I'm going to ramble this out: With the current mechanism the worst thing that can happen is nothing, the best thing that can happen is you get bits. This makes me think I could pander. Muting offers a nice counterbalance as I can flood feeds with shit posts before I'm silenced on a majority of the site, but as the community grows and the common denominator lowers, that might change. But that's a potential future, so we'll set that aside. This will get us, hopefully, a nice boost in content but I wonder what will happen to the level of shares. With actual currency tied to the action, I myself feel more gollum-y, clutching my bits to my chest in search of things that I value, making me want to be less cavalier with my shares. Probably a good thing. I'm going to put my imaginary bits towards an increase in posts with a decrease in shares. Though this does open the door for some interesting "markets". What if it cost bits to post? What if it cost bits to add community tags? What if the current community tag wasn't the one with the most users, but with the most bits? What if badges were automatically worth 100x's boops were worth? You're teetering on the edge of making a free market of community content and the gulf below is vast and awesome. EDIT: oh man, now my mind is going crazy with this. You could make entire stock markets for content. You could tie the popularity of a tag to the number of bits it costs to post to that tag, or to vote in that tag. You could allow authors to set bit bars on their content, forcing people to pay to play. You could create a "karmadecay" that applies a modifier to every bit of content, making reposts progressively more expensive. An actual "karma market" where currency has variable values is such a powerful concept. I'm nerding out right now.
Another idea on this: I could see bits congregating at greedy points - folks who post a lot, get booped a lot, but have their donations set to zero. In time this would create bit pools and stagnate the economy. It's not a pressing concern as the community is still small, but I wonder what effects an expiration date on bits would have.
There was some musing a while back about what a Hubski marketplace might look like. Half baked idea, but it sparked some decent conversation.
More ideas: This one falls under granular control, so I don't think it has merit for hubski in its current form but I think there's something in it. I've been doing writing prompts. If I wanted to hold a week long contest where solid entries get 500 bits, I'd have to adjust my bit rate every time I went back to the thread (because that's just too much to give to everyone). Some way to limit my donations to tags, or posts on my own threads. Maybe even a currency separate from boops. Imagine a golden hubwheel appears only when you have bits. you can vote regularly or with bits, your choice.