MISSION
DonateOpen is more than a tipping platform. Here, donations are more than money — they are signals of quality. These signals power our honest, quality-driven ranking system, creating an Engine of Quality and activating people to donate.
A rise in donations = a rise of quality and creators’ well-being.
DO’S DUAL MISSION:
To heal the information environment: to identify and label quality, making it easier for people to separate it from “noise and clickbait” and consciously choose what is worth their time and money.
To make it so that a hundredfold more donations are made in the world, and so that creators can earn from their content without hitting the ceiling of advertising monetization.
Mission in detail
DonateOpen is more than a donation service. People donate to what they truly enjoyed, to what surpassed their expectations. This first-hand experience captured by donations holds immense value, yet it currently dissipates without benefit. By rectifying this fundamental oversight of the information society, we translate donation data into publicly accessible markers of quality.
So, we unlock the informational potential of money, adapting it to reward quality, improve content navigation, and foster an economy of reciprocity — which holds the future, yet currently lacks reciprocity itself, meaning a modern system of direct and feedback loops between people.
Other goals
- To solve the problem of noise and “adverse selection” in information markets by building an independent, honest, transparent, crowdsourced evaluation system based on donations.
- To counter the situation where low-grade content pushes quality content from the showcases of attention.
- To offer content navigation tools.
- To cultivate direct (non-advertising) monetization of quality, free from the dictates of algorithms.
- To ensure the matching of authors with their audience.
WHY AND FOR WHAT?
The “pains” of the information society:
The internet is cluttered with content, obstructing access to quality products
There is little money in the user-facing internet. (It’s commonly believed that there’s a lot of money in the B2C internet. This is an illusion; it’s only 2-3% of the world’s GDP. Compare this percentage with the time spent on networks and its value, and you’ll be struck by the imbalance. Today’s revenues support less than 1% of the workforce, while tens of millions who join the content sphere annually will be left out of the advertising pie. They need several times more income — and it will come from donations.)
DONATEOPEN CURES BOTH “PAINS” WITH A SINGLE SOLUTION: PUBLIC DONATIONS
Donations are both money and signals of quality — two sides of the same coin. Therefore:
More donations
Higher earnings for content producers (non-advertising monetization)
More donations
Higher discoverability of first-class content, better content navigation
WHOSE “PAINS” ARE WE SOLVING?
The pain of creators: “discoverability”. It’s hard for authors to break through to an audience, the showcases of attention are barricaded by low-quality content.
The pain of users: It’s hard to understand what’s hidden behind the myriad of labels and tags, who is “broadcasting truths”, what their reputation is, and whether they are worth listening to.
There are thousands of videos on the internet about how to sleep properly, how to avoid aging, how often to move your ears, learn Italian in 3 days, or get a million followers...
A person who reads cannot find what to read and stops reading. How do you choose an educational course when Coursera alone has over 15,000? For example, in neuroscience, over half a million articles are published annually, three-quarters of which are a parody of science.
“WHAT IS SAID?” AND “WHO IS SPEAKING?”
Two pressing questions of our time
The pain of creators: no option to donate “to whomever you want, for whatever you want”. (Today, less than 1% of active authors are present on donation services like Patreon.)
The pains of the information society: information noise, outdated navigation, post-truth, a race to the bottom in the quality of texts (truths, ideas, doctrines...), and many other “joys” of information superconductivity.
Paradoxically, the information society has a poor grasp of the value of informational goods and fails to realize how much this hinders living and developing.
Content prices are all cookie-cutter. Take books, movies, music, or blogs — prices don’t depend on or reflect quality. They are uninformative. The same goes for information sources — their reliability is unclear. The same for content producers — their income speaks to popularity, not reputation. It’s unclear who to trust and how much. Because of this, excessive resources are spent choosing what to read, listen to, watch, and whose advice and services to use.
RATINGS AND RECOMMENDATIONS ARE THE TWO SUPPORTING “WINGS” OF CONTENT NAVIGATION
Ratings identify hierarchies of quality; recommendations show what is right for a specific person.
How it works