> Perhaps you will always find people willing to write interesting content about vintage computers, but you won't find many people who want to write about the intricacies of local bureaucracy, the tax system, and other boring-but-necessary topics.

> Donations just don't work, and people should stop pretending they do.

ProPublica and Mother Jones are doing just fine on donations.

But more to the point, these are absolutely not topics we want advertisers to have control over. I'll admit that donations leave many important forms of content underfunded, but the alternative you're proposing is a well-funded fox in charge of the henhouse.

> I make literally 100 times more from affiliate marketing than I do from donations. If I had no integrity, that multiple would be even bigger.

You might have integrity but you're a stopped clock: even when it's right it's never useful. The only means your customers without expert knowledge have of distinguishing your motivations is by looking at your funding, and as long as you accept incentives to lie, you can't be trusted.

> Let me put this another way: the bare minimum level of affiliate marketing covers all my expenses. Donations don't ever buy groceries. I could not put this much effort into my work if I had to get another job to put food on the table.

That's not evidence that donations don't work. That's just evidence you've built your business around advertising and not donations.

I think donations would work, if there was not all the spam content to sift through. Imagine if all that spam was not financed or pushed by ads and marketting, how many more users would feel the need to find good content, rather than sheeply accepting whatever is pushed into their faces. If there simply was not so much of artificially pushed meaningless or generic content, then their need would move to other content. If that need was not fulfilled, then the demand would outweigh the offer and more than enough money would be available for donations.

Perhaps an example, not sure if that one works well: I have my personal music collection. I choose music to listen to based on mood. I do not own a spotify account and I do not want to own one. I go out to my music collection and choose music for myself or I go online and search for more music of some genre or fitting my mood. I actively seek that out. On spotify people let stations play some music, based on algorithms. The content is pushed into their faces (ears). If there was not so much of music "to fill the gaps", then more people would go on an active search, instead of relying on it being pushed to them. They would maybe discover some music from some composer and seek out their website, shop, bandcamp, whatever, and buy their music there. I have done so at least and found great music this way. Basically cutting out the content pusher middleman, that has nothing to do with the actual creation of content, but merely acts as a publisher. More people being actively seeking content themselves, less people relying on publishers.

I guess it is a continuous fight of donation financed content creators against the generic artificially marketted stuff, that is financed in different ways. We can however see, that there are content creators out there, who do make due on donation basis. Personally, I hope that we will see more of that and less affiliate marketting pushed stuff.