@evan I gave a silly answer, and then saw the results with the vast majority not giving the silly answer.

@evan

"I'm not paid in the sense of money transfer, but I have a lot of indirect transversal advantages which can't be monetized".

@evan why, are you offering?

@rubinjoni what's the silly answer?

@lucas I guess if you got a job at Open Earth Foundation or Social Web Foundation part of your job would be posting on the Fediverse, but we are not hiring right now.

@evan Is that a trick question?

@pauamma

I guess if you were secretly getting paid to post on the Fediverse and you didn't want anyone to know, it would be a clever trick? Otherwise, no, not a trick question.

@evan I keep hoping George Soros will discover my insightful comments here, and will offer to start paying me. So far, he's stayed silent.

Hey, everyone. Thanks for the replies. I originally had posted a jokey poll about the Chorus group, which paid some online influencers to post without disclosure:

https://www.wired.com/story/dark-money-group-secret-funding-democrat-influencers/

Then I realized that I post in my work capacity both at the Open Earth Foundation and at the Social Web Foundation. So, I'm kind of getting paid to post.

I thought it might be interesting to see which other people are using the Fediverse as part of a creator job, or posting about their work to raise funds, or doing posting for work like me, or getting paid directly for making content.

Anyway, I'm Yes, But. Yes, but that's only part of what I post.

It's interesting to see how few people responded yes. I wonder how many people whose jobs bring them to the Fediverse said No.

Anyway, thanks all for the responses.

This poll also reminded me of a service from the early 2010s called SponsoredTweets.com. You could log in with your Twitter account (X used to be called Twitter) and it would offer you sponsored messages you could tweet out or retweet and get some money. I think when I used it I made like $0.50 per Tweet.

When Twitter decided on an advertising business model, they changed their developer TOS to disallow advertising clients, so sponsoredtweets.com shut down. But there's no single entity that can change the TOS for the Fediverse, so this kind of business would totally work here. Steal this idea!

https://web.archive.org/web/20090813030023/http://sponsoredtweets.com/

One thing that's hard to explain about this period in the evolution of social networks was how generative the platforms were. People built all kinds of interesting things on top of the Facebook Platform or the Twitter API.

Those businesses were slowly (sometimes quickly) strangled as the platforms pivoted to advertising models and needed to eliminate rivals or assert more control of the client experience.

@analogfusion influence is sold, not bought. Or peddled, I guess. If you want to get that sweet dark money, you have to go knock on some doors and get noticed. It's all about the hustle.

@evan also, there were so many games (mafia wars, farmvill, etc).it doesn't seem it's the case anymore. (Also, I don't hang on those platforms anymore that much except when I communicate for the dance nights I organise)

@dolanor we need more games. I want to do some work on that.

@andypiper that's interesting! I went with Yes, But.

This reminds me of years ago, @evan posted to status.net (paraphrased): “Hey, everybody, you do realize that our plan to fund each other on a crowd-funding sites for all our work is actually *not* going to work, right?”.

In seriousness, It's fascinating that the key code that $DJT/TMTG added to Mastodon was a standard ad platform.

But I really don't think we need more “Influencers” though, do you?

The fediverse *does not* need a GRWM video of me shaving my head — sponsored by $RAZOR_BRAND!

@bkuhn this sounds GREAT