A Senior Developer working mostly with PHP and JavaScript, with a bit of Python thrown in for good measure, all on Linux. My tooling is simple, it's GitLab and JetBrains where possible.
I did something somehow similar back in the day...
I had a website and I only posted High-Quality articles, mostly on science subjects. No religion, ancient-aliens, bullshit.
The content was very, very good. High-Standards, every article had research behind it.
We were doing for the love of science.
Then we decided to let other people post.
Again, very good content. We found a lot of people willing to post for free, with similar mindsets with ours.
Then we've put ADS... and shared profits with the editors. Guess what. Those great editors, posting only high-quality science articles, started to go deep into pyramids, conspiracy theories, ancient-aliens, 'cause this stuff brought in a LOT of traffic => lots of money....
I feel that monetization is really bad for a website. It will bring lots of low quality posts.
When people do things for free, I feel they do their best and they do it because they feel it matters. When money comes in...
If people opt to donate, then low quality posts won't get anything. I don't see there being too much of a worry really.
I did something somehow similar back in the day...
I had a website and I only posted High-Quality articles, mostly on science subjects. No religion, ancient-aliens, bullshit.
The content was very, very good. High-Standards, every article had research behind it.
We were doing for the love of science.
Then we decided to let other people post.
Again, very good content. We found a lot of people willing to post for free, with similar mindsets with ours.
Then we've put ADS... and shared profits with the editors. Guess what. Those great editors, posting only high-quality science articles, started to go deep into pyramids, conspiracy theories, ancient-aliens, 'cause this stuff brought in a LOT of traffic => lots of money....
... you got the idea.
Agree, there is a fine line between posting for the readers (high-quality content) and posting for money. 😉