[grepgeek]

Did they try to ask for donation? Linux Journal has a huge reader base most of who probably grew up in the 90s and early 2000s. Most of these readers are now probably working professionals and earning well enough to donate a small amount to Linux Journal on a monthly or yearly basis to keep this journal running.

[nabakin]

Looks like they have a patreon https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?u=10705728

[_eht]

I would rather donate to them directly, personally.

[self_awareness]

Isn't Patreon a direct donation?

[jedberg]

Minus the Patreon fees.

[bigiain]

And plus the occasional Patreon douchbaggery...

[SSchick]

They do take a cut, that's their business model.

[paulryanrogers]

10% not including payment processing fees. I know they need to keep the lights on but that seems steep to me.

[chipotle_coyote]

Patreon has three membership plans for creators, none of which are actually 10%. :) The basic one is 5%, the "pro" one is 8%, and the "premium" one is 12%, which is targeted more at companies/teams than individuals. (It comes with a dedicated account manager and I believe some kind of shipping/fulfillment system for physical merchandise.) Their payment processing fees are also actually lower than what you'd pay Stripe directly for pledges of $3 and under.

Patreon isn't problem-free, but I think they get dinged a little too hard by folks sometimes. It's not very easy to find a competitor that offers comparable value-added services at significantly lower cost.

[dtech]

It used to be 5% and they recently upped it to 8% for new creators.

[ygjb]

seems like a lot of room for competition...

[ilaksh]

Yep, currently around 200 patrons at $1153 per month total.

Compare that to, for example, the top 200 "adult" (porn) projects on Patreon: https://graphtreon.com/patreon-creators/adult-games

One example would be DarkCookie with "SummerTime saga", a "dating sim" at around $50,000 US.

Or another example at 769 patrons and $2,287 per month: "Porn Empire is a simulation/management with light RPG elements where you play as an amateur porn producer. Start small, shoot amateur porn and as you progress, you earn more money, buy better equipment, pick up better girls and train them"

If people really cared they would have signed up. But the proof is in the pudding. What people really care about is totally different from what they say publicly. What they really care about, apparently, if you follow the money, is interactive cartoon porn.

I wonder if Patreon would consider diverting a small amount of the porn money to worthy causes like Linux Journal.

[nemothekid]

>What they really care about, apparently, if you follow the money, is interactive cartoon porn.

But, according to the link you sent, the global top 100 only has 15 NSFW creators. People seem way more interested in Podcasts and YouTube videos.

[ilaksh]

Right. Sorry. What people care about is probably something like this ranking:

- podcasts

- YouTube

- porn

- Skyrim mods

- Minecraft mods

- Instagram models

... several other bullet points ....

- journalism

[denkmoon]

Many of those podcasters and youtubers are better journalists than the writers for Washington Post.

[cameronbrown]

The real issue is the we've forgotten what real journalism looks like. Nobody wants to pay.

[kebman]

I beg to differ. There's just more competition, and the bar for entering is lower. And so you get a lot of chaff. But there are serious journalists with high standards and integrity out there that thrive on the donation model, such as Timcast. Now there's a guy who actually meets up where it happens! Add to this that often it's not needed to send someone out, because you can always read some random guy's twitter. We don't exactly have less access to news or reporting. The problem is the filtering. But I'm not sad for it. Not one bit! Because it has revealed to us just how things were filtered in the past by the big giants. Not so anymore.

Other than that, you have to remember that there's been a pretty painful phase of adaptation with new and emergent technology. This means a lot of the old bastions have fallen, or are trying to figure out how to cope with the new media reality. Either way tabloids will always sell more than real news, sadly. They also did during the heyday of serious broadsheets, and there's not really any indication that it's going to change in the near future. There are some noble efforts to fight the fake news agenda, that tries to pick apart the rabble of the tabloids, such as Snopes -- until you realise that they're also extremely biased. So in the end, you're left with thinking for yourself, which can be both a blessing and a curse. Probably more of the latter if you believe in UFO's and crystal healing...

[pmontra]

I'm not sure that nobody wants to pay. There are too many things to pay for. Suppose 50% of the sources of HN are paywalled with a monthly subscription. How many of them one person could be paying for? Not many I guess. With a per post subscription? More but we're not really there. Furthermore it's hard to ask for money before the customer sees the product. How many disappointments before the pay per article model fails?

The search engine and aggregator sites commoditized information, including technical one. That started killing news, online and paper.

[chovy]

$1500/month in donations? Yeah I'm going to go out on a limb and say the donation model doesn't work for open source.

[timattrn]

this isn't open source, it's media. I am/was a LJ subscriber, sad to see it go, but I don't feel starved of similar material.

[chimprich]

I think FOSS has not sufficiently explored the donation model. I'd be keen to donate a decent amount of cash to get some fundamental improvements to Emacs, for example. Lots of developers are relatively well paid and use a lot of free tools.

[denkmoon]

>I wonder if Patreon would consider diverting a small amount of the porn money to worthy causes like Linux Journal.

Hell no. Patreon have already shown they want to be part of the culture war, we don't need to give them any more excuses.

If I want to spend my money on virtual lolis, I expect all of that money (besides the patreon fee) to go to virtual lolis.

[arnmac]

I was a subscriber for 15 years. When they went digital it lost a lot of value for me. However when my subscription came up for renewal in June I realized I had not even read an issue in a few months.

[mixmastamyk]

Right, like Mad magazine? I would have subscribed if I’d known they were about to close.