[kerkeslager]

I'm with you that people should be paying for services with money instead of their private data. If you were running a Slack/Discord alternative and wanted to charge for it, I'd support you. Maybe not 50 Euros support you up front, but I'd support you. You only need a few thousand users to make something like 10 Euros a year a lucrative side project, and I'm sure you could get people to pay more if you earned any trust at all first.

Where you lost me is that I don't need your help getting people together to talk about books. Sure, that's worth bringing some snacks, in person, which might add up to 50 Euros over the course of a year, but doing it on the internet with a bunch of unknown randos makes the value go down, not up. And putting a fixed price on it means you get less interesting people: on the one end, it excludes the broke intern who needs the mentoring the most, and on the other end, that senior, experienced, well-thought-out guy who brings a fuckton of knowledge to the table brings more value than the host just by opening his mouth.

Where you really go off the rails is this: "There's no motivation without the surveillance to give away all of this work for free." Yes, there is, actually. I don't know what it is about some people on Hacker News who can't comprehend that there are other motivations besides money. If you're only motivated by money, I don't want to be around you, let alone go to your book club.