Comments on: Metafilter Wants You - The Fundraising Post!

Metafilter Wants You - The Fundraising Post!

jacquilynne — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 08:33:50 -0800

Metafilter depends almost entirely on user contributions. The community needs your help to stay up and running and to improve in the future. Contributions, especially recurring contributions, are what pay for servers, moderators and technical support. Please contribute through the Metafilter funding page!

Details about the financial situation along with discussion are over in MetaTalk. Please hope.

By: toastyk

toastyk — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 08:49:36 -0800

Thank you I just started a monthly sub. Thanks for all the good stuff; I've been lurking since my teens and only in the past few years have I started posting things.

By: stevil

stevil — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 09:08:39 -0800

Thanks. Made a one-time donation.

By: aleph

aleph — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 09:19:47 -0800

Will do.

By: Baxx_24

Baxx_24 — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 09:21:59 -0800

Finally joined up, and signed up for a $5 monthly subscription.

By: skippyhacker

skippyhacker — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 09:23:33 -0800

Been a monthly donor for years - the blue must continue - continblue? It's painless and worthy of our ongoing support. Let's go people!

By: 517

517 — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 09:31:57 -0800

all good things...

By: beagle

beagle — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 09:36:08 -0800

I will contribute. May I suggest that on the funding page, the references to plates of beans be linked to this, for the benefit of the uninitiated?

By: jellywerker

jellywerker — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 09:53:16 -0800

I did not realize it cost so much to run this website. Thanks for the open breakdown of actual numbers. I had no idea the initial $5 to join goes practically nowhere as far as keeping Metafilter going. I did not mean to freeload so long, and I wish I was in a position to do more!

By: Lookinguppy

Lookinguppy — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 10:24:12 -0800

Thank you for making it so easy to do!

By: joannemerriam

joannemerriam — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 10:45:04 -0800

I already make a monthly contribution and also just made a one-time contribution.

By: flabdablet

flabdablet — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 10:45:52 -0800

Thanks for the open breakdown of actual numbers. Seconded. Some other actual numbers I would appreciate being able to see are how many recurring donations are currently active and what the mean and median donation amounts are.

By: TedW

TedW — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 10:46:32 -0800

Have you looked into ~~ads~~ extended underwriting credits? Proud to be a monthly supporter and hope everyone gives what they can!

By: gwint

gwint — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 10:54:31 -0800

Thank you to the Steering Committee for posting this to the Blue. I'm sure it will get to the eyeballs of many people who otherwise would miss this important message. Metafilter remains the best of the web. Let's keep it going!

By: zenon

zenon — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 10:57:47 -0800

I now have the shiny star.

By: JHarris

JHarris — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 11:22:57 -0800

To TedW, we are considering it, a sidebar ad is already shown to users who are not logged in. It would take some coding effort though and we don't have the development time/energy to implement that yet.

By: martin q blank

martin q blank — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 11:23:17 -0800

I just cancelled a subscription to a pricey magazine that I rarely read anymore. I'll channel that back to Metafilter. As soon as I can find my wallet....

By: martin q blank

martin q blank — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 11:28:20 -0800

oops, forgot PayPal's an option. Done!

By: Kadin2048

Kadin2048 — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 13:00:51 -0800

Does the site have a preference (in terms of which one has lower fees) between Stripe and PayPal? I notice that Stripe is positioned above PayPal on the donation page, which suggests to me that Stripe might be considered preferable... but it'd be nice to know if one is significantly better than the other. I'd be paying from the same credit card either way, so it's six/half-a-dozen to me which route I'd use. But if one is taking a 3% cut and the other is taking 5% or whatever, I'd certainly rather use the one that has the lower fee structure for my "fire and forget" subscription.

By: rockindata

rockindata — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 13:22:54 -0800

My understanding is that stripe and PayPal were different, but now they have settled into a nice cartel situation with roughly the same prices

By: tavegyl

tavegyl — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 13:26:41 -0800

Indeed, I understand there's not a substantial difference between Stripe and Paypal fees. Whichever works better for you.

By: Too-Ticky

Too-Ticky — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 13:59:59 -0800

Checked on my monthly donation, and I'm happy to report that it is rolling along as it should be. I can't afford to raise it, but I'll keep it going.

By: JoeXIII007

JoeXIII007 — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 15:54:16 -0800

Hope y'all doing fundraising are treating yourselves to some fancy dinner and snackage while receiving ~~pledges~~ contributions. Happy to be an $8/month contributor since I forget when. Have there been any thoughts to poke a (non-profit) org for limited dollar-for-dollar matches?

By: Wilbefort

Wilbefort — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 18:20:49 -0800

My once-a-month email from PayPal is always a bit of sweetness in my day. Do it!

By: Jilder

Jilder — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 18:49:51 -0800

TedW: For a while there Metafilter did largely support itself through ads - Ask used to bring regular traffic and basically kept us afloat. In around 2012 Google changed how its search engines ranked user generated stuff like Yahoo Answers or Quora and Ask itself, and traffic dropped off a cliff basically overnight crippling our revenue. Matt writes about it here. The long and the short of it is that ads are no longer a reliable source of income, and will only become worse as time progresses. The last decade has been spent trying to diversify and find ways of moving away from ad dependency, because it's clear it's just not going to cut it. There's a lot of details on the situation from the steering committee in the Metatalk link posted, it's interesting having a read of it. I've been here something like fifteen years and it'll be interesting to see how many of those ideas bear fruit. Personally I really do think paid subscription is the absolute only way we're going to stay afloat, with the periodic fundraiser to provide a bit of padding for unexpected expenses.

By: adamvasco

adamvasco — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 19:39:33 -0800

Paypal vs Stripe. Ever since the wikileaks debacle I will never have anything to do with Paypal ever again. It is a morally bankrupt organisation. Metafilter should look at wise ex transferwise used by many outside of USA.

By: subdee

subdee — Wed, 26 Oct 2022 07:25:51 -0800

Stripe had lower fees than PayPal when we used it to accept payment for a zine on bigcartel, but PayPal has more users outside the USA.

By: subdee

subdee — Wed, 26 Oct 2022 07:28:57 -0800

Donated! I already pay the monthly subscription. This is my main source of news, after the news app Newsy.

By: TedW

TedW — Wed, 26 Oct 2022 11:08:19 -0800

I was just joking about the ads; I've been here long enough to remember the Suicide Girls controversy! But the advice to check your donation status was good; I looked at my PayPal account and didn't see it. I'm guessing it got lost in the shuffle when I switched banks a while back. So I have re-instated it, with an increase to cover inflation and the time I wasn't donating when I thought I was.

By: Kadin2048

Kadin2048 — Wed, 26 Oct 2022 13:26:57 -0800

In around 2012 Google changed how its search engines ranked user generated stuff like Yahoo Answers or Quora and Ask itself Yeah, this was also when Google's actual search results started being a lot less useful, and not coincidentally sometime after that, they also started returning their own (presumably machine-generated) "answers" at the top of the results page, which are often dangerously wrong. Grr. My understanding is that Ask Metafilter has traditionally been the way lots of people first encounter Mefi and where a lot of users (myself included) started. It's also just a huge volume of really high-quality information in itself. I've been trying to think of ways that the site could get more exposure to Ask content outside of Google, but I'm not sure what other mechanisms people really use for question/answer discovery these days. It's a tough problem. Also, thanks all for the info re Stripe/PayPal. I will probably continue to use PayPal, crummy company though they are, because I already have subscriptions through them to other sites/services that only do PayPal. Easier to have things in one place if it's all the same on the receiving end. (Also, Stripe is owned in significant part by Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, so I'm not sure how less compromising they are. And they do some pretty shady corporate tax-dodge shit via an Irish holding corp, too, but I guess that's basically table stakes in the "fintech" space.)