| Replying to my own comment so the individual saying "Bravo!" can delete their comment if they so desire (you can ask the mods to delete it if you missed the window to self delete). This is absolutely not intended to be personal about them in specific. For the record, because there is no shortage of people worrying about my fee-fees, I don't need pats on the head or a sticker for the back of my hand like a 5 year old you are trying to mollify. That kind of reply is actually part of the problem. It treats me like I'm an emotional basket case, not like someone with a legitimate criticism of actual sexism and classism. What I do need is a better income. I posted a piece in early January called The Hand Licking Incident. [1] It got more than 60k page views and multiple people copied it to their site, one with my permission and proper attribution. What it didn't get is a single fucking tip or Patreon patron. There are no ads on most of my sites because ads don't do well. A high percentage of people in the world today use ad blockers and bitch vehemently about the evils of ads online. Yet, they won't support good writing with actual money. I am routinely told by the HN crowd that if I don't like being poor, I should go get a real job, that expecting adequate pay for good writing is just crazy talk. Writing isn't worth any money and should be done for free. I spent about two weeks on that piece and it's informed by years of experience and education. I would love to do more writing of that sort. I think I have something of value to offer. But, no, I can't just keep working for free. I need an adequate income. And the entire world seems to think that's just an unreasonable expectation. So either leave a one dollar tip on one of my sites, become a patron or in some way support/promote my work or just leave me alone. I absolutely don't need people trying to massage my emotions here. If I were that emotionally fragile, I would have committed suicide years ago. This is a chronic issue where people worry about my feelings and continue to not do a durn thing to help me establish an adequate income. I've been complaining about this for years. It's not remotely a new issue. Guys here routinely encourage other guys here to use services like Patreon to monetize open source projects or the like. But I'm treated like a beggar and dismissed as asking for a handout for doing the same. And HN is even more hostile towards ads than most of the internet. When I lay all that out, the next step is people telling me to give up entirely. Yet, at the same time, all of HN expects excellent content to show up here daily and also has a hissy about pay walls. (Insert disgusted faces of the "Really??!" variety.) [1] https://raisingfutureadults.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-hand-li... |