>Maybe you're right that it's a bit naive to throw money at internet eccentrics who don't have a plan and trust that they will manage things well.
I don't expect him to manage it well. I'd have been happy if half of the promised work got delivered and the money was spend on hookers and blow. I know most of the fees for my portfolio are funding that type of thing already.
>> "You are probably one buying work on freelancer websites?"
No, I sell my services. My main point was that if he took money immediately he might have got these issues sorted out sooner. No guarantee though. I've been stung by freelancer.com's 14 day wait for the first payment too + they used to only process withdrawals once per week.
> trying to make money from people who actually create value is not really the future of the web I want to see.
Isn't this a fundamental principle of business? How are they also not creating value, if value is more or less defined as money earned?
The web is literally dominated by like 5 companies, and every smaller company's stupid 'mission' is to build some platform for everyone else to 'create value' and change the world with their SaaS. Maybe I'm just cynical, and I understand that you disagree with sort of scummy extortion tactics, but the wording you chose seems to me to already be what the web is.
> Long story short if I had money that would be relevant in this context I would invest really hard into Tenstorrent.
I would happily accept a bet (e.g. $100 bucks or a nice bottle of whiskey) from you (or anyone) that atomicsemi is successful. I will just bet against it because I am skeptical that a new company is successful in a capital intensive segment.
It is probably slightly insulting, foolish, and arrogant to bet against the famous Jim Killer on a website dedicated to startups. This should not be a dig against Sam and Jim Killer. I guess that will try something truly innovative. But if I look a the past, the odds seem to be stacked against them.
> Why would you give someone's random website (or random gofundme) $1k?
for no reason
and I won't do it in the future
listen, smart contracts aren't more secure as other contracts today, that have been read by lawyers and proven in court for decades and still they are not to be trusted in full.
this difference being there are far more lawyers than people who can read and understand a smart contract
you live in the world of wishful thinking (not wanting to think you are deliberately lying) I live in real world where smart contract means nothing, it only works in very small communities where everybody already know and trust each other
>"I don't think Craig's a bad guy, but he's harvesting $50M a year into his pockets and not improving the site. In ten years I think Craigslist will be an afterthought..."
If I were pocketing $50M per year for 10 years, I wouldn't give a damn if the site wasn't around at the end.
> I signed up for earn.com with the expectation that anyone wanting to message me would have to pay first. Then they sent me spam from ICOs without paying me. Worse than useless.
What lead you to expect that people would want to pay to email you? The business model makes no sense; it's obvious that that wasn't going to happen.
>These are people -- tricking them into helping to increase your websites monetization is just unethical and wrong.
This only persuades me that they're doing it. I don't believe backlashes are effective in this kind of scenario, as there's no power on the backlash side.
>This company never made sense to me from a “venture scale” perspective. It’s big, sure, but are the financials really ever going to be strong enough to go public? I guess I don’t see it.
It looks like the company's biggest creator brings roughly $5k a month for Patreon and only one other creator has their financials public and brings in even 40% of that [1]. There is certainly money to be made in that business, but I just don't see how they scale revenue in any large way without pissing off either patrons or creators.
>It is also the same mental frame every starving artist shares too. They are able to see the value in what they do despite not having a firm monetization strategy.
If you read the next sentence you can see I was gently incepting that along with the idea that successful people see value before they see the price they can attach to it. To even waste your time performing the economic calculation to determine the numbers you must first be motivated by something, there is a period of time however short between the idea and its technical analysis, the value you see and its monetization. Hey, that doesnt mean monetization isnt important, but it can be forestalled for important reasons like exploring the field or gaining experience, just as much as unimportant reasons, those, being subjective to the one paying the bills.
> realize you on the path to make $100K on an app that, rightly or wrongly, could impact other people's livelihoods
Because someone giving me 100k for an app which wrote, to use it for the exact purpose I made it for is certainly /the/ reason I would change my mind about making it...
> and subject me to a torrent of unpleasantness. But that’ll end soon enough, and that’s better than how I’d feel if I kept going.
What he doesn't say is that he is obviously already getting what amounts to a "torrent of unpleasantness", from people which are more like colleagues than customers. Of course, no one wants to admit to kowtowing, so there is no mention of it, but as we can see, he cares about this sort of thing, so it was obviously a significant factor.
> Considering that the site doesn't look like anything that's generating revenue, I don't understand why that person refused to sell...
Maybe because unlike you, he's not an unquestioning whore to the almighty dollar. (I expected a small bird-feeder business before I clicked, but the point remains.)
> I don’t feel like they meant to deceive me or squeeze money out of me.
From the article:
> They were so excited about the project and got carried away, but he was going to remove the hours they’d spent redesigning the blog.
The management directed the designers to do that work, to see if they could get away with charging for it. There is no doubt, that you were deceived to squeeze money out of you.
The only kickstarters I’ve seen that are to fund just a single thing (instead of individuals each getting a product) are for funding R&D or medical bills. I haven’t seen any of those reach $30M, nor have I seen any kickstarters that intend to have open governance. And I’m doubtful many kickstarters have been quite as social as today’s DAOs either.
> which will fail in one way or another.
It might fail. That’s fine (though I’d prefer it pass). The novelty and enjoyment of it has already been worth the $.
> you quite firmly believe the project itself has a future, just that nobody else is able to do so.
Looks like some unwarranted feeling of self-importance combined with the sunk cost fallacy.
You still have options: make it paid only, stop taking contributions at all, hire someone to sort it out or find a volunteer to do so. Or walk away and see how quickly Amazon will copycat you.
Or accept that that’s the cost of having your pride.
Otherwise it’s almost a textbook example of emotional blackmailing some parents are known for.
> What about Kickstarter? A $500 million+ company that takes a 5% vig on all transacted funds can effectively be replaced with a few lines of code.
No, it can't.
> If total ETH sent to contract address by date X > Amount Y then send the ETH to the fundraiser, else return the ETH.
Somehow missing the tracking of backers and rewards, the mutual identification of the parties, and the enforceable obligations with regard to rewards. Kinda key features of Kickstarter.
I don't expect him to manage it well. I'd have been happy if half of the promised work got delivered and the money was spend on hookers and blow. I know most of the fees for my portfolio are funding that type of thing already.
reply