I on the other hand have no interest in buying a $30 t-shirt emblazoned with a garish podcast logo, that was manufactured in a sweatshop for $0.50.

Let them read all the NordVPN and Dollar Shave Club ads they want. I'd rather put up with that than the wastage that goes into production of merch and swag.

How do you know about the merch or Patreon? Do they not even tell you about it?

Because if they do, that's an ad.

There's a huge difference between being asked to support the people making something you enjoy and allowing totally unrelated and reactionary monied interests access to my attention. The latter can talk to the hand because I don't wanna hear about it.

To each their own, but I personally would rather have someone saying "here's some cool power tools / skateboard equipment / digital pianos you might be interested in buying" than "don't you feel terrible for not sending us money for this thing you can get for free?"

I don't like being guilted, I really don't. But I understand that some feel differently.

It's bad either way, only adequate public funding for arts and media can resolves some of these problems.

I agree with you...I have long been saying that intellectual property (and that includes software) is going to either be subject to artificial scarcity (to me, the biggest evil * ), or horrible funding models like advertising.

Public funding makes a ton of sense, personally I think it is the only economically efficient solution, but doing it well is hard. I scanned your history here to see a bit more on where you are coming from (I agree with you on a lot of things), and I see that this is something you talk about a lot.

I notice you say elsewhere "the enemy is the state". That makes it tricky to say "the state should decide what stuff gets funded." I always tend to be up against that whenever I suggest that state funded IP makes sense. I still believe there is a way.

I have more thoughts on how we could actually move toward such things, my contact info is in my profile, feel free to email.

* see chapter 25 of the Grapes of Wrath for a beautifully written essay on the evils of artificial scarcity: https://genius.com/John-steinbeck-grapes-of-wrath-chapter-25...

If users aren't willing to support a podcast then that's a big signal as to what the value of that podcast is.

When I look at the list of podcasts I subscribe to there aren't really any that I would miss terribly if they decided to stop. I have too many options when I want to listen to something.

That only works for podcasts with big, dedicated audiences.

same with ads.