against me and my friends, sure Discord itself costs us nothing, but the bot hosting does, the game server hosting does, there's a cost to a lot more things that might not be immediately obvious to everyone.

If freenode asked to buy them a coffee, I think any of us who used IRC long enough might "buy them a coffee" because we know the infrastructure is not free, the time invested by the maintainers, etc.

I like your post, let me buy you a coffee ;)

3 beers for 4 euros? Man, we live in different Europes

I believe that I would be happy to recompense someone for their efforts since, providing I enjoy the music, I happily give money to buskers.

Yet getting my credit card out for a stranger everytime I half-enjoy an article is not something I'm going to do.

Unless the answer is payment friction, assumed wealth or assumed effort, I can't seem to reconcile why I'm happy to recompense buskers but unwilling to recompense bloggers whose article I'll enjoy once and whose website I'll likely never visit again.

In an internet of initially-convincing yet insubstantial AI-slop, people hawking every fad going, and knowing your hard-work will be fed into a AI model that you'll later be charged for, I can't help but feel there must be a solution.

This gives me "Reddit hates everything" vibes.

> This irks me primarily because I'm so tired of rampant capitalization and constant advertisements.

Then maybe complain about that instead of indie creators placing some text to make it easy for people who want to give them some money.

This is how you end up with paywalls and ads, calling people greedy for providing a way to donate is crazy. Does the same argument go for open source software / organizations funded by donations?

Yeah I don't agree at all with this stance. I am as tired of capitalism as anyone else. But let's not pretend money is not important. Just like open source projects need money and funding to keep delivering.

I d rather donate $1 to 10 different blogs every month, than subscribe to NYT or Atlantic.

I agree with the post, though I have to admit I was tempted for a split second to send them an email offering to buy them a coffee.

I dislike the donation button for a totally different reason.

As soon as I see "buy me a coffee" I get the sense that there is some kind of community, fandom, or other groupthink or ulterior motive potentially tainting the honesty of what I'm reading.

It may not be a conscious bias that the blogger has, but it makes me curious. If their blog is too similar to the other people they associate with, their credibility drops a bit. If I dig enough and find their little cult, I'm out. If I wanted to read that shit I can just go to reddit.

Counterpoint: Why don't people ask for help? If they put a donate button on their site...

> This irks me primarily because I'm so tired of ... constant advertisements.

And yet advertises on their site. Shame.

I think there's a distinction between content designed to be monetized, for the purpose of generating the maximum amount of income possible, and content not designed to be monetized, but has a mechanism to generate income (i.e. putting a "buy me a coffee here" link at the end of an article or the bottom of your site or on the about page or something). I like the discrete donation link. I hate the promotion in the middle of my youtube video.

I disagree, for two reasons. First, blogging is nearly-free for people who have non-demanding, well-paying jobs. Sure, I find it tacky when an engineer working at Google is asking for donations, but I accept that for some people, a small trickle of extra cash may be the difference between being able to blog or having to work two shifts.

Second, blogging is cheap if you're writing about what you had for lunch, but there are numerous personal blogs and websites that are obviously costly and time-consuming to run. For example, I'm sure that Ken Shirriff's blog costs him money. Similarly, if you wanted to recreate Marcin Wichary's blog, it would cost you tens of thousands in photo gear and travel costs.

> I'm so tired of rampant capitalization and constant advertisements. That's why I'm here on the indie web, to get away from all of that, and now you are here, begging me for my money.

And that just comes across as entitled. The indie web doesn't owe the author anything, and it especially doesn't owe him the adherence to his views on capitalism.

Blogging should be free, free as in beer and free as in speech.

wow, that comes across as very entitled. what business do you have to tell me that i should do something for free for you? i am tempted to add a paywall to my blog just for you, while everyone else gets free access.

if you had titled that: "why i don't ask you to buy me a coffee", for your own blog, then that would have sounded very different. or if you had written that you won't buy anyone a coffee because you'd rather give that money to more worthy causes, or if you said that you can't afford to support them, that would be fine too. but to tell someone: "your blog should be free. you should not ask for money." that's extremely inconsiderate.

you claim to know how much $4 is. no you don't. in some countries $4 can feed a whole family for a day. maybe the author lives in such a country, or they support people that live there. you have no idea how far those $4 will go. unless of course you are talking about a specific blog and you know where the author works. but you didn't do that. you addressed the general case.

blogging should be ... whatever their author wants it to be. if it is free, be grateful. if they ask for support, be tolerant. you don't know their life situation. you don't know what they do with that money, why they would need it. maybe they are in a badly paid job or even unemployed and are trying to make their life a little better. maybe they are paid well but are trying to get out of their job because they see no future in it, so they are trying to build up a second income. maybe they are trying to save up for a new computer. who knows.

you can of course compare their blog to others which don't ask for money and decide that you like those better, but then please go and read the other blogs and don't bother the author of this one whose motivation for asking for that coffee you know nothing about.

> This irks me primarily because I'm so tired of rampant capitalization and constant advertisements.

This is the dumbest post I've seen on this website. Do you also go into cafes and knock the tip jar off the counter? Or do you just ignore it if you don't want to tip?

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