Could we pay for the upkeep here?

Non members have advertising. They pay for our upkeep. I don’t know how much we make on ads. I hope it is self sustaing.

No idea, but I would be willing to donate for upkeep, and furher maintenance. I’d love to see the site improved on, and features added/fixed/wtv.
If it was possible for Fluther to be bumped up from ’‘waiting to die’’ status by just one notch, I’d do my part.

^Me too.

Me too.

I suggest a “donate” button for Fluther, like many other site. Yeah, I know nothing can be changed, but that’s just something I want to see.

It depends on how many ‘zeros’ the servers fees have.
More than 3, I’d say no.
(10,000+)

I like the idea of a ‘donate’ button as long as the funds are used to improve the site too. If people started donating, there would need to be some public reporting of profit/loss and that might not appeal to the founders.

I’d donate too.

I never see ads. Maybe I should sign in anonymously and click a few.

The adds are always at the bottom of the screen if you come to the site on a phone without logging in. Better than half of them are for uber. Judging from the frequency and variety, I suspect deficiencies here are not the result of insufficient revenues. I may be wrong.

@stanleybmanly I’ve seen the same phenomenon on many sites I’ve used ranging from Drawception to StumbleUpon where the developer(s) will sink a lot of work into a site at the beginning and, if it doesn’t go viral and make millions of dollars and attract venture capitalists with bulging moneybags, the site becomes moribund as the dev(s) leave in search of their next get-rich-or-die-trying project. The old projects just kind of sit around, slowly dying, like Fluther.

Oh shit, I remember StumbleUpon lol.

So fluther was envisioned as a get rich quick scheme. I’m shattered. Another illusion crushed along the highway of cynicism. Why not? It’s never too early to stifle idealism.

@Symbeline I still use it. I’ve been there for a decade, and use it mostly to send news articles to friends. SU has a sordid history. It got sold for outrageous amounts of money to PayPal, who fiddled around with everything, trying to make it go viral. When they couldn’t, they shrugged their shoulders and sold it on to a pack of sleazy venture capitalists who took a hatchet to the site. They stripped off everything they could (like the blogging feature), effectively killing the community which had formed over a period of years. When they couldn’t turn SU into the next Facebook, they stuck it on the back burner and said “fuck it.”

@stanleybmanly I hope you’re being facaetious. No one should really be that naive.

@SmashTheState Oh jeez that doesn’t look like what I remember. I liked it back in the day. I found Draw My Thing on there, which I spent hours on. But there always was someone drawing dicks every three games lol.

Facetious it is. Being shattered by discoveries about fluther is beyond naive. It would be “Palinesque”.

If this site is remotely close with it’s stats on Fluther….Fluther is indeed a sinking ship. When I first logged on the the link it had stats from 2014 and said Fluther had a traffic value of over $40,000 and generated $1,600.00 a month in ad traffic revenue. I can’t imagine it costs that much a month to host this site so I am guessing they had some profits last year. This years stats though show traffic and revenue is down almost 50%.

What is most troubling is 2014 stats showed 4.44% in negative growth and 2015 now has the trend of 84.01% Negative Growth!

My suggestion is everyone get email addresses of the Jellies you want to stay in touch with if or when they pull the plug.

Well, there’s always competition to be “last rat off the ship”. Some of us are sure to chase after the “honor”.

How many of us do you suppose are shut-ins, sitting in prisons, agoraphobic, etc.

I wonder to this day what befell Askville?

What do you mean about Askville, @stanleybmanly. A bunch of in-house ass-wipes were charged with making it self-sustaining and failed. Intentionally, perhaps. They were a grumpy lot from the outset.

Well I was wondering if perhaps the base of participants fell below a level enabling the site to generate revenue from ads. It was a very curious and abrupt death.

I remember the in-house developers had a hard target to make the site wholly owned and operated, and they failed. There was something about having to pay a substantial yearly fee to another company. They kept dumbing the site down because they were writing half-assed replacements for the proprietary features. I’m not sure there was even one working on it full time.
You could use the Wayback machine from another question on Fluther. It would just make me sad.

@ibstubro You could use the Wayback machine from another question on Fluther. It would just make me sad. Could you expound on your comment to provide context or plead the 5th!

I cannot, @Cruiser.
I overestimated your tool.
No need for the 5th, I thought you’d given us insight into the internet past, and I thought that was cool. Not cool enough to try it out.
Ho meets hum?

I was trying to provide @stanleybmanly with a bit of solace.

Me…three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten…eleven!

I heard (read) the drop was caused by Google’s delisting. Few people were not drawn to the site.
And then there’s FB.

There are some really smart people around here and I’d hate to lose the ability to ask a question periodically.

And there are no other good Q&A sites to escape to if Fluther dies. None that I know of, anyway.

The ads are dependably at the base of the screen in the event that you go to the site on a telephone without signing in. Superior to anything half of them are for uber. According to the recurrence and assortment, I think inadequacies here are not the aftereffect of inadequate incomes. I may not be right.