All these cases sound like instances where somebody is creating (what they think is) value for someone else, so it seems fair to ask for donations.
At the end of the day when work is being done somebody always pays. Sure, sometimes it's the creator who's giving work away for free, but we should not require that of people.
You might not think somebody's contributions are valuable, fair enough, I'll probably agree in the case of anything short enough to fit inside a tweet, but because it's a donation, you can actually make that decision for yourself, contrary to your data being sold by some website you visited that turned out to be useless.
Donations are a very transparent business model that aligns monetary incentive with buyer satisfaction, what's not to like?
Of course the story changes if we're talking about UX rather than ethics :-)
All these cases sound like instances where somebody is creating (what they think is) value for someone else, so it seems fair to ask for donations.
At the end of the day when work is being done somebody always pays. Sure, sometimes it's the creator who's giving work away for free, but we should not require that of people.
You might not think somebody's contributions are valuable, fair enough, I'll probably agree in the case of anything short enough to fit inside a tweet, but because it's a donation, you can actually make that decision for yourself, contrary to your data being sold by some website you visited that turned out to be useless.
Donations are a very transparent business model that aligns monetary incentive with buyer satisfaction, what's not to like?
Of course the story changes if we're talking about UX rather than ethics :-)
IU agree, whenever you feel you're providing value, you should feel free to add a donation link, but I've seen some blowback against people doing it.
I'd love to hear your views on the UX side of things.
Well I'm no UX-er, far from it, so my opinion in this respect is purely personal.
I'd say donation requests draw the attention away from the main 'content'. This makes it 'harder' to consume the content, thereby devaluating it.