wolftune

Price discrimination at all is not the same as individualized prices. And really the issue conflates two things: 1, privacy and surveillance pricing; 2, AI profit-maximizing.

Even if Netflix or others do price-discrimination, the AI-pricing issue would still be used to squeeze as much as possible from the poor. It's not like these blood-sucking capitalists who run these massive corporations are into helping the poor.

*It is easier to avoid temptation than to resist it.* - Dan Ariely

You are thinking of tip4commit. Gittip later became Gratipay and then closed (but the fork at Liberapay still exists). Gittip never collected contributions for people who didn't first sign up. Gittip/Gratipay did other reckless things, but that's a separate matter.

No easy answers. We're trying to address that at Snowdrift.coop but are ourselves struggling volunteers not getting fully launched still (but not giving up, still at it).

Most efforts do seem focused on corporate open-source. The under-funding of that stuff is indeed an issue. But it doesn't result in real public goods that treat the public well if it's all upstream stuff that only serves to make proprietary downstream end-user products.

> We've been around since 2014 (before Patreon!)

Patreon was announced in 2013 I think. But Snowdrift.coop still was started first, as the first rough prototype proposal was up online in early 2013 actually.

(This is a bit internal feedback, I'm the co-founder of Snowdrift.coop who was more involved at that early time)

If we didn't have our own issues with zero-funding and all-volunteer efforts, we'd have gotten Snowdrift.coop launched by now (we're still working on it, hope to show some real public updates soon). Our focus on 'crowdmatching' is aiming specifically to address this type of dilemma, and we'd be thrilled to see it work for Firefox. We just need to get the whole thing functioning (and proven with more likely first adopter projects, tweaking and solidifying the platform) before Firefox dies.

The basic point: we all (the users and general public) do need to be donating. But I do not donate myself to Firefox. After all, I'm underemployed, low-income, and volunteering thousands of hours for related software-freedom and anti-ad etc. efforts. For me to donate won't change the overall situation. We need a critical mass of donors, hundreds of thousands, millions of donors. We cannot get there by just asking each person to unilaterally sacrifice. I want to pledge to the world that I'm willing to be part of that critical mass. I'll donate more of what I can for each of you others who join me in such a pledge.

This is about the best we can do short of funding these sorts of public goods with taxes. As long as it's open to the public and not paywalled (and that's fundamentally important), we're stuck with the freerider dilemmas and need to resolve the challenges of collective-action and coordination.