Sure, but there’s a distinction between maintenance and profit.
If that requires a maximum ratio of active users to average donation, then it’s feasible, and has the potential to survive with a more invested userbase than a site that’s severely bloated with lurkers.
Yeah, the best social networks are designed to prioritize…socializing. It’s like building a public park and people start asking where the money comes from. The point is that it’s made for people to use.
When I was younger…well, there were only Palm Pilots back then, so it’s a bit unfair, but I’d prefer physical books, and if I were doing active reading then it’d usually be with a physical book.
Reading digital books now requires using a device that often has access to Youtube or something else that’s shorter and snappier and yet pulls hours upon hours out of my life.
And as I’ve gotten older…I haven’t read read a book in years. Is it a lack of attention span? Yes, which makes me feel sad and ashamed and so fucking frustrated because I could, I could read long books as a kid and now…I can’t.
It’s also that I have more to do: laundry, cleaning, work, cooking, errands, exercise… So there’s less time to sit down and read, or if I do, it feels increasingly hedonistic and therefore wrong to just do one thing at once. If I can multitask then shouldn’t I?
Audiobooks are both a godsend and a curse. I can actually consume books again! But I’m locked into the ease of it.
Actively choosing to doing just the one thing, for myself, is far harder than it ought to be.
I got to a really early point in Dune where a character was thinking about the various ways to be manipulative (not necessarily evil, just politicking) with their expressions and words and body language and I just got tired of it.
Also gave up on Wuthering Heights. Was it revolutionary in its day to draw back the gilded curtain and display naked domestic abuse for what it was? Sure. But…I don’t need that curtain drawn away, as I’ve seen far better depictions of DV, and, well, I go out in public, too. So it was just tedious bitching and being cruel to each other until I stopped reading.
Remember back in the old web when letting people know your real name was a horrifying breach of personal privacy? Heck, having the same username for multiple places gave me the hives, if it was unique enough.
We need to go back to those days; not just for safety reasons but because there’s a freedom to the individualized anonymity of being a (apparently) distinct user in each instance.
Ask the wrong person to share a whiskey with you and you might end up with two fingers.