How do you feel when you see a donation link or "how you can help" page on the website of an individual artist, writer, etc.?

Please clarify. Is the “donation” to help an outside cause or to support the artist/writer etc?
Is the artist/writer a non-profit?
Where does the money go?

A link would be handy.

If it was to help a cause the individual is passionate about, I wouldn’t mind a ‘how you can help’ link.

Does not bother me, perhaps someone would actually want to help this individual for whatever reason. Supporting artists is not a bad thing.

Doesn’t bother me, but at the same time I don’t donate to people I don’t know for individual the benefit of that one individual.

Ah, thanks for the clarify request. I mean when the person says something like “here is a way you can donate to support my work” or “if you liked this article, consider donating HERE”

The donation link on Octo mom’s website made me want to barf and wonder who in the world clicks that thing.

I don’t mind it for charities, but donating to support an individual, especially an individual who has things for sale, bugs me. If I wanted to support that person enough, wouldn’t I just buy something?

A lot of artists and writers don’t sell work per say, they may only take donations; in that case it makes sense to have a link incase someone feels inclined to help. If they are selling things, as @likerader said, that would certainly be different.

I have donated to software projects before. I sent the guy who wrote this 20 bucks a few months ago because I have used his work in a few projects.

I say ore power to them. If it works cool.

I would like to donate but I wouldn’t because you never know if these websites or links are legit or what that person might use your money for because they could say that they need the money to use it for their career but they could use it for something else instead.

I don’t think a second thing about it. It is very typical and a great idea.
In fact I often wonder if I could somehow help.

“Help”? Why? Unless they were doing things that really couldn’t be funded any other way, like earth art or poetry?