First of all I would like to suggest to @ernest to take a day or two break from working on kbin and in general to not overwork himself.
Secondly, some sort of Patreon should be setup to streamline the donation process. I, probably like many others would like to just set up a recurring donation and forget about it.
Thirdly, I think it would be great we also have something like https://beehaw.org/post/428209 to keep this as transparent as possible.
No, being profitable isn’t the problem. The problem is the expectation to be ever more profitable than the last time, and to be as profitable as possible in spite of everything such as a decent treatment of the user. I don’t think the majority of people were against reddit being profitable, but the way they chose to do and communicate so is what made people despise them.