An advertisement or billboard is not the same as controlling the content visibility of the forum via financial means. You can call it a "donation" but it's actually more like a payment for visibility. Again, it just gets into a pissing match of who has more money to blow and won't actually improve the quality of the CONTENT which I think is what you're glossing over. Great content can only come from those who have deep experience. Say we had thousands of newbies on here just blasting out comments and interacting but it was all trash information... Is that better? I don't think so at all.
thousands and thousands of newbies on facebook, instagram and youtube click "thumbs up" to determine content visibility. the other day my friend showed me a video on facebook of a tree with purple fruit growing directly on the trunk. at 1st glance i thought it was jabuticaba, but on closer inspection i realized that the fruits were mangosteens. i second guessed myself and had to google whether mangosteen was actually cauliflorous.
is there no other way the world may live?
actually there is. when a high quality flower patch is discovered by a foraging bee she flies back to the hive in order to recruit other bees. the way she signals her valuable discovery is by dancing intensely. her willingness to sacrifice so many of her precious calories proves that her discovery is worthy of the other bees' attention.
more than 20 years ago i was treking through the panamanian jungle with a buddy. we decided to take a quick water break. all of a sudden he started dancing crazy. unfortunately it wasn't because he spotted a garcinia tree loaded with fruit. it was because he was standing on a nest of bullet ants.
for this forum, crazy dancing isn't really the best way to direct each other's attention. neither is democracy because we risk being flooded with stupid content. therefore, donations. we will all have the opportunity to sacrifice our precious dollars to direct each other's attention to the most valuable fruit topics.
Good lord, I've never seen someone so obsessed with money as a medium for making choices in life.
it's certainly possible that i'm overestimating the usefulness of money as a means of communication. the proof is in the pudding.
Voting should be free, fair, easy to access and unbiased. Making it pay for play does NOT improve the quality of your choice!
how many of the
olympic fruits have you not tried? i haven't tried 3... abiu, star apple, cacao. so perhaps my input was 10% ignorant. how does my ignorance percentage compare to the forum average? how does my ignorance percentage compare to the national average?
with democracy, the more participants, the dumber the results. with donations it's the opposite.
Re: earmarking donations to an actual place like Huntington: they are doing physical things (costs money to maintain or build), they have physical space (costs money to keep), and a broad spectrum of offerings which you may or may not be into (costs money to develop). A forum is not the same thing where its purpose is to facilitate discussion and storage of information, not actually be built brick by brick, plant by plant, or so on. While forums do cost money, and I think the devs and mods should earn some token amount of money to do the valuable work they are doing, I don't think the quality of this site would improve with tens of thousands of dollars (no offence mods!). The quality is in the people and the experiences they've had, and the information they hold.
whether we're talking about the huntington, a beehive or this forum, what matters is how beneficially we direct each other's attention.
one time i visited the garden of loran whitelock. it was quite incredible with lots of cycads of course, staghorn ferns and orchids. but i don't remember seeing any fruit trees. he donated his cycad collection to the huntington.
why didn't loran have any fruit trees? maybe he didn't like fruit? or perhaps nobody pointed him in the right direction?
my plant friend mimi is an elementary school teacher. with the help of her students she's been turning her school into a botanical garden.
a few years ago i donated a couple of my lemon guava volunteers and the kids have been enjoying the fruit.
x = donating guavas to a school
y = earmarking a donation to guavas
i'm sure you're fine with x, but you don't seem fine with y. but in both cases personal sacrifice is used to direct attention to guavas... in order to save the little lorans of the world from the clutches of evil cycads.