What have you done, exactly?

If by "I've put a lot of effort into getting donations", you mean that you've put a lot of effort into soliciting donations, it's quite predictable that that wouldn't work.

If by "I've put a lot of effort into getting donations", you mean that you've put a lot of effort into finding out the needs of your audience and producing content that meets those needs, it would be very surprising to me that this didn't get any response.

It's certainly important to make it easy for people to donate, but it's arguably more important to produce something people want to donate for. And, I don't want to underplay the fact that producing quality content is hard. But it's not impossible.

> In any case, it’s futile to argue with you. You have the luxury of judging from a distance what I’m constrained to describe from first hand experience.

Not the case--don't make assumptions about people you don't know. Perhaps you should read some of my comments where I gave numbers on what kinds of subscription numbers I was able to get when I was running a substack.

> In any case, why should anyone care about what you want? You get a free product and complain that it’s not free enough. The cheapest customers are truly the most demanding. It behoves any self-respecting person to ignore them.

1. I donate a significant amount to content producers, and pay for a few different subscriptions, as well as being willing to pay to purchase content. My point all along has been that people are willing to pay for and donate to the production of quality content. Maybe if you cared more about what content consumers thought, you'd get more of them to donate.

2. I don't think you can reasonably disagree that quality content is content that serves the content consumer. You want to produce quality content, right? If content consumers tell you what they want, it behooves you to listen.

3. If you're a sociopathic content producer, sure, you have no reason to care about people except as potential sources of income. But as a content consumer, and more importantly, as a decent human being, you probably do care about other people as more than just sources of income. You've said you could make more money on ads if you didn't have integrity, so you clearly have other motivations besides money. You probably aren't a sociopath. So if you set aside your emotions about this disagreement I think you probably do care about people even if they don't directly contribute to your bottom line.