Interesting points, CG. Although b_b qualified it, I want to reiterate this is little more than the product of a conversation we had in the hallway a couple of hours ago. It's not even half-baked.

Basically, b_b said "What if comments and posts cost a penny?", and we started riffing on it from there. The first problem we saw, was that it might stifle good conversation. For that reason, we came up with the approach that shares and comment upvotes might transfer a penny from the appreciator to the commenter. In that sense, good conversation is free. However, once we happened on that, we started to think of the mountain of credit that kleinbl00 would be sitting on. Although it might not be undeserved, what would he do with it? Our answer to that was that he should be able to give it away to anyone he wanted to.

The 'marks' experiment is an interesting idea. TBH even if we thought this idea was a good one, it would probably be better to first convert dollars and cents into something like marks if for anything just to rinse off some of the connotations that come with cold hard cash. Also, if we found that 1.2 cents or 0.8 cents made for a better rate, we could do that.

One aspect I do like about this idea is how someone could come to Hubski with $1.00, and because they were so valued, never pay anything beyond that. But, the question then becomes: Who is paying more, and why?

I wouldn't say that this idea is a winner, but there are some interesting components to it.