...That doesn't make any sense. Donations don't have the $400 threshold like paid mods. And people paid more attention to paid mods, and could investigate them for free due to the 24 hour refund (to steam wallet, but still).
I wish the conversation would finally move out of this thread, though, even though the thread's generally slow... Just to keep the discussion in one place.
Are you being serious right now? Let's break it down:
1a: Donations are extremely small amounts, often spaced out over the course of years, even in the cases of extremely popular mods. There is an arbitrarily small chance of any given mod, stolen or otherwise, receiving a donation within a week or two of being put up.
This is literally the exact same thing everyone shilling for Valve was harping on about when they were trying to convince people that paid mods were good because modders would gain more money faster.1b: $400 threshold, but everybody who gets the mod pays in. Even if it's only $0.99, that only requires a bit over 400 downloads before the uploader starts gaining money, and even terrible piece-of-shit mods can swing that under a free system; a stolen good mod would
easily hit that point within a reasonable time period if it wasn't caught early on.
2a: Free mods are vastly easier to investigate, due to being, y'know,
free. You download, check the files, check how it looks and acts ingame, done. If it was stolen, you get in touch with the original author and the hosting site, problem solved.
2b: Paid mods require you to pay before you can do that. Regardless of whether the mod was stolen or not, you're either stuck with that out of pocket or have to refund the mod, which is additional hassle
and prevents you from trading for a while, IIRC. If it was stolen, you're shit out of luck because nobody with any authority is going to listen to you or respond promptly if at all, and there's no non-customer oversight.
There are fewer barriers to investigation with free mods, donations bring in less income with much longer gaps between payments (unless you'd like to retract comments about donation systems not financially benefiting modders, hah), and the sites which host free mods have a greater incentive to rigorously root out thieves, because they rely on word-of-mouth and user loyalty for the revenue they receive, rather than skimming 30% off of sales.