I can only apologise for the issues people are experiencing and the lack of communication around this.
Here are some details that hopefully will help people understand where we're at with the various issues and what's going on:
Audio Cutting Out When Streaming
For the past couple of months we have been working on a complete re-write of our audio library that will fix this issue. We're currently testing it in beta and it's almost ready - a few weeks away. In the meantime just download episodes before playing and you'll have no issues. If you'd like to help us test out the new version please join our beta group on telegram - https://t.me/+ZMnGthLREYQ3N2Rk
Not Earning / Earnings Counter Resetting
There are a few things going on here:
You won't always earn on Fountain. You'll only earn if you are contributing to the platform by creating clips, liking clips and comments, and supporting podcasts. We have done a very bad job at explaining this especially in the app UI - so I apologise for that. Again we are working hard on some UI updates that will give an indication of how much you are contributing which will directly relate to your earnings.
Bots / gaming prevention. We need to protect against bots / people gaming the earnings system. The better job we do at this the more you will earn on Fountain as a legitimate user. Currently we are seeing a number of false positives on some of our systems which are causing legitimate users to not earn. Please email me oscar@fountain.fm if you are not earning and I can investigate.
Payment Failures when Boosting / Streaming to Podcasts
Many podcasters are self-hosting their own lightning nodes - so when you boost or stream the payment can fail if:
the node is offline
the node lacks inbound liquidity
Even some of the biggest bitcoin podcasts regularly see their nodes go down or run out of inbound liquidity - and this is by far the majority of the reasons for failed payments. If you see a failed payment when supporting a podcast. Please reach out to the podcaster. Again we are working on updating the UI to give more granular info on why the payment failed.
HOW YOU CAN SUPPORT FOUNTAIN
If you like what we're trying to do with Fountain - please subscribe to our premium subscription - only 2% of our users currently are and this really helps.
We are a small team and working hard to address everything - please be patient.
Happy to answer any additional questions in this thread.
Audio Cutting Out When Streaming
Not Earning / Earnings Counter Resetting
Payment Failures when Boosting / Streaming to Podcasts