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The more individual developer stories I look into on Sponsors or Patreon or wherever, the more I see a recurring pattern. The vast majority of developers don't
by kemitchell 6y ago
The more individual developer stories I look into on Sponsors or Patreon or wherever, the more I see a recurring pattern. The vast majority of developers don't make any significant money. The outliers that do use the platform as a general-purpose payment processor. They take donations, but they also sell things. The line between isn't terribly clear.
The platforms help style all the payments as "donations" or "sponsorships" or "patronage". That avoids harshing the project vibe with overtly commercial overtones that turn off the financially immature and preternaturally entitled. But in reality, they're often really payments for products, services, access, and so on. Some people do simply donate, usually small dollars, and don't receive or care about "perks". Others buy the perks on offer specifically, as a simple exchange. Somewhere in between, people and companies may be inspired by donation-like feelings, but use the benefits to get their payments approved and expensed.
It's hard to draw any broad conclusion from outliers. But it all points to there being strange value in muddying the concept of paying developers with a lot of ambiguity, on both the buy side and the sell side. It's like one of those statues that looks like one thing from one angle, and something completely different from another.
- hinkley 6y agoIn class and race struggles it's not uncommon to see someone worry aloud about token individuals who are "allowed" to succeed out of proportion to their peers. It gives the rabble hope, which keeps them sedate. But the success rate barely exceeds attrition at the top of the pyramid. I don't think I personally will ever know if this is just an accident of the system (being happily exploited), planned, or a little bit from column A and a little bit from column B. Enough notable success stories satisfies the Availability heuristic in your brain, but that often tricks you into thinking things are quite different than they actually are.
- kemitchell 6y agoI agree there's a lottery-like dynamic in open software funding. The winner-outliers are well known, broadly remarked, and frequently advertised. The long, long tail of financial busts gets downplayed, though we all know it's there. Same for startups, by the by. I don't think it's necessary to personalize the rules, odds, and constraints that reinforce these outcomes. We could find individuals who see how it works and like it. But I haven't seen evidence to show they add up to any kind of conscious conspiracy. I'm more concerned about the smaller players who aren't winning and haven't seen how the game is skewed.
- gbacon 6y agoWe see power-law distributions everywhere, notably the 80-20 Pareto rule. They are the rule with uniform distributions being the rare exceptions. The claim of a hidden puppeteer running this gigantic con that occasionally allows success and precisely mixes column A with column B such that the rabble attack one another only and never the mastermind pulling the strings is truly extraordinary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution