Comment by lobsterthief 10 hours ago
Yes, but you need a scalable and low-friction donation solution. Patreon is the closest but it doesn’t pay the bills for most creators. Maybe some micro-tipping solution, but nobody has made that work yet.
If someone puts a donate button beside their name or in the corner of their webpage, and that button leads to a payment page, I think that's good enough.
The point of paying creators is so that they can focus on creating content instead of making other things. Giving money to a creator is basically saying "you're so good at what you do, and it has so much cultural/intellectual value, I'd rather have you make content instead of stocking shelves or making food". But this should be reserved for people that publish good content because they can and are passionate about it, not just anyone putting out slop with the instrumental goal of paying their bills. If the friction of clicking a button and filling in payment details is enough to deter people from paying them, then maybe their content isn't worth paying for and they should find some other way to make a living instead.
No one has made a successful micro-tipping solution, because regulations and entrenched interests (banks, payment processors) have too much control and assess per-transaction fees that dwarf the amounts that such a system would be designed send.
Aggregation of tips and payouts would help, but that requires network effects (achievable only at scale) to be viable. I believe this approach has been tried in recent years, but I am not sure where those efforts went.