[tomg]

Goodbye Hacker News.

A bunch of extremely well-paid SWEs complain about donating two bucks to a completely free encyclopedia representing hundreds of thousands of volunteer human hours of effort; replacing (sorry, “disrupting”) extremely expensive Britannica books means to me the orange site has lost it’s way.

[geocrasher]

How long have you been reading HN? What makes you think everyone here is an "extremely well-paid SWE"? Have you not read the threads such as

"Ask HN: How to find work while homeless?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22442454

This is a discussion forum, not a blog.

[hbrn]

> bunch of extremely well-paid SWEs complain about donating two bucks to a completely free encyclopedia

You are NOT donating to free encyclopedia. You are donating to their parent company, which spends fraction of your donations on the encyclopedia, the rest goes to other questionable causes. That what bothers everybody.

[tyingq]

An item hitting the front page doesn't mean anything like "most people here agree with the premise". Just that they find the content potentially interesting to see, discuss, debate, etc.

[jorvi]

That would hold merit if I wouldn’t regularly see people’s insightful comments sent deep into greyed-out oblivion because they went against the grain of the echo chamber.

Be it here, on Reddit, or any site with a content voting system, the vote buttons always end up being ‘this is what I could have said’ and ‘get bent’ buttons.

Funnily enough, imageboards seem to have it figured out: post something interesting, your thread or comment gets engaged. Post drivel - everyone ignores you. Meritocracy.

[mardifoufs]

The pushback is very present amongst Wikipedians editors too, you know, the people actually writing the encyclopedia. But I guess software engineers on hacker news know better and can just handwave the issue because it makes them feel better to think that their donation is useful.

[CoastalCoder]

I think you might not understand the reason for the fundraising pushback.

I can try to summarize if you like, but it's probably explained elsewhere in this story's comments.

[jmfldn]

Wikipedia is a rare living embodiment of everything the web can be at its best. I consider my recurring payment to them a form of public duty.

[hacknewslogin]

I'm an underpaid inspector with heavy ADHD. At this point I feel like my chances of breaking into the tech industry are a pipedream. I still enjoy hacker news, especially since I can access it at work.

[no_time]

>Goodbye Hacker News.

See you tomorrow

[KomoD]

Bye bye! You are delusional if you believe everyone is a well-paid SWE

[klabb3]

Do these volunteers get a share of the donations?

> the orange site has lost it’s way

You can change the color in account preferences to any hex color you want.

Jokes aside, I don’t know whether the criticism is valid, but aren’t we all here to find out? Or disagree?

[mattlondon]

Not everyone here is a silicon valley millionaire. Sure there are some, but there are many who are not. Some are even from developing nations where a few USD represents a significant amount of money.

I think the core of the argument is that they don't need the money, but act like they do to keep the site running but actually run a huge surplus.

[blowski]

Goodbye :wave:

[Hello71]

what percentage of the money actually goes to the volunteers?