As many of you know, the idea that somehow, someday Hubski will need to raise a little bit of money has been discussed several times in the last couple years. I threw an idea at mk today, and he fleshed it out a bit that we wanted to get community perspective on. Please bear in mind that is a purely hypothetical exercise. It's intended to generate discussion, and not to scare you into thinking you're going to be charged any time soon.
That said, here's the idea. You create a Hubski bank account of sorts, the amount "deposited" being completely up to you. Then, every time you comment or post, you are charged a fee (say, one or two cents), which goes to Hubski's coffers. Alternately, when you upvote or share, the same fee is transferred to the account of the user whose content you are appreciating. You would also have the ability to transfer credits to whomever you want without having to share or upvote. At the current comment rate, a penny per credit would pretty much offset the server costs, although one would expect the comment and post rate to drop were there a fee attached, even an insignificant one.
I think this does a couple things. First, it will keep out spammers and undesirables.
Second, it will probably limit useless comments (for example, the other day I got a million upvotes for whiting a smiley face), thus making an eternal September or a replay of the SRS debacle very unlikely.
Third (and this is the most interesting aspect, IMO), it would create an economy on the site based on social capital, as credits would be passed around, bought, sold, and given away based on appreciation from the members. The negative side, of course, is that this could represent an upward redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich, so to speak, but it could also encourage development of ideas, since each comment would have a value. It is my conjecture that members who may not have much or any money, but who are valuable would be supported by the richer among us. I think there would be a mixture of shrewdness and benevolence that could give an interesting dynamic to the marketplace, and that it would be a cool internet experiment.
This was a quick brainstorm, so I'm sure many holes could be poked in it, but that's kinda the point here. Poke as many holes as you can think of. It's still free...for now :)
Isn't this effectively just monetizing karma? Instead of worthless internet points people get internet pennies. Still, the "see how many pennies I get for this pun" would still exist, right? I'm not sold. Seems cumbersome and I don't want money tied to my Hubski use. I like the idea of being a Hubski "member" $1 a month, a "supporter" at $2 and a "sustainer" at $10 month. Still allowing anyone to use the site free of charge. That's just my two cents. Keep it simple.
I like this. But I wonder how it will work out if Hubski keeps growing. But it shouldn't be obvious for anyone who is a supporter or a sustainer. Many websites give the people then stars next to their names etc. this creates a weird separation... Their user page could state if they are a supporter or sustainer etc. giving the impression that it doesn't make you "cooler" to be a supporter (for the newcomer/outsider) but that people actually support the website for keeping it running."member" $1 a month, a "supporter" at $2 and a "sustainer" at $10 month
Yeah, we are not interested in giving usernames a special color etc, but we could offer special additional features/reporting for the different levels that only the person would know about. I'd be interested in knowing what additional features people would be interested in at a premium. We are not interested in making any of the current features pay-to-play for you all already on site.
Just had the idea of making old posts accessible only to members, 'the vault' and all the fun stuff in the 'chatter' tab for example. the hubski weekly newsletters too. If you really wanted to put up a pay-wall, it wouldn't be hard to do. you just have to decide if you want to take that step.
On the other hand, I like the idea of shares and badges being a finite commodity. Would make you really careful about what you shared, wouldn't it? Which maybe would in turn make people think very carefully about what they posted and how. Can't tell though whether that would encourage more thoughtful exchange or just de-incentivize regular use.
Yes, that's as much the point as raising money is (maybe even more so, given that we're talking about pennies both literally and figuratively). That's why I termed it "Hubski Economy" instead of just an idea to raise money. Donation schemes don't have this interesting element that could evolve in unexpected ways the way a 'living' system can. It's kinda game theory applied to the social network idea. I don't know if it's been tried before, but I don't know too much about the internet in general.
Fuck the "thought" part. experiment. This is something I used to give the guys at Reddit a ration of shit about, back when there were guys at Reddit to give a ration of shit. they never beta test anything. Y'all are nimble and I know you're fucking with the code as we speak. SO: STEP 1 Build your metric into the code. Say every share you get is a point, every badge you get is ten points, and every time you post an article is five points and every time you post a comment is one point. Or even better - every share you get is a blue, every badge a red, every article a yellow and every comment a green and keep track of those values, individually and cumulatively. Now give every account on here a thousand "whatevers." Don't make it visible to the users, don't let us interact with it at all. Run it for a month. Run it for two. See what kind of users are making what kind of points/colors, and what the economics actually look like. Report back for science. STEP 2 Take your invisible back-end and make it visible. Let us see what our "point spread is." Allow us to opt in or opt out, but don't take away your invisible metrics. Let it run for a month, let it run for two. Report back for science. STEP 3 have this conversation again. ___________________________________ I'm not against monetizing. I'm not against this idea, either, but I'm flush this year and I'm one of the 800lb gorillas of the site so it's kind of like GM arguing in favor of tax benefits for auto manufacturers. I can certainly see the controversy. At the same time, I'd point out that SomethingAwful has a much simpler system: if you want to participate, you pay $10. If you act like a douche, you forfeit your $10. This simple system has allowed SA to thrive through the downfall of Digg, the winnowing of 4chan and the mediocritization of Reddit, all the while giving their adventurers a home base for their foreign adventures (SRS, the genos, etc). While it's not my kind of community, it's definitely a strong and thriving community. I say test it and report back. There's plenty to be learned, I reckon, without upsetting anybody.
This is a good idea. Even if we don't use it for something like this, it would be interesting to see the accumulation of these invisible credits. It might be informative for other purposes. BTW, everyone does have an invisible number. Yours is 19095. :)Now give every account on here a thousand "whatevers." Don't make it visible to the users, don't let us interact with it at all.
I think kb is on the right track as far as collecting all the metrics on the site. But to spin it a different way, what if there was an actual real world cost given to the uses of the site. Say you take the cost of bandwidth and then you divide that by how much each individual user is drawing from the site. Then you take the cost of storage and you divide that by how much each individual adds to that storage by adding content, comments, etc. It would be interesting to see a little ticker on my feed somewhere that tells me, as close and specific as possible, how much I as one user costs the owner to keep the doors open. This info would only be visible to each person. No one could see other users usage and dollar draw. As a user that has been here for a while, I would love to know how much I am costing Hubski, and would definitely be more likely to give money - and likely even more than I cost. You could take this as far as you wanted. Say you took all the time that was spent to code the back end, upgrade hardware and what not, well that could be a line item too. The more users on the site, the more these costs are divided. The more active someone is, the more they cost. Payment would not have to be required, it would just be a "hey, fyi, your 50 posts today cost us $.00065 in storage. Another idea is to have an actual page that you could go to with advertising on it. It wouldn't be on any other screen but one. It could look like "feed - chatter - global - tags - community - badges - accounting" or something. I click on accounting and it's just a stream of video ads or something. Also on that screen, there is another ticker that tells me how much the site is earning by me watching these ads. Say I wanted to earn Hubski 50 cents one day because I saw that that was how much my draw was that day for using the site, I could watch ten ads, or refresh my screen and get more ads or whatever. Mind you, I have no idea how ads work or give money. Edit: My first point reminds me of the new Aphex Twin album cover, where he breaks down where all the costs of his album went to. I know for example that .00041 quid went to tracking and monitoring illegal download links and that .00113 quid went to advertising in Spain: 
Is this viable? Surely someone would've done it. I'll happily idle on an advertising page every once in a while, or refresh it while I do other stuff.Another idea is to have an actual page that you could go to with advertising on it. It wouldn't be on any other screen but one. It could look like "feed - chatter - global - tags - community - badges - accounting" or something. I click on accounting and it's just a stream of video ads or something. Also on that screen, there is another ticker that tells me how much the site is earning by me watching these ads. Say I wanted to earn Hubski 50 cents one day because I saw that that was how much my draw was that day for using the site, I could watch ten ads, or refresh my screen and get more ads or whatever. Mind you, I have no idea how ads work or give money.
So there are a bunch of different types of advertisements but, at the most basic level, you have impressions and clicks. Cost/impression is how much and advertiser pays every time someone lands on a page where their ad is loaded. Cost/click is how much and advertiser pays every time you click. These days, a lot of ads are pay per click (PPC). So, even if there were a bunch of ads, no one is going to pay you much for the impressions and even if we had a separate page, users would not only need to sit idle on the page, but actively click ads. And, seeing as the page is separate, I'm not sure if the advertisers would pay the standard rate for PPC. I'm not sure. I know there are ad networks and stuff and we may be able to get away from it for a bit. But it feels kinda shady? I don't know if that's the right word, seeing as we're talking about shitty online advertisers. So...that's about as much input I can give on the viability of this idea. I do like the idea though and I do like the thought process happening in this thread. Please, don't take my response as discouragement for throwing out ideas or anything.
So, wait, the bloggers etc who throw up little "please disable adblock so you can see my ads and keep my site running" -- they're talking solely about impressions, I assume, because no one who disables adblock is actually going to click the ads. Do they actually fund their site that way? Because if it's powerful enough to pay some of their server costs (even without clicks!) it could probably handle some of ours ... every little bit helps and it doesn't cost the users anything. Lemme know if I'm off.
See links below for the latest and greatest ad networks that explain the different styles and pay rates for ads. CPM = cost per THOUSAND impressions. So a $0.50 CPM would be 50 cents for 1000 impressions. Based on Hubski's pageviews yesterday, we would make a few bucks (literally) if we had those on every page you all viewed. $0.50 is really high though. Usually it's much, much less. The way I've said it up there isn't technically correct though. It's usually said, "the advertiser pays a $10 CPM to run 100,000 ads (a $1,000 total expense)." But then you have to look at what the RPM (revenue) actually is. Since you are using an ad network, the cost may be $1000 but you, as the "publisher" or whatever, only sees $500 because the network takes the other $500. [1] http://www.monetizemore.com/blog/10-best-ad-networks-2014/
Online advertisements are a crazy underworld. Based on the numbers I see randomly because of work or whatever, I don't understand how anyone makes any decent money of ads.
Advertising might be a good bet. There are many ad networks out there you can integrate with, and make some decent eCPMs depending on your traffic volumes.
Don't know really. That page might have to have some type of actual content on it which would turn it into a fun, almost subversive challenge I think. The whole idea though is that it would be something you choose to expose yourself too.
I've been thinking about this over the day. There are two main ways to help the site sustain itself: a recurring fundraiser (Wikipedia, Subbable) or an implemented system (Flattr). The first is easy to do but rather unpredictable how much you'll actually get, the latter is its exact opposite. I think any sort of implemented monetization effort should be a thin layer over one of hubski's current systems, and not a separate system, as that makes the barrier for entry so much higher. If you can't explain the whole idea in a sentence or two, it's too complicated. So I don't like the idea of a whole micro economy where you get or give points for this & that, but I do like the idea of giving pennies to posts that you like. It should be opt-in, I think. Hubski is inherently about the preferences of individuals, and just like there's a difference in how everyone uses the site, there should be an option to change the amount you want to give or to not give something at all. Having said that, here's some ideas that might be interesting to try: - Hubwheel Donation. Whenever I fill up my hubwheel, amount X is withdrawn. If you don't post or interact with the site for a while, you don't pay for it, which seems more than fair to me. Since you can determine the amount, power users who are wheelin' at top speed can set it as low as they feel comfortable with. Maybe even put a maximum amount in it. - Silver Badge. When I give someone a Silver Badge, I not only think that post is amazeballs but also support hubski by withdrawing X money. Or you could make it so that every, say, $5 you donate turns one of your badges into a Silver Badge, and the next badge you give will be differently colored. (I chose silver because in Dutch, when you cash a check, you 'silver' it. I like the historical connotation). - Community Post. I think the Community page could be really useful here. Maybe you can upgrade a post to Community Status / Pick of the Day or something like that, and have it appear on top of the Community page? It will then be replaced by whomever next gives a post that status, or after a day or two. Sort of like a promoted post. - Custom Theme. I think kleinbl00 talked about this earlier. Give us the option to customize the site's css! You could charge a small fee to create a new theme or to edit one. I'll edit more ideas in when I think of them. Taggin' mk.
I'm not a big fan of this idea, though I probably can't express my reasonings with a lot of clarity at the moment. I'll certainly try. First, I'm all for a way for Hubski to raise some money. I'd be more in favor of either direct donations (which probably exist somewhere) or some sort of premium membership (no idea what that would look like, but I'm thinking of reddit gold) - but I'd support that. This is my first problem. Where and how? I have the bite in the back of my head that tells me this idea was probably jolted into existence by the opening of Circle - which I have no experience with, no confidence in, and no knowledge of how it works. If it's (edit: 'it' being the Hubski system, not Circle) just paypal operated (another site I have issues with, but mostly just because their customer service is terrible), I'd be a bit more okay with it. But really, the "Hubski Bank Account" isn't something I have a giant problem with, just an insecurity. This is a bigger problem for me. I don't like the idea of being charged to post content, even if it is one cent. Even if a ten dollar deposit would give me 1000 posts+shares, I just don't like the precedent. I'm sure it seems minuscule and insignificant, and there may very well be no logical reason for it. I simply don't like it. This is also exactly how badges work already right? Badges "transfer" from person to person when they're awarded. If this were discussed further, I'd want to see statistics on badge movement. Do they actually move around? I've got seven (a fact I didn't know until I turned off Zen mode a few moments ago to collect info), and they definitely don't go around. This is important because... I don't think Hubski's content should have an economy on social capital. It has an economy built in: interest and discussion. I think implementing something like this would have serious upward distribution. In fact, I don't think it would have anything but upward distribution. Power users with hundreds of followers will be able to make an absurd amount when compared to newer or simply sharing users. For instance, thenewgreen has 977 followers. Assume half of his followers share something, that's $4.89 he's made with a .01 cent investment. Great return for him. I have 15 followers. If I share something, and half of my followers share it, that's .075¢. Not a great return. If all of my followers share it, it's 15¢. Not a great return. That's obviously discounting the cascade effect a "share" actually has. Obviously if thenewgreen shared my post, it has a potential to reach another 977 people, which would open me up to his "market." Which brings me to... Trickle-down economics is a bad idea, and it's never worked. Though, with extremely microscopic transactions like 1¢, it probably has a much better potential here than anywhere else. Again, I want to see information on badge distribution and storage. thenewgreen has 73 badges (I see him badge things quite frequently). For users with a lot of badges, do they badge enough to sustain an economy? It's not something they should really be concerned with, I think. While I understand the desire to keep out spammers, I really wish the rhetoric on "undesirables" on Hubski would disappear. It comes off as elitist. That's an irrelevant nit-pick.
--- Despite all of that, I do find the idea interesting. My biggest problem is the eco-speak in the presentation. Hubski shouldn't be a marketplace. It should be a forum. I don't want people to pay me for my comments here, and I don't want to pay people for their comments. In the rare cases which I do, I'd give a badge. Here's my suggestion, which I think could test this idea and some of the theory behind it: Introduce a way to buy "marks", a strict one-time-per-user test run. $1 = 100 marks (making each mark worth 1¢, the proposed price). I'm imagining a clone of badges (the only reason I suggest using something other than badges is so that the integrity of the test isn't compromised by existing badges or badging behavior). Marks can be given in the same way that badges can, received in the same way, but also go away with each post. So for users who have invested the $1, a post now costs 1¢. Track the transfer of marks to and from users for the duration of... between one and three months. I think this would be enough time to track some of your theories and see if they work. It also makes the experience voluntary, which means there will be an existing control group of people who don't participate in buying marks. This would allow us to see how behavior changed when money was introduced into the equation (even an infinitesimally small amount). At the end of the test run, our subjects will be the evidence. Those who participated could only have initially purchased 100 marks. How many do they have now? How many did they give away? I'm sure a dozen other metrics could be taken from the information as well. I'm purposely ignoring shares here because they're a metric that I think should remain totally free of pay. I don't anticipate a great deal of difference between the shares and marks in this test, however. My theory is that if a post is worth badging or marking, it's worth sharing. That's a possible weakness to the test, but it's my suggestion that shares be completely free. This would also be an incredibly interesting study of extremely micro-economics which could be cool to watch and participate in. My testing suggestion probably has issues too, but I think a test run with something more focused (marks (or whatever), instead of shares) would be beneficial). ---- I realized about halfway through that I was being really negative, and that wasn't my intention. I get very worried when people start putting price tags on opinions, and when free discourse becomes a market. Things can go very bad in a very short amount of time, and it worries me (just look at the evening news). 1¢ is basically nothing, I get that. I worry about down the road. You create a Hubski bank account of sorts
Then, every time you comment or post, you are charged a fee (say, one or two cents), which goes to Hubski's coffers. Alternately, when you upvote or share, the same fee is transferred to the account of the user whose content you are appreciating. You would also have the ability to transfer credits to whomever you want without having to share or upvote.
Third (and this is the most interesting aspect, IMO), it would create an economy on the site based on social capital, as credits would be passed around, bought, sold, and given away based on appreciation from the members. The negative side, of course, is that this could represent an upward redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich, so to speak, but it could also encourage development of ideas, since each comment would have a value.
It is my conjecture that members who may not have much or any money, but who are valuable would be supported by the richer among us.
I think this does a couple things. First, it will keep out spammers and undesirables.
Just a clarification - it seems from your post that you think a badge, once received, can then be given again. That is not the case - badges can only be given once. So I have 4 badges right now. If one is given to me for a post, that doesn't go into my badge count and I can't re-give that badge. Right now they're a one-stop shop. I was thinking about this proposal with cryptocurrency in mind (sadly it doesn't quite work out) and I think the Hubski bank account should be like a wallet - but then, either we would have to use a 3rd party provider or the work of the people behind Hubski would increase, which I think might counter the point of raising money - it could increase the cost of running Hubski as opposed to defraying it. I also like your idea of running experiments and looking at the data as opposed to just jumping in on this head-first.
I don't think so. I would envision a system where the credits you buy have no cash value. That is, they can't be redeemed. Otherwise, Hubski turns into a potential income source, and the accounting get real complicated, real quick, and I'm sure as shit not going to jail for not providing 1099s to people all over the world. Edit: I may have misread what you were saying, but I still stand by the above if anyone else is wondering....I think the Hubski bank account should be like a wallet...
If the income is under 20 dollars or something, it doesn't have to be reported. So I highly doubt there'd be any problems with redeeming currency. That said, I don't like the idea much either, I'm behind CashewGuy on the donations idea. I've got like 30,000 dogecoins you guys can have, plus I'd donate some cash. If there is a way to donate it isn't very apparent, so if you do accept donations you may want to post that somewhere obvious.
Well, that is one way of generating some cash :)
That's what I thought, thanks for correcting me! Call me a technophobe, but I think cryptocurrency (in pretty much every implementation I've seen up to this point) is a bad idea. If the system were built on cryptocurrency only, I definitely wouldn't participate. ironpotato is the polar opposite, he practically fetishizes dogecoin.Just a clarification - it seems from your post that you think a badge, once received, can then be given again. That is not the case - badges can only be given once. So I have 4 badges right now. If one is given to me for a post, that doesn't go into my badge count and I can't re-give that badge. Right now they're a one-stop shop.
I was thinking about this proposal with cryptocurrency in mind (sadly it doesn't quite work out)
I was thinking that we should make our own Hubski currency? And that posting would be like "mining"? It was mostly metaphorical. Then I realized that the cryptocurrency would need to be based on actual currency because the point of this would be to fund Hubski and that to me then seemed to defeat the basic purpose of cryptocurrencies (as they are currently imagined/practiced).
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.
To Hubskify this idea, the longer and more pinwheeled a comment is, the less it should cost.
That's far too simple. I want to see grammatical analysis applied server-side so long, complicated, information dense posts are forced into existence by economic pressure and low effort one-liners like this cost me a dollar!
An arbitrary value. If I were going to do it for real, I'd set a range of costs between $0 and $Something where $0 is the Gaussian analysis of the length*grammar score of highest voted, densest comments in the entire Hubski database and everything else falls away to $Something that would be enough to make one think twice about being glib and lazy. A Thoughtful Web Is Free; For Everything Else, There's Mastercard. This would still be costing me money.
I agree. I was just saying to b_b, that if there is a lesson here, it is that money should have nothing but an arbitrary relationship to interaction on the site. It seems once you create a link between the two, you must then work to correct for all the ills that it begets.
Based on your It's basically a 'rich' guy's upvoteI realized about halfway through that I was being really negative, and that wasn't my intention. I get very worried when people start putting price tags on opinions, and when free discourse becomes a market. Things can go very bad in a very short amount of time, and it worries me (just look at the evening news). 1¢ is basically nothing, I get that. I worry about down the road.
This is exactly my opinion. Commerzialized opinions are inherently bad and in social networks this can create a distribution worse than the power of law distribution. It discourages new users and encourages circlejerking.marks
idea I want to propose something: How about you can buy 1 mark for $1 and these you can use like badges or upvotes and show your appreciation and these are then added to the account of the user you gifted them. This user than can give them a different user as appreciation, though with every new 'transaction' the mark looses in value (like a coin, that gets more and more marks of destruction, up to a point (10 txs?), that it can't be sent anymore. If you buy marks, these don't get added to your account, so no hoarding ensues or 'bought appreciation' is created. Also you see how much marks a user had, like "10 marks currently (25 marks total)", so hoarding gets discouraged and they get passed along. To show on the profile a mark with less 'value' got send, either you display them next to each other or you can use decimal digits ({1,...,0.1} at the first tx the mark doesn't use value).
If it ain't broke ... I am a regular apologist here for market-based solutions. It seems clear to me that the market is the best mechanism known for getting people to work together toward ends they value. It is often described in terms of competition and greed, but the former is really a competition for opportunities to cooperate with others in voluntary exchanges, and the latter is an ugly label for the healthy self-interest that directs us all to do what's best for us and those we care about. The market-based model encourages a healthy, spontaneous order among millions of strangers who might not otherwise have incentive to work together. "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." But the market is not best in every case. Our household is run on collectivist principles. We have one bank account. Most property is held in common. The junior member has relatively few freedoms compared to the adults, who exercise authority that is not always egalitarian. Similarly, my workplace exhibits hierarchy and favors. When a relatively small number of people know each other and are interested in each other's welfare, the market model may not be ideal. Perhaps communities up to around the size of Dunbar's number, like Amish towns, function better on collectivist principles including kindness, group responsibility and authority. Hubski seems, for now, more like an Amish town than a global marketplace. There is some question about how well it will scale, but in my experience it has already scaled far beyond the point at which I feel I know most users, yet it still feels generally friendly. The day care center is a suggestive example. That evidence suggests that such useless comments would be encouraged rather than discouraged. If the Hubski masters wish to offset what must be considerable server costs, I think a donate button is the simplest answer.it will keep out spammers
This assertion is made without evidence. Does offering financial reward for posting really discourage spam? It is possible that monetizing will have the unintended consequence of encouraging spam. Right now, one of the reasons people refrain from outright promotion is that it would appear crass and inappropriate in a discussion forum, where we users are like guests at a party. When you require people to pay to post, they may feel entitled to post whatever they like: it's their right, they paid for it.it will probably limit useless comments (for example, the other day I got a million upvotes for whiting a smiley face)
Third ... social capital ... a cool internet experiment.
It would be interesting to experiment. I know I would not be able to resist the temptation to accumulate social capital and move up on the scoreboard. I might give up my habit of attaching lengthy comments to stale posts and instead rush out quick crowd-pleasers for hot topics.
I just saw your comment about "no cash value" so the experiment might not be bad about attracting spammers as I suggested.
I'm not sure I made it clear enough to begin with that this isn't an idea that was hatched by team hubski, or even discussed. It was just a thought I had as a hypothetical exercise. I appreciate the comments, however. That's a good point. Although you'd be surprised at the level of entitlement some (though by no means many) people display even when they're not paying. This could tip it to the point of being unbearable. I don't think you'll find too many people round here interested in customer service. Well, maybe thenewgreen would get some weird pleasure out of it. He's a people pleaser.When you require people to pay to post, they may feel entitled to post whatever they like: it's their right, they paid for it.
So now you not only get muted and silenced if people disagree with you, you end up having to pay money? Undesirables... Yeah... Won't that encourage useless comments if they get upvotes?First, it will keep out spammers and undesirables.
(for example, the other day I got a million upvotes for whiting a smiley face),
I don't have any in-depth analysis of this. I like kb's idea. My thoughts are mostly that I'd rather just have a way to donate, such as tng is mentioning or just have a blanket fee similar to SomethingAwful.
Yes. 50 to start, or ten per month, etc. There are definitely ways to make it less of a barrier. As to your idea about doing it behind the scenes, I like it, but I also have to echo flagamuffin. Adding a money layer drives people away. And possibly fast. There's no guarantee that anything we can glean from that experiment could be applicable in a live test. People mostly like free shit. Free shit is either terrible or temporary or you're being set up to be sold down the river. Anyway it seems like there's not a lot of imagination here. Everyone wants a donation button, but nobody would donate regularly. NPR says something like 1% of regular listeners donate. I can't imagine it'd be much different here. There's value in some creative solution to the funding models that currently exist. I'm NOT saying mine is that solution, but at least it's outside the box, a jump off point for further ideas.
I have begged to donate :p I really like waffles.fm's fundraising. It's all extremely transparent and the only time it's in your face is when the site is in danger of shutting down because they're so behind on server costs. Sure, they're always in danger of shutting down, but the community has stepped up something like nine times now. -- The part of your post I least like is that these bank accounts might eliminate short posts that don't take thought. But not all short posts are like ":D" -- sometimes I just want to say "how does that work," or "what have you been doing," or get into a back-and-forth conversation with kleinbl00 about a fantasy book club. No thought required on any of that, but I'm not sure I should be 'penalized' so to speak. I don't want to have to think twice about putting one-line posts down, necessarily.Anyway it seems like there's not a lot of imagination here. Everyone wants a donation button, but nobody would donate regularly. NPR says something like 1% of regular listeners donate. I can't imagine it'd be much different here. There's value in some creative solution to the funding models that currently exist. I'm NOT saying mine is that solution, but at least it's outside the box, a jump off point for further ideas.
My feelings exactly. I'd like some of Klein's experimentation with some of Green's hippie NPR pipedreams. My better half donates all the little we can to every charity out there. Orphans, puppies, Popes. I blow what little funds I can hide on crap. If Hubski was growing too big for it's britches I'd gladly help to buy it a larger pair.
Please don't raise your pitchforks... but how much could Hubski make off of (shudder) advertising? Would it be enough? How much and how invasive would the presence of ads be to fulfill the minimum financial goals?
Piketty is vomiting into his cereal...
No, in all seriousness, I think it would be a fun site experiment to do this behind the scenes like kleinbl00 suggested. Only issue with that -- you know how they say poker isn't the same game without real money involved -- you can gather all the metrics you want behind the scenes before actual implementation but they won't tell you what will really happen to the site if you set up bank accounts.