Discuit now has a Patreon – and a note on monetization
Discuit will be a non-profit going forward
Hey, everyone! If you'd like to support the development of Discuit and contribute to hosting and other costs, we now have a Patreon page through which you can donate to this project. Any contributions would be highly appreciated.
Patreon link: www.patreon.com/discuit
All "Supporter" plus Patreon members will receive a "Supporter" badge on their profile. Thanks a lot in advance to all donors.
On monetization: Discuit will be a non-profit going forward
Back when I launched this site, I knew that the path that previous generations of social platforms took—being funded by venture capitalists who expect exponential growth and huge returns on their investments—is invariably going to lead to the same outcome, if any new platform tries the same approach, no matter how good the intentions of the founders are. This realization, as I explained in my first blog post, left me with the conclusion that, for a new social platform to not end up where Reddit and Twitter and Facebook are today, it has to be set up either as a private company (non-VC backed) or a non-profit. It was unclear at the time to me which was the better option for Discuit.
Having thought about this in depth, I made the decision a while ago that Discuit is going to be a non-profit, modeled after organizations like Wikipedia and Signal, funded entirely on user donations. This means, most importantly, that there won't ever be any ads on Discuit, nor any user data will ever be sold to any third-parties. Having no investors—nor any owners, for that matter—will ensure that with growth Discuit will not, in the end, turn out just like other platforms. We're already open-source, and I believe being also a non-profit would make this platform truly a community project.
(I'm looking into how to register Discuit as a 501(c) organization. Hopefully, the fact that I'm not based in the US wouldn't be a barrier. If any of you have any experience with the legal side of these things, I'd love to talk to you about it.)
Another important upside of not being a VC backed company is that there's no pressure to grow as fast as possible or else go bust. Discuit will be here, at this domain, as long as I'm alive (and hopefully even thereafter). And also, generally speaking, it seems to me that certain non-profits are more long-lasting than for-profit corporations. I'll bet that Wikipedia will still be here decades after Facebook is no more.
