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made the mistake of looking at the meta and now the mistake of adding to the feedback loop.

This website is not my friend it's a place to hang out with friends. I really like it here so I'll continue to do that for however long it lasts and it's fun. If it goes away I'll hang out with friends elsewhere. I'll miss some people and I'll make some new friends. A site going away will not turn me into a refugee. Have some perspective.

Staff's salaries, which are not particularly high for tech salaries in the places where they live are not the difference between this site being sustainable or not and I assure you the people making those salaries have more on the line than you do about whether the site succeeds. I like this site a lot but I am more interested in staff being paid fairly and making enough to be comfortable than I am the site surviving. I don't want to hang out on a site where people work long hours for no money out of some mysterious belief that a website is more important than them

I heard some grumbling about @Staff salaries in the context of cohost's financials.

According to the most recent released figures, each member of staff is paid US$94,616 per year.

As of today that's equivalent to £74,319.38.

On that salary, I could buy a three bedroom house in the town where I live and be mortgage free in three years.

(This isn't a podunk middle of nowhere town, either, it's a town with a booming population and lots of housing being built constantly. We're an hour from two major cities and two international airports.)

Or I could take a single year's salary, and buy a brand new Ford Mustang GT, Dark Horse trim, and a year's fully comp insurance as a new driver. Full retail, no haggling with the dealer, paid in cash.

Or, since I don't drive, I could just buy groceries for myself for fifty one years.

That's how much money they pay themselves.

I could be very heavily critical of the site's dependence on taking out more and more loans while paying themselves stratospheric salaries and being reluctant to implement any way of getting actual revenue. But I won't, because foolish people dig themselves into holes they can't get out of every day. It's not interesting, and nothing I could say would be of any benefit.

And also that's not actually the issue. I don't care.

What I care about is that cohost plus exists, and that it functions as nothing more than a method for users to donate money.

What I care about is that Cohost's userbase seems very poor. We're all intensely queer, most of us are living on the fringes. We've either got terrible low paying jobs or no job and sometimes no job for years. Every day, we pass the hat around because one (usually several) of us are financially fucked and are either an inch away from losing a roof over our head or already have.

With that in mind, is it at all ethical for cohost plus to exist? It's very poor people giving alms to the rich.

COMMENTS LOCKED DUE TO ILLITERACY EPIDEMIC - EXPLANATION BELOW

I do not give a shit how much Cohost staff earn in itself. It could be $200 million dollars a minute, more power to them.

My issue is that, while paying themselves very handsomely, they are effectively accepting donations from a userbase that largely won't ever earn anything like what cohost staff do.

I think that is a fucked up relationship. Charity is not supposed to flow from the worse off to the better off.

They need to actually offer something in exchange for money.

Starting to get Blaseball vibes on here now where the sheer act of talking to people you know about literally anything you read on this site is treated as stalking or sinister, I remember Blaseball people who would act like you're spying for another team if you just...ever spoken to people on other teams. Y'all can't tell me you don't talk to people in your discords or group chats or whatever about posts on social media or go "look at what this person said" ever, I'm losing my mind at people acting like doing that is kiwifarms now. That's regular ass socializing. That's passing someone a note in class that says "did you hear what Jennifer said to Darren yesterday???"