Thank you for this write up. As someone who has loved actually doing the mod, and using the machine afterword (hardware and espresso novice for the most part), I’ve felt like I am taking crazy pills following along as an open source maintainer in the past. The weaponizing of CC-NC is wild to me, though I think it might be coming a bit from the 3D printing STL sharing community.
It just all makes my heart hurt. It is a great accessible DIY project with amazing results, but just with insane baggage.
It’s been honestly pretty fun to run this at BackerKit. Sad to say it caught my COO, but actually more inspiring seeing my team banding together and fighting back and letting folks know in Slack. Also, a bonus, a really cool lean use of Drift which inspired us to use that tool better.
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BackerKit is the best way for crowdfunding creators to manage their backers, help fulfill their campaign on time, and allow them to focus on what they love doing—making something awesome! We've helped thousands of creators to raise over $115M, supporting them in everything from surveys to shipping.
To learn more about who we are, our engineering culture, and whether this is the right place for you, read our Key Values profile: https://www.keyvalues.com/backerkit
People putting themselves out there, even if it's not quite there, is still something worth encouraging IMHO.
It's hard to get a single person to care. The Creative Fund now is a group of folks want to see people take the leap and try and put new things into the world.
You would be surprised at some of the messages we get. Actually heartfelt responses of folks saying that getting this first pledge pushed them over the edge to push harder. I'm excited that if we get to a point where the funds might be even $5 or $20 per project, that CAN be a material difference to lots of cool projects. Projects don't need even $1000 goals to be compelling.
I'm sure that it's encouraging to people, but in the end it's very unlikely to change any outcomes. If the project is going to succeed, someone else would have made that first pledge, and the same effect would have happened. It feels impactful from your end because you're getting involved in so many projects (and getting a lot of thank-you messages), but if all the same projects succeed and fail you haven't actually affected anything.
It's probably also worth mentioning that small pledges (especially $1 ones) are the least efficient in terms of how much of the pledge is lost to fees. A $1 pledge on Kickstarter loses 15% to fees. This is made even worse by having the money come via Patreon, where a similar chunk is lost. So if someone pledges $1/month on Patreon to you, this will end up with a project creator only receiving about 70 cents of it.
I don't mean to be too cynical, it's a great thing to do. I just think it's worth considering if this is really the best approach, or if you could change your method a bit and make more of an impact with the effort and money you're devoting to it.
As we mention in the article, a lot of it IS about the token statement, and we have thousands of KS messages at least of grateful folks supporting. Do you value your $1 supporters on Patreon? Do they have a material benefit for you?
If we figured out how to make the fund work for Patreon, how would you feel?
I do value my $1 supporters on Patreon - emotionally because they chose to support my work in particular rather than the mindless shotgun approach, and financially because there are 46 of them.
If this project raises enough to give $46 to every project, they'll need $92,000 by their own reckoning and will still be giving little more than a vapid pittance to each. Can you really not think of something better to do with 92 grand?
Haha, thanks, I guess. If you actually use and apprecitate my work, then of course I appreciate your support, but otherwise I'd rather you kept the money.
It just all makes my heart hurt. It is a great accessible DIY project with amazing results, but just with insane baggage.