Donations make up a quarter of my income

[canada_dry]

> backers receive no benefits, rewards, or access to exclusive content. They don’t even get a thank you email.

I've sent donations (e.g. $25-$100 via papyal) to open source and technical folks and only once received a reply (thank you) back.

I suppose it shouldn't disappoint me, but it does and thus I'm much less likely to bother.

[justinclift]

Interesting. We (sqlitebrowser.org) have Patreon donations (plug: patreon.com/db4s) and I'm careful to thank everyone who becomes a Patron. And to follow up with any thoughts/questions/etc Patrons have via that platform.

But I _very_ carefully don't put extra time into doing Patron-only stuff.

The core purpose of the Patreon for us, is to gather funds so we can improve things for the project. eg buy new equipment (HiDPI monitor purchased, ARM64 based Mac Mini coming up, etc).

So, putting time into making the project better is much better than putting time into doing "Patreon only" things. eg "private blog posts" etc.

From my personal point of view, if someone becomes a Patron to our open source project with the expectation they'll receive some huge extra level of effort... they're probably better off not becoming a Patron.

But if they're ok with just the acknowledgement/thanks and knowing they're helping out with an important aspect of things that no-one else is, then that's all good. :)

[bsder]

Does the author actually get your contact info from PayPal in way that they can respond?

Normally, if I send anything like $50-$100 to a creator via any of the "normal" mechanisms for this (Patreon, Venmo, Zelle), I get a very nice response.

[noodle]

It's one of the reasons why donation platforms are demonstrably more effective than just a form or button alone. Even though the emails are largely or entirely automated, people still like to get them for causes they like enough to donate to, whether thank yous or updates or whatever.

[goodpoint]

The "thank you" is in the thousands of unpaid hours they put in their projects.

[smoldesu]

There are a lot better (and more cost-effective) ways to pay people to make you feel good.

[vorpalhex]

If you want someone to send you a nice email, you can hire someone to be your pen pal.

[dewey]

For OP: the about page is 404'ing https://method.ac/about/

[duopixel]

This reminds me of a dream from 2019: https://method.ac/writing/work_journal/08-01-2019_work_log_t...

I'll just remove the link, thanks for letting me know.

[mistrial9]

when I had post-adolescent support systems in place, long ago, the donation system made so much sense to me.. now, long after, its not a pretty picture w.r.t. cost of living

[smitty1e]

$0.25 sounds less than benevolent.