Also 100% agree with that!!!! I also think we need to be slow to put our hands in our pockets….we don’t HAVE to financially support anyone. We can if we want, but we don’t have to. I’ve seen so many comments about people wanting to “move their financial support to xxx person”…..why?
When it comes to getting a message out, the internet is the ultimate in "cheap", you can actually do most things pretty much for free.
What changes is when you want to make money. There can be legitimate reasons for this, maybe you have incurred some costs travelling to do research (but again, most things are online now, so why?) or to interview people (ever heard of video conferencing?). Pretty much anything you can think of can be done remotely online at zero cost.
The reason for travelling usually comes down to promotion. Same with someone doing a book tour - they want to shake some hands and build up some 'aura' to gain more followers. Why? To sell more product.
This is where things can easily change. Because even if all you are doing is putting a Google Adsense ad on your website, you are making a choice. You are inconveniencing someone and providing a worse user experience intentionally to make money.
I made that choice. You will see the ads at the top and side of this site. At one time I was spending several hundred dollars a month for database and web hosting and even if you're on a decent salary, it can be a drag on your finances. Thanks to technology innovation (the cloud) and competition, and some refactoring, it now costs less than $100 per month and if I spend some time on development I can drive the cost down further still. The fact that there are only 2 ad-slots instead of the 3 permitted is because the 2 work to cover the costs and maybe at some point only 1 would be needed. I think I had a PayPal donate button for a short period too, but I always felt a little uneasy when someone donated and worried what would happen if I thought I needed to moderate something that person subsequently posted.
The point of that is to demonstrate that even with the best of intentions, you almost certainly will be making tradeoffs between what is best for your users and what is best for the revenue. Hopefully it's not too bad of a tradeoff even though in an ideal world any ads are really "too many".
But further along the spectrum you get to the point where what you publish makes a difference. i.e. you can easily have to chose between what's true and factual ... and what is popular and sells. The minute you start making decisions based on what $$$ it will generate, I think that starts dictating all your behavior from then on.
No longer is the monetization there to cover the costs of creating content, but the content is there to support the monetization efforts. It's flipped. The more money, the more compromised the decision making becomes, to the extreme that if you are 100% dependent on the income as your sole means of living ... you have pretty much guaranteed that you will always be making decisions based on generating the most revenue. It's inevitable human nature. At that point you're running a business.
It doesn't mean you're corrupt and that people shouldn't be able to support your endeavours if they want, but IMO it takes someone with strong ethics and morals to not be compromised by the setup. Because it's a business, anyone else doing the same thing is now competition, taking away views that could be yours (in a business where views = $$$) so now you have an incentive to try to out-compete them, either fairly by creating good content, or unfairly by bad-mouthing them and driving them out of business (which is actually easier when they are not in it for the $$$, because it is all just unnecessary aggravation for them - pain with no benefit).
Think about why you are being asked for money. Do you really need to fund someone's trip for a meetup? Why aren't they paying for it themselves, given that the benefit is to them, for self-promotion, to meet their followers? Likewise for the time they spend - they chose to spend time on their project instead of with their family, how does sending them money alter that? All it really does is encourage them to spend even less time with their family doesn't it?
As Andrew Gold mentioned on his video, it's better to not have all your eggs in one basket, instead of depending too much on one community, belong to many. That way if one ends up becoming a disappointment, well, you are not so impacted. Same with content creators - if you do want to support people, give less but to more people. Don't give huge amounts to one, and put them on a pedestal because you risk two things: first, you may be hurt if you discover that they are not "all that" and were using your monetary donations for unsavoury things, and second, you may compromise your own morals by feeling you have to ignore what they have done and keep supporting them (something many JWs do when they find out about WT wrongdoing).
So think twice before sending $$$. It can be a really nice thing to do to support someone, but maybe think of it more as a tip than a fee - beware if they are claiming they have costs (for what, exactly, you don't have to upgrade their equipment to hear the message) or need you to pay for their time (why, you didn't hire them?). Your contribution could inadvertently make things worse.
