Thanks, Reef3. It's pretty clear that the money aspect is not going to survive beyond the experiment.

When I created Hubski, there was an on site currency at work. Every day you would get a bit of karma, which you could spend voting up other people's content. When your karma was 0, you couldn't vote anymore until you got more. When people voted up your content, you got some more to spend.

Once we implemented sharing, we found that the reticence to share fluff was enough that we didn't need to have any sort of scarcity at work.

Money is corrupting. At the same time, there has been talk of value-sharing as in a co-op or something similar. Social aggregators are valuable because of the content that users create, but that content costs increasingly more money to host. At some point, you need to pay for these costs, and yet not ruin the experience for users. It's not enough to raise some money. Revenue needs to cover the costs, and they both need to scale. We need to be creative and experiment, since existing revenue models seem to either make the site closed and eternally small, or growing and doomed.

If it comes down to it, I'll choose the former. But I am not willing to rule out another possible future yet, and this kind of experimenting helps that search.