
Ask HN: How can a hobby CS/tech writer accept donations? - kqr
I occassionally write about the things I learn and publish this on my web page. A large portion of why is because I want to remember later, but on top of that I spend a  nontrivial amount of time cleaning it up, formatting it and making it generally palatable. I do this because I believe everyone should have access to as much knowledge as possible.<p>However, as I get ever busier, I can no longer justify spending as much time editing content for publishing. It feels sad that I have this huge pile of notes and no means to publish them.<p>A fraction of my content is relatively popular, and while I have thought about trying advertising to fund my editing, there are two reasons I have ultimately decided against it: a) I want to keep providing &#x2F;distraction-free&#x2F; content, and b) I want to openly support readers who choose to block tracking cookies etc, and afaik no ad network wants that.<p>So someone suggested I provide an easy way to donate. What are my options here? I only know of<p>- Paypal
- Patreon
- Bitcoin address (? is this even an option?)
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dfraser992
I would go with Stripe over Paypal. Paypal is just too problematic in many
respects. They have perhaps improved their behavior over the years, but I
always try to discourage people from using Paypal because... well, after all
the e-commerce work I've done, I just don't like Paypal as a company. Strictly
my opinion, based on my experiences and reading about others' hassles.

There are lots of e-commerce related companies you could use beside
Stripe/Paypal, but they are the big ones in terms of global reach, I think.
They key thing for you is to make donating easy as possible, so said donator
does not reconsider their impulse to donate in the midst of the process.
Assuming you know how to program, Stripe is dead easy to set up (Paypal is a
headache).

Patreon and Bitcoin/alt-coins are solutions as well - no reason to limit
yourself to only one thing. The recent kerfuffle over Patreon changing the way
they deal with patrons and 'artists' is something you should look into.

Another possibility is, if you can spin what you do somehow in the right way,
the outfits that support donating to charitable orgs and such might provide
some functionality you find useful. There is a lot of them and they'd take a
cut, but then you don't have to do much like set up your own e-commerce
infrastructure.

And Brave (a new browser) is doing something with micropayments, but I do not
know what the status of that is.

