People have a mental cap on what text should cost. If someone creates instructional content that provides thousands of dollars in value, they can sell videos for $200+, but a book version is hard to sell over $50, even if both provide the same value. Even for free content it is easier to monetize YouTube than it is to monetize a blog.
If we want people to create more text-based material, it needs to have similar financial incentives.
When people sign up for Gophercises, the first two emails I send them are about the course asking how the course is going, if they had issues with the player, etc.
After that they get Go related emails. Eg https://ckarchive.com/b/0vuwh9hvx32q Again, not really irrelevant given the interest in learning Go, and 99% of the people I talk to love those emails.
Maybe 3-4x per year I'll have a sale on my other paid courses. During those times people who have been on my mailing list for a set period of time (I think it is at least 10 days and have received at least 2 previous emails from me without unsubscribing, but I'd need to double check) will get a notice about the sale. I try to avoid being super annoying with those, so they will often contain useful lessons about coding with Go even if you aren't interested in the sale.
I make my living selling Go courses. I was only able to create and offer Gophercises as a free course because of this, so yes, I require an email address and I use Gophercises as a marketing tool. I try to make it a decent experience, but no matter what I do someone will always complain. I find my time is better spent helping the people who enjoy and appreciate what I am doing.
Many employment contracts prohibit doing additional contract dev work. I agree the spirit of contract to hire is great, but worth noting it won't work for everyone.
I'd double check that you don't have multiple orgs. You used to share a cess to your account with people, then they made some org change a while back that essentially moved that shared access setup to an org and gave you a new personal account iirc. Easy to not realize you have both.
Was this a timed take home project or something with a flexible timeline? That is, was it "You have to respond within 3 hours of receiving this email with your solution" or something more flexible?
I mostly understand why some companies do the x hours routine, and when I've done interviews this way I've historically performed well, but it just felt like it added unnecessary stress. For instance, anyone on the job doesn't have to worry about issues like, "What if I couldn't get the app up and running because I had the wrong version of X installed?" longer than maybe their first day on the job. And if you plan on hiring an engineer for a few years, one day is irrelevant. At best this felt like it favored contractors who were more experienced at jumping into new projects frequently.
If we want people to create more text-based material, it needs to have similar financial incentives.