Writing

I’m Not Ashamed to Beg For Kofi Money

It’s not about the money, honey

Some people have chastised those of us who include Kofi links or the new sign-up referral links. They have called it undignified, coarse, even shameful.

Those judgmental folks have been shamed themselves by people who are clinging to the edge, struggling to survive, people who truly need any money they can scrape from their cruel reality.

And then we have people like me, people quite comfortably living in a wealthy country in our own homes, driving new cars, with good piles of savings, stocks, and more. People seemingly without a care in the world who put those bits of beggary at the end of their posts.

What’s up with that?

It’s not about money

This is funny: I’ve given out a hundred times more Kofi money than I’ve taken in.

It’s not about money at all. I don’t need this money, not any of it. I make more money from stock dividends than I will ever make from Kofi or sign-up referrals and those dividends aren’t even enough to pay for our groceries. This begging money is truly unimportant to my finances.

Keeping score

Contributions, monthly payouts from writing, referrals, and stats are all about keeping score, all about metrics I can see.

Stats are poor everywhere I have written. Nobody gave me raw web logs to analyze; the only place I could get that was at my own site. I can see how many people read a story, I can see how many stories were read, but I don’t know whether X number of stories were read by one person or X people. Unless people leave a comment, I know very little, and comments are a small percentage of reads.

Claps, Views, Reads, and Follows

Claps don’t say much. Some people clap 50 times, some once, some a few. It’s a score, but it’s meaningless.

Views mean nothing at all.

Read time doesn’t keep score because people read at different speeds.

Follows are meaningless because most of them are just hoping for a follow back.