Auto-Enrolled Donations? [Stupidity Knows No Bonds] #MindsGaming #OP #OpenMinds

Auto-payments are not new in the world of technology, almost any service today has an automatic payment system for a subscription to their service, from Netflix to Minds Plus subsribtion services are an important asset to business big and small.

Many of these services are even opt-out to not enrol in the subsription. However, what we have on Minds is far away from what auto-enrolment and payments is used for by other services.

Let me explain, when you sign up for a service that auto-enrols you for a subsription to the product they are providing well, ... a service.

Here on Minds, users are auto-enrolled into a payment plan for nothing no service is attached to a donation WIRE. You are being auto enrolled into  donating.

donation

noun

do·​na·​tion | \ dō-ˈnā-shən

: the act or an instance of donating: such as

a : the making of a gift especially to a charity or public institution

b : a free contribution : gift

So you sent the user a wire as a gift, and now you have to send the user a gift every month because you forgot to uncheck a box... and of course the cancellation feature is bugging out on you. So now you have been trapped into a gift that never stops giving.

This is not the concept of automatic payments and enrolments, imagine if Gofundme, Cashapp or any other donation service did this to users... they probably wouldn't be around long.

Not only is Minds (or the user) not providing a service for these autopayments [they should look at the US Federal law about this] they think its predictable ethical.

Deep down somewhere in the business of making a buck, Minds must know this isn't really ethical because they have a subscription feature for users to use that is called a paywall.

A paywall can be set [in settings, wire] by users, this feature was literally built for subscription based services when used along side the reward tier features found in users bios.

I think its time for more users to voice that there  donations are not a subscription! They can easily opt-in to auto-payments to support other channels via donations when they want. I myself have no want or need to be colluded into doing so.

Remember Not All Wires Are Equal

Minds solution to the issue is that the system should remember the status of the checkbox for auto enrolment of donations. So if you checked the box for a user because maybe they provide subject matter and a service like writing books or making custom content that they release on a regular base, it will stay checked for everyone else no matter the reason of wire. They fail to say if the check will start checked or unchecked by default of course. They also forget that this will devalue the paywall for users that provide actual subscription based content on the network.

Minds may hope to sweep this under the carpet by saying that the feature is ethical because it was designed to be auto-enrolled, but it was designed to be auto-enrolled into a service and if everything that was "designed that way" was ethically sound a lot more countries would have nukes.

Closing

Why have you got to make everything a battle bro?  What happened to listening and valuing your users, why does it take all this effort to simply get you to please your userbase?

As for my normal readers, thanks for reading and make sure to drop your view on the subject in the comments or in help and support group.