lori

It is my personal belief that if you run a big public website for tens of thousands of active users, you do in fact have some obligations towards them and their data and being fully transparent about your situation since your livelihood directly correlates to the safety and longevity of their accounts and data. And it is perfectly okay for users to talk about the actual situation of the website and how that may be a risk to people looking to really get stuck in on this website. And it is perfectly okay for people to want the transparency you promised them financially, nobody forced you to commit to monthly financial updates but that's what you said you'd do and yet they basically don't exist most of the time. It has been 19 months since they said they would do monthly updates and by my count there have been 9 monthly updates (the November one included fairly incomplete data for October, I was tempted to call that 0.5 but let's round up) and the H1 update that was extremely condensed info for 6 months. So even if we count those as full months, it's 15 months of updates out of 19. And that's data that has largely been extremely variable and inconsistent. You can't really chart it or glean anything from it long term. They've changed the time periods they calculate things for at different times, they've changed when they combine different bits of info or separate it, some of the updates (especially the H1 update that comprises 6 out of the 15 months of updates) are just broad overviews of their own interpretations of the data. It really reminds me of this Defector piece about Autostraddle (https://defector.com/autostraddle-is-spiraling-toward-a-shutdown-or-a-sale), and how their financial updates rarely actually gave insight into the reality of their financial situation. But I think this stuff really does matter, and I don't think insisting everyone shut up about it actually helps anyone. A positive attitude doesn't erase debt. Writing people talking about the financial state off as haters doesn't erase debt. Fuck, even if they (we, I,) are haters, it still doesn't change the financial situation on the website.

do they intend to compete with kofi? (this is genuinely unclear to me. I think it's somewhat reasonable that the rest of the post+comment would follow from this competition)

I still worry about this site heading the way of vidme in that I wake up one day with no access to my content and the site’s just abruptly closed without saying goodbye and the weird gaps in features getting added, the very hostile culture towards freelancers/brands here, and the lack of consistent transparency on financials do contribute more to that worry for me.

Like I dunno I’d love if they were bluntly honest more often and had a feature roadmap and doing that sort of communication rather than “OWO LOOK WE OPENED ORDERS FOR A PLUSH OF A MS PAINT BUG”. I got a physical postcard from Vidme once and they seemed transparent ar first! Still didn’t stop them from shutting down the website months later and causing a lost media frenzy though