Yep. And I'll gladly handle all that. But guess what... it's a lot of work, and if it is to be done right, that's a full-time job. That means I need full-time pay. I don't post as many reviews as I used to... because I have bills to pay and doing reviews doesn't pay enough to justify the time required. That why LTT has a youtube... they have to have it in order to generate income.
But I'll tell you what... he's likely also got that patreon account, too. That's just a small slice of the social media presence.
I look at it this way; if readers of TPU can't afford to each toss us 50 cents each over the length of the year... why even bother? If you understand the type of revenue I am hinting at I want to see...
As to trolls... It would never go that far, let me tell you that right now. If you know how patreon works, the things that are provided to donators remain on patreon. TPU wouldn't change one bit; but we'd need more content for that. You'd never get added privileges on TPU... maybe something by your name, but nothing more. There would me things like regular merch/hardware give-aways, done through patreon alone. several give-aways were done in the past few weeks... I got like 400 lbs of motherboard to get rid of....
Social media done right costs a fair bit of money. Anyone can google what it costs. if we don't have donators, how do we pay for that? If it was as simple as getting body in a chair and having them press buttons, everyone would be doing it.
Now, I'll not say that this is what W1zz has in mind. I cannot speak for him directly. But it is things like this that might be cause for need of additional revenue, and might have prompted W1zz to make this post. It's things like that that the money would go to... more staff. On the other hand W1zz might have posted this simply to see what people genuinely think about this subject, and it might not really be anything more than that.
But I'll readily agree that mining using users resources would not be the way to do it.