Jimmy Wales Solicits Donations for His Ad-Free Social Network
"I need your help," reads an email that Jimmy Wales just sent to financial supporters of his ad-free social network, WikiTribune Social (which currently has 494,296 members):All the problems in the world that I've set out to try to solve with WikiTribune Social are as bad as ever... WikiTribune has a different model. A strange model, to be sure, but it's one that I believe in. We don't want our platform to grow by focussing on having as many pageviews as possible by maximizing addiction and outrage. We want to build something that people like you care enough about to support voluntarily, financially. It's a "pay if you want" model. I've joked many times - it may not be a great business model to give things away and hope people will voluntarily support them - but this is how I've built my career so far! We are severely short on funds There's no simple way to avoid saying it. I've chosen not to raise venture capital money because I want to maintain full creative control to build the vision that I have in mind. Over the past two years, I've been personally the major funder of the project - but it's straining my personal resources. Over the past several months, we've gone back to the codebase and completely re-architected it from scratch pulling from everything that we've learned so far. We've got a great small community and the new software will have new ways to support and reward people for making quality posts (instead of how all other social networks reward people for making viral addictive fluff). Finishing this redesign will have a huge impact. I'm excited about it! But to finish, I need your support. I have to pay for the development work to finish the new version of the site, and I need to do some PR and marketing to get the word out. I need to really start pushing this forward as a relaunch. If each of you can afford to give even a little, I think we have a real shot at making something revolutionary and new. We won't know unless we keep trying. This is our chance to break the back of toxic social media by offering a better alternative... so please donate today. Jimmy Wales
Read more of this story at Slashdot.