To manage my time and make a living, I long ago closed commenting on my blog and Facebook page to all but select persons. I’m often asked how to get commenting privileges in both places. There are various ways to do that. But this method is guaranteed:

  • Anyone who is supporting me on Patreon gets to post comments on my blog. Moreover, their comments will publish immediately. No sitting in moderation first. For new patrons, it might take me a few days to get your login email address entered on my site’s whitelist. But once that’s done, all you have to do is comment using the email address you supplied at Patreon, and my site will automatically post your comment. Which facilitates discussion among patrons on my blog, as you can engage in back-and-forth discussions on any blog post here without my having to be there.
  • Anyone who is supporting me on Patreon gets to post comments on my Facebook page. That requires you to “friend” me on Facebook. All patrons get accepted. You just have to remind me when you send me a friend request that you are a Patreon patron (and if your name differs on Facebook from Patreon, please tell me the email address you used at Patreon so I can verify that). My private message settings are set to public so you don’t have to be a Facebook friend to PM me on Facebook. Or to read my posts on Facebook. But only Facebook Friends can comment on my Facebook posts.
  • Anyone who is supporting me on Patreon gets the courtesy of my attention in person and other media. You can email me questions, PM me questions, pose questions to me at events, and I’ll apply special attention to all your questions if you are a Patreon patron. Just let me know you are one. I get so much correspondence otherwise that I often now have to ignore most of it. So this might be a perk you’ll like as well.

There are other benefits to supporting me on Patreon at a high level (that you can explore there, under the Rewards section). But you can gain all the above benefits even at the minimum level of support, which is $1 per blog post, which you can then also set to a maximum of one post per month. With both settings in place at Patreon, your cost is only $1 per month. And if you don’t like Patreon, you can seek the same benefits with recurring support through PayPal.

Although I greatly appreciate and benefit immensely from greater support! I only post four substantive patron articles a month (and only those you pay for; announcement posts and things like that are free). Maybe someday on some rare occasion I’ll post five, but so far that hasn’t happened; and yet more will be even rarer. So if you max your settings at four posts for $1 or $2 each, it will only cost $4 or $8 a month; if you set it at $5, then it’s $20 a month; and so on. And for merely that you keep me employed creating excellent, entertaining, useful articles on my website, and you get to show your appreciation for all I do, that you want to see more of (and indeed, patrons get to make requests for future articles, and all such requests will be seriously considered).

Once you’ve created and set up your Patreon account, you also never have to bother with it again if you don’t want to; it just keeps operating at the parameters you set. So it’s the easiest way to help continually reward and fund my work. And that means you will be helping make it all available to the public, worldwide. You can then use it yourself, recommend it to others so they can use it, or cite it to people you’re debating, and discuss its contents with them. In short, by supporting me on Patreon, you become a patron of valuable educational information that benefits everyone.

Discover more from Richard Carrier Blogs

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading