[wpietri]

Exactly.

Personally I am done with indirect funding models where people burn my time and attention in hopes of getting me to waste enough money on something that surplus cash can be skimmed to pay for the original content. It's ridiculous. Direct payment or GTFO.

And I'm putting my money where my mouth is. My Patreon bill was $150 this month. And that's not counting direct payments to creators.

[skinkestek]

> And I'm putting my money where my mouth is. My Patreon bill was $150 this month. And that's not counting direct payments to creators.

Nice!

I'm still not using Patreon but I "guilty" of paying for promising alpha quality stuff, subscribing to services I don't use deliberately even after realizing I cannot use it yet etc.

I think we IT people have a reputation for being a bunch of cynical whiners and I also think it is somewhat deserved so I am happy to hear that I am not alone in actually wanting to pay for good stuff.

If anyone wonder what makes me pay, here is the best I can come up with:

- stuff I use or can see myself using

- one time payments, no subscriptions (unless there is a specific ongoing cost that I realized must be there)

- tokens are a nice alternative to subscriptions (eg: $10 for 50 tokens that let me start multi-player games is something I would easily consider for a good game like Polytopia)

- not too expensive, once it passes impulse buy at around $10 monthly or $40 one time it gets significantly harder bjt not impossible

[thinkloop]

I love this, but that means you are now paying 3 times: ads/premium, sponsored messages, and patreon. Even if you block ads - as well as the much more complicated sponsored messages - you are still paying by having to manage that system and work around its edge cases. Direct "donation" should include ad-free and sponosor-free access to videos.

[wpietri]

I'm mostly supporting people who are writers and the like, so that's less of a problem for me. But I hope that more direct payment shifts things in that direction.

[kadoban]

In some cases it does, but that requires basically way too much work from the content creator, they have to have a separate way to give paying subscribers videos. For example, LinusTechTips has videos on their own video delivery service available, and they're pretty much ad free. I know some other creators do a similar thing (not setting up their own youtube competitor, but the rest).

Personally I just use adblock, skip the sponsor segments and live with it. Sponsor stuff is really easy to skip in my experience, especially on mobile where if you double tap the right side it skips 10 seconds. You get used to how many taps to do per content creator, their sponsor segments seem to be consistent lengths usually.