I'm amused that y'all's big idea for rescuing Hubski from the funding miasma of social networks is Micropayments - the Great White Hope of People Who Don't Understand Economics. I'm further amused that you decided to hide the mechanics under a layer of abstraction by leveraging the most volatile trading token you could find. Finally, the fact that you've given it to 20 users, none of whom have any real idea what's going on or why, as a measure of a site-wide result kinda tickles me pink. This is a bad idea. You're adding friction to the one aspect of the site you want to be frictionless (Hubski: the discouraging web). For the people whom you have incentivized to Share The Love (STL), you've given no guidance as to expected measures, what the economics actually mean for the site or what everyone else is doing. For the people whom are just watching the experiment you're simply letting them know that you added a weird useless marker to 20 Secret Shoppers. I suspect the end result will be "mk learns why micropayments are a bad idea" which, if this is what it takes, is entirely worth the trouble. HOWEVER if this means that you're going to play games with profit models, I'm all for it... assuming we can try some different games. I have a few ideas. Shall I list them elsewhere, since this discussion is already unwieldy? EDIT two hours after writing this, and with very little else in my feed at the moment, I've determined that I've donated 250 bits and earned 17.3 bits. In other words, this comment has earned me about half a cent in play money. Which, as boldboldness points out, is fucking insulting. Chapter 4.
Micropayments aren't an inherently bad idea. They work for funding services, which is the purpose they were originally intended for. AWS's pricing is pretty much micropayments, though they only bill at certain thresholds to avoid the problem with transaction costs. They don't work well for funding content, and even if they did I don't think Hubski is large enough, but there are circumstances where they work.
There's a big difference between B2B "micropayments" where you're buying into a plan that you expect to cost a stone crapton of money and capital-M Micropayments where you, the end user, are meting out currency a fraction of a cent at a time. On the one hand, you know you're in for several thousand "micropayments" that will comprise a real-money bill. On the other hand, the end user is contemplating spending $.0015 sending an email and trying to decide if it's worth spending $.0030 more to cc two people. The former works. The latter doesn't.
I think the truth of the matter is that users are never going to get a lot when the site is just getting by itself, which looks like to be the lot of the social aggregator. We should probably decide if giving back to the users is meaningful in a monetary sense at all, or if we should just put all revenue towards the site, and hopefully return the value in another way.
Should the users get a lot? I'm certainly not here because I think it'll make me rich, I'm here because I think this is a valuable community whose insights and opinions matter to me. Our previous discussion about b-corps segues nicely with rob's insistence on open-sourcing. That Pando article about Digg v. Reddit also points out that Craigslist still exists because they never prioritized monetization. I think you guys are in an entirely different paradigm than Reddit in that you aren't interested in a sale and you aren't interested in getting a bunch of TED talks out of this - you want to build a lasting, worthwhile community that isn't a financial drain on you. That gives you a lot more leeway. I'm 100% sure Hubski can be operated at a profit such that it will provide for the livelihoods of those who devote their time to running it. Part of the reason is that I think it's a system with a great deal of extensibility and scalability; the other part is that because of how you've arranged it you just don't need a lot of staff. I'm equally 100% sure that Hubski will never be bought out for millions of dollars. If you're cool with that, the future is bright.
Of interest, Hubski is sitting at 45000 bits atm. However, there was one whale involved. What I am cool with is making something that lasts that wouldn't have otherwise existed. I'd really like to be able to pay the people that work on it too. I didn't expect that user revenue would ever be much more than the occasional sandwich, but that's because there just isn't that much to go around. It was intended as a gesture, and the ability to involve the users in an interesting way that stays alive. I don't want to beg like Jimmy Wales. It's funny, gaming Hubski for bits is just a terrible value proposition. I am also a fan of selective sharing pressure. IMO it is a important factor in the health of the site.