It's been a while since I've encouraged donation. Yesterday it took me about 45 seconds to throw hubski some loose change. Please consider it. If you've got a credit/debit card, or if you've got some bitcoin or etherium - consider how much you love this place and throw some at it.
There are no ads here. The team believes so firmly in not collecting data about you and maintaining strict privacy. Can you think of another place online where you spend so much enjoyable time that asks nothing of you? They won't even ask you for a donation. They just slip a quiet "donate" link at the bottom of the page. edit: I think mk hates that I even post these reminders.... but I hate the idea of him spending $3000 per year of his own personal money so that I can enjoy this site.
Since they won't ask - I will. Throw a couple bucks at hubski. It takes one minute. Whatever we don't donate, these people pay out of their pockets. They already spend their blood sweat and tears to make this place operate. Let's help defray the server costs.
No guilt. If you can donate, do. If you can't, don't - and feel good about the content and discussion you can contribute. But if you scrape up some dollars that might otherwise go to pizza or coffee.... consider a donation.
I'm matching donations at 10% up to the donation goal of $2400 and I'm already ahead of you guys. Catch up.
edit: This is what reminded me to donate today. It's worth a listen (or a read). Nothing is free.
So, several people have asked if they can donate via PayPal. I have a PayPal account, could accept your donation, and then pay Hubski in a format they accept. What's the current state of this internet? Is this something people would trust me to do? Or not? Or...?
Considering it's the only forum I use anymore, I gave a nice donation. Thanks for making an enjoyable community, guys.
Only now do I realize my last donation was in 2015. It's been a while indeed. wasoxygen, you'll be fine. As someone who only uses their credit card for random international payments...I find it to be a weird trust-based system that somehow hasn't let me down at all. But hey, I'm also someone who loves pin-less contactless debit card payments, so maybe I'm just weird.
You're right, it worked just fine. But I wasn't really expecting problems, it's just an irrational phobia of internet-mediated scamming or something. Things are probably more civilized in the Old World, but here there is always some weirdness when money moves around. When I opened a bank account, the bank gave me a secret and unique number assigned to that account. This number is the key for extracting my funds. The bank also gave me a box full of hundreds of paper slips, and each paper has the secret number printed on it (with magnetic ink, which can be detected inside an envelope). Like other bank customers, I regularly put one of these papers in an envelope and drop it in a metal box so a person I've never met can take it away and give it to another stranger. They also gave me plastic cards with secret numbers embossed on them. People regularly stick these cards into machines owned by other banks to get paper money, and pay what I would consider lunch money for the convenience of not going to their own bank. I think you're right, it is a weird trust-based system and it rarely lets us down.
It's a very poor riff/degeneration of the meme, "Do you even lift, bro?" The reverse de-evolution: "u metch bro" - > "do u even metch, bro" -> "Do you even match, bro?" with the intended effect of a challenge to match with an implication of a donation. I'm glad I can at least explain what I meant with comments like these, even if it turns out they don't make sense to anyone living outside my head - as does often happen. :)
Why not try creating a responsible advertising model? Like DDG [querying Google on your behalf], you could proxy between members and advertisers. Sell ads based on forum demographics & topic, while maintaining the virtuous model of non-tracking and anonymous readership.
This from the guy that convinced me that google analytics was evil and was responsible for our getting rid of such things... Ideally, Hubski could forever remain an ad free space.
Are there any public figures regarding the specifics of Hubski's operation costs? I'd like to consider putting in considerably more, though $3K (or even the $2.4K from the top-right metre) annually is ostensibly a bit much considering the site doesn't look like it'd be particularly resource-intensive (unless those figures include a dramatically low developer rate). An Azure A2 instance would run less than $1.2K/yr including bandwidth costs.
I think this post should answer this quesiton for you. :) EDIT: Reverse TL;DR In addition to paying for servers, we buy stickers a couple of times per year, send them to people, and typically buy a few meals, drinks, and t-shirts. We might also include occasional travel expenses in these costs, but Hubski meetups feel too much like vacations. Hubski has always run in the red, and the money has come out of our pockets. This isn't an ideal situation, but it is a bearable one. However, there may come a time when our situation is not so bearable, and we thought it would be a good thing to be clear about where we are at. We have set the 2016 funding goal to $2400. Assuming we can bring our server costs down as planned, $2400 should enable us to pay for our servers, and leave some money for stickers, swag, meetups, and some room for an increase in server demand. Of course, there's more content, commentary and jokes within the post and replies in that link above, but this is the fiscally relevant portion from mk's post. Are there any public figures regarding the specifics of Hubski's operation costs?
Currently, Hubski's server costs are $212/mo. That equates to $2544/yr. These costs are too high, and reflect an inefficiency of the Arc app. We are currently working to correct this inefficiency, and once this work is completed, we expect that out costs will drop to $116/mo, or $1392/yr.
https://arclanguage.github.io/ref/ I do not recommend learning it. If you want a Lisp to learn, Racket is a good choice. Arc is a terrible, poorly documented, poorly supported, unreadable language, whose primary goal is to save characters at the cost of comprehension. Which is lunacy. Characters are in far greater supply than comprehension.
if memory serves... Arc was an offshoot language that Hacker News was written in. When mk first built this place, he did it based on HN code... which was in Arc.
That all said, is there any possibility of making a donation via PayPal or something similar? Poland is not even mentioned in any future plans for Stripe expansion and I'm highly suspicious about buying BitCoin and similar currencies. It's not that I'm not willing to donate or don't have any money, but right now the only way for me would be to flash my double citizenship status while on trip to Germany, somehow get a debit card despite living abroad and then use Stripe. :/
As someone who has had to research untraceable credit for dramatic purposes, untraceable credit is dramatically simple. Like, you literally can't plot Bourne Identity shit with any credibility anymore because offshoring your money is so stupendously simple... unless you're talking about risking money so small you shouldn't really be worrying about it. I'll bet if you said "I want to ship an international money order, gimme a damn address" mk would be psyched for the stamp.
That sounds in equal parts intriguing and disturbing. Could you expand on it a bit? If that's a viable option, sure. No problem. mk - would the money order also be OK? goobster and veen both made good points and offers, but I would like to have a general idea what's actually viable for you. To sweeten the deal, if you are collecting post stamps I can throw in some German, Polish and Czech that I have laying around. ;)As someone who has had to research untraceable credit for dramatic purposes
I'll bet if you said "I want to ship an international money order, gimme a damn address" mk would be psyched for the stamp.
As mentioned down the thread, I think the easiest way to buy/pay online without a credit card account is using a prepaid card. You can buy them with cash, and then use them like credit. Unfortunately, valuable stamps would be wasted on me, and I don't think Digital Ocean will take them for server time. But the thought is much appreciated!
Hey, I'm a novelist. You get to do all sorts of dumb shit when you're a novelist, assuming the NSA buys it. The unfortunate thing is that international dark pool finance has gotten so much less interesting since the era of "untraceable numbered Swiss accounts." Much like the drama that evaporated when cell phones became ubiquitous, the fact that any chucklefuck with an internet connection can now splash hundreds of thousands of untraceable dollars around with zero repercussions and zero drama required me to find my drama elsewhere. Which is fine. Makes it more real. But it's made me a lot less sympathetic to the plea that money can't be transmitted across borders easily.
I trust the Hubski crew. I sort of trust Stripe. I see the https protocol and the reassuring little padlock icon on the donate page. But every time I start typing digits into that janky HTML form I get twitchy and close the tab. It's the same credit card I handed to a random camarero in Mexico City. I don't know what's wrong with me. I just can't do it. I have some PayPal credit. I don't especially like PayPal and there are reasons to mistrust them. But I like to prowl eBay and it's just easier with PayPal. I've donated bitcoin, but bitcoin is a pain to acquire and I'd prefer to hold what I have left. PayPal makes it look easy. Convincing them Hubski is nonprofit involves some red tape, but that might be avoidable in the near term: "We make it easy to set up your site to take payments but to withdraw more than $500 a month you will need to verify your account." They even support recurring donations.
Lol. One of my favorite comments I've read in a while.
Sorry, I didn't know about the possible problems. Shame though. Unless I'll manage to get a card from a 'proper country' around Christmas I'll regretfully say that I simply can't donate. Obtaining BitCoins is not something I want to do for a similar twitch reflex you have with PayPal. Every single way to get them makes (aside of mining, but I know enough about hash strengths to not bother with my so-so GPU) me feel like I'm in an after school special where a shady man gives me a trustworthy offer. Yeah, I'm salty. That's a Yet Another Service that made me feel like I'm living in the arsehole of the Earth itself. A place where you don't want to bring your business in fear of Bear Cavalry, Witchers, mages and frigid winds.
It does. It also collects ridiculous fees for transaction to a non-EU country. To donate 10 USD I would have to pay 18 USD total. 'Sensible' rates start around 100-150 USD where I would only need to spend about 20 USD in fees. Yeah, I was also surprised. I'll look around for a different bank, but I don't think will look any better. There's also one fucked-up thing about distinction between debit and credit card. As someone who does not work (and my registered tutor income/business does not count, I've checked) I can only get a debit card. These mean nothing to most internet transfers or stores, being the main reason I'm using PayPal instead. Anyway, thank you for input. Much appreciated, as it at least got me to go look for a more viable alternative (i.e. different bank, asking someone I know in Germany and paying them back etc). But I feel like my whining, because it's largely that at this point, detracts from a much more important topic that steve put out.Doesn't your bank issue credit cards?
Woah, that's quite steep. Regular credit cards here are, usually, around 20-40€ per year in fees with little to no transaction fee. Have you looked into prepaid credit cards like Visa? Pretty much all stores and services see it as a regular credit card, but you can just put money on it like with a prepaid sim card. Also, Paypal can be dodgy af: (also also, maybe more comments will increase the amount of people seeing the post and thus increase donations? :) )
That's… news to me (as in term alone, I only knew about pre-paid in cellphone sense). Thank you, I'll read more about how that looks here. Regarding fees, I do want to put an emphasis on non-EU countries. My card costs nearly nothing per year, national payments are free of charge (aside of some minutia about ATMs but even that is mostly free), and EU fees are almost negligible. Getting something from USA, or even Norway, was just not worth it. Shipping notwithstanding, as this is about bank fees alone. Well, in that case I'll go and put my extra wooly sweater that itches even when you look at it to get annoyed proper. :DHave you looked into prepaid credit cards like Visa?
(also also, maybe more comments will increase the amount of people seeing the post and thus increase donations? :) )
Most people can get prepaid credit cards, also known as "secured" credit cards, because there's honestly no real extension of credit. You've already given the company your money and the only money they let you spend is that. You want to keep an eye out for fees associated with the cards. This industry is currently fairly unregulated so the fees often aren't readily disclosed. Things like a monthly maintenance charge, atm withdrawals, "over limit" penalties. Be careful, ask a lot of questions, or else you might get hit with unpleasant surprises. Unlike credit cards and banks, the companies aren't required to issue disclosures on these - you'll have to ask. If you already have a bank account, I find it difficult to think why you'd want one of these unless it would allow you to make US payments and your bank card won't. Sorry, really just saw an opportunity to nerd out about credit/debit cards and stuff, and took it.