The Rise and Rise of Online Donation-Nagging

"The big donations are not really donations. They're deals. And the small donors are just the mugs who pay to be trampled on by the big donors."

Above the fold on the EDRi (digital rights group) homepage. But it's really about activism, not the money, you understand.

As we head towards a world in which every other Twitter feed harbours a link to GoFundMe or similar, there's an uncomfortable sense that charityhas slowly been hijacked by the rising class of the “champagne victim” or "grassroots activist". The “champagne victim” being a well-off individual or business, using emotional pressure and guilt-building tactics to source charitable donations on their own behalf.  The "grassroots activist" being a self-styled champion of human rights, whose real concern for the common people persistently hovers around the nil mark.

It's certainly true to say that in some areas, the sob story has begun to replace the transaction as the go-to means of making money online. And in terms of personal economy, why wouldn't it? I mean, why complete ten online surveys for £8, or write a thousand-word blog post for £20, when you can just slap down your victim card and have some charitable soul give you an unconditional £50? And then another. And then another.

Times have changed. We're now used to reaching the bottom of a lazy, half-soaked blog article, only to be told we should be paying for the four minutes we've just wasted reading other people's random, speculative quotes from Twitter. Four minutes we will never get back.

What so many of us don't realise, is that the people tapping us up for these donations are so often getting paid anyway. Some of them have strings of major corporate sponsors. Some of them receive very hefty grants. They may sell their best content from behind a paywall. Why pay them for the clickbait they know no one will buy?…

Attention-Span Zero - Lower Than Nil: The Future Value of Social Media

"Mainstream social media needs to realise that the current deal, in which we exchange our entire personal dossier for an opportunity to be hidden out of sight whilst we're force-fed with editorially-sanctioned news, is wearing very, very thin."

Photo by Ochir-Erdene Oyunmedeg on Unsplash (image modified).

I looked at his Twitter profile, and realised I couldn't actually see any of his content at all. I could see Promoted Tweets, a “Who To Follow” block, a “Topics to Follow” block, Retweets… If I'd scrolled down a little further I could probably, in fairness, have found a Tweet of his own. But the reality is that Twitter profile pages are now such a chaotic daub of digital migraine, that there's just too great a disincentive to bother.

Yes, what little chance the average person ever had of being visible in such an overcrowded environment, has steadily been eroded to a new, subterranean low. Eroded, in fact, to the point where even when we make a deliberate effort to notice them, ordinary people are swamped out of sight by what the platform wants us to look at instead.

Let's dispense with the illusion. Twitter is no longer a social network. It's slowly transformed into an editorially-curated news portal, increasingly dominated by large publishers rather than peer to peer chat. And the content management dynamics have evolved towards those of a news blog, where non-publishers are relegated to low-visibility “comment threads”, and do not define the topics. Indeed, even the commenting system is steadily being closed off, as Twitter opts both to hide Replies at whim, and give publishers a means to block Replies outright.