When real money is involved on the internet the worst kinds of stuff results, and it takes a lot of effort to avoid it. How's that going to work?
None of this is to take away from your accomplishments here, by the way. The exact opposite in fact, you've got an interesting enough idea that it prompts interesting questions of the mechanics.
P.S. do you have any long-term plans to IPO this if it becomes successful? If not, some kind of guarantee that this platform is immune to enshittification would probably be very, very popular.
when a sub-forum crosses a threshold of insensitivity, just remove it from search and let those fans direct link
sub forums can remain popularity contests where community decides if anything there is a good fit. theyre already echo chambers and nobody is aiming to solve that so just run it that way
What will be interesting is how they are incentivised differently. Different people attach different relative value to fake internet points and less-fake currency points, so you'll get different behaviour from different sets of people.
This is a solid call out. Part of me wants to keep things private in order to maintain the "user is the customer" alignment. One issue with going public is it then means shareholders become your primary customer, with your users becoming second tier. I'm not quite sure what the answer is.
This also brings me to the question of funding - on one hand, proper funding here would help drastically with launching, on the other hand it comes with expectations and requirements.
Part of the reason why I want paid users though is it means the site can be self-sustaining without that funding, if it can get past the network effect threshold.
Lots to think about.
That's what the objective of the site is. Viewing doesn't reward anything (whereas views do reward in the video you just linked). My hope as well is that for nonio, knowing you're contributing a share of your monthly pool will make people more conscientious about what they upvote, thus improving quality.
Just charging $2 might be a huge improvement over reddit because it makes sock puppets cost too much to scale.
Paying out for upvotes, I fear will incentivize lowest-common-denominator content. If you go to a quality tech subreddit and sort by "Top" comments, they will mostly be memes. They won't be from an expert solving your very specific problem. And more generally, I worry it will reward that twitter-style, shrill political dunking, binary thinking, maximalism and in-group point scoring. This may be a recipe for an even more toxic r/politics.
Very interesting trying to puzzle out how a given incentive structure will play out in practice.
If he can get 50k paying users, he's a millionaire. If that means low effort meme posts, who are you to slap those dollars out of his hand?
The "intelligentsia" of the Internet need to get a grip on what people want; these sites are for entertainment not elucidation and discovery.
I could subscribe to a couple moderator's idea of "low effort", a few more for "spam" moderation, etc . Could even have "#racist" and "#woke" mods, whatever bubble you choose to subscribe to.
That puts an upper limit on how much of an "attention whore" you can reasonably be.
Same reason I buy albums that I love despite me already having Spotify—to give back to the creators.
Do this anyway. You don't want to be paying out every cent immediately to people reposting things that otherwise warrant moderation.
I think that might stem a lot of the potential abuse of the system to earn money, and it gives users a good feeling.
You’d have to show thats a substantial part of Reddit’s traffic and therefore revenue, for it to actually be given.
I'd also give out upvotes more sparingly overall, since upvoting a post reduces the amount my previously upvoted posts will get paid.
1. Hustlers and schemers, who want to get rich quick (usually the folks that like spam, blackhat SEO and 'hustle culture').
2. Folks in 3rd world countries who see this as a ticket out of poverty.
The former are a disaster for any good community site or service, and the latter have the potential to become the former, since 'spam the crap out of a service for the chance to make more money' becomes an enticing proposition. A big digital marketing forum shut down its revenue sharing because these folks flooded it with low quality crap, the likes of Medium and Quora have become hellholes due to the same incentives, and crypto based 'pay to earn' games have literally led to people starting up sweatshops to make money in them.
Having it also cost money to use the site will help a bit, but it'll also filter out many good users due to not wanting to spend money on a subscription, and create a mental calculus of "can I make more from my content than it'll cost me to sign up", which isn't ideal in itself.
> This means you’ll no longer have to add “Reddit” to your searches when you’re looking for thoughts from actual humans, not empty answers from websites just trying to get clicks.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/20/23034024/brave-search-fea...
> It turns out that almost 70% of polled readers add 'Reddit' to their search results at least sometimes.
https://www.androidauthority.com/reddit-web-search-queries-p...
I can’t say that it’s a substantial portion of Reddit’s traffic, of course. But clearly it’s not just a mrtranscendence idiosyncrasy.
I foresee some company suing because their content is being monetised by other people.
Besides, there are many routes to profitability here that have absolutely nothing to do with replicating all of Reddit's value for a user. Presuming this needs to be a 1:1 clone of Reddit seems needlessly reductive.
The basic incentive of money drives all sorts of things. Maybe the best “exploit” will be to find interesting and novel links.
Ofc there are determined and financuially comfortable trolls out there that would still make a few dozen, but those few are easier to stamp out without the noise of low effort trolls.
>if there is monetary incentive to get upvotes/attention seems like it could pencil out
worst case, it helps pay for the server. But yes, this is the equivalent of a KS campaign being partially self-funded to make it seem like others are interested. There are likely dozens of other tricks that such a community would reveal.
That way you can interact with the site and upvote shitty memes as you normally would, but when it is time to be serious you'll using the paying-upvote instead.
Reddit kinda landes on a similar formula with Reddit gold.
- $1 goes to the server
- $.67 goes to the users you upvote
- $.33 goes to the moderator(s) of the group you upvoted in.
So there's actual incentive to want to mod to begin with, and less incentive to risk that by trying to game for post votes as well.
Now ofc I already see a half dozen issues here, so we'd need to deviate strongly from reddit to make this work:
- you can't just create subs willy-nilly. You don't even want that in the beginning anyway because you shouldn't splinter a small community. There would need to be a formal way to talk to an admin and request any new sub. Or at least, we need to delineate from a monetized sub vs. non-monetized, with ways to transition from one to the other.
- This encourages small mod groups and you don't want mods to be able to pick/kick at will now that money is involved. Again, new mods would need some more admin intervention for moderator changes.
- As you can assume, A senior mod won't be equal to a newly recruited mod. So it probably isn't the best idea to spread that mod fund equally per se.
- Mod posts would need to be taken into account as well. Maybe moderators (and possible alts) can't make money off their own posts to avoid double dipping
Lot of interesting ideas to go about. So I hope this site does at least get some visibility
from my experience, there will be a LOT more ne'er do wells being filtered than good users. Not because there aren't a lot of good users, but simply because there are a lot more low effort ne'er do wells attracted to internet forums.
Other users can still browse at the very least. I think this will capture that nice medium of "good user who doesn't mind a little incentive". Because ofc the highest quality users aren't posting their ideas on public forums at all
I’m not saying this needs to be a clone of Reddit; I don’t think I implied that, or intended to at least.
It seems counterintuitive to restrict users interacting with your platform, but I could also see it working the other way (I want to login and use my daily allowance instead of losing it).
Arthur: (uninterested) Yes...
Man: But all the decisions of that officer 'ave to be ratified at a special bi-weekly meeting--
Arthur: (perturbed) Yes I see!
Man: By a simple majority, in the case of purely internal affairs--
Arthur: (mad) Be quiet!
Man: But by a two-thirds majority, in the case of more major--
Arthur: (very angry) Be quiet! I order you to be quiet!
But if not, and if memes are what subscribers want to use all their votes on, well... the experiment fails in my eyes (even if it may be a success as a business).
That's also why I feel we need at least two tiers of votes, personally. There will be times where you want to vote on a cheap but funny meme but you don't exactly want to say "yes, this is the content I pay for". A version of vote that says "I don't mind it but obviously you shouldn't make money on this" may help curb that as more of the super votes go to actual quality content. But nothing is bullet proof when you let the people decide.
so how do you feel about HN personally?
>If that means low effort meme posts, who are you to slap those dollars out of his hand?
If so, congrats. I'll keep searching and be glad some rags to riches site came about in a time of multibillion dollar empires.
>these sites are for entertainment not elucidation and discovery.
put it this way. I've been on the internet for decades, and I know that to really find quality content you gotta either pay for it in money behind a paywall, or in a lot of time digging through the muck. I have done both.
I'm not going to pretend there won't be a lot of muck to dig through here, even with the idea of a paid subscription site. But the goal here is that there will be enough nuggets underneath to make it worth it. And currently, that line is pretty low given what I dig through reddit to find.
It makes me think, what if the upvote counter was the same, i.e. you have only one upvote per month, and it gets split between all upvoted posts. And maybe it would be nice if you could accumulate your upvotes over several months...
I don't think that's true. I published some of my privat projects only on reddit because I want to put them out there, but do not expect people to interact too much.
Wouldn't it be highly coincidental if the Top posts contain a solution to your specific problem.
No, tens of thousands.
Nation state actors have troll armies, and $2 extra per astro turfing account would be coffee money compared to the salaries they already pay their trolls.
Websearch for 50 cent army
Alternatively you could base it on the number of upvotes a user gave last month, before correcting it at the end of the month, although that system might be easy to game.
What's that worth for, say Xi in China - look at how much he is ok with spending on invading Taiwan. And how much he'd save, if a to him a more friendly person (Trump) became the president. Then compare that with $2
The people who like memes are a lot easier to make money off of than you, and as much as people pretend to hare money, it’s the way we survive in this world.
This idea more or less surfaces in the book "Fall; or, Dodge in Hell", where in the not-too-distant future the internet is so polluted that you are pretty much expected to hire a full-time "editor" to curate your social media feed. This doesn't scale particularly well, of course, so in reality particularly wealthy families hire an editor to present a cohesive stream of social media to their whole family-tree. Meanwhile the masses typically subscribe to an "off the shelf" stream (or several?) that most closely matches their tastes.
In a 50 army, one individual can be paid a third world wage to register free accounts all day long to post comments. The cost of $2 per comment would massively outweigh their wages.
hence why a website that is not attempting to sell ads to me but has a sound monetization scheme is appealing. Not that I mind a site that uses ads (I have adblock but I wouldn't mind subscribing to something of value to get rid of ads), but one trying to rely on "non-desirable monetization" may have less memes in such a community.
I can certainly be wrong, but again: it's an interesting experiment I wouldn't mind trying out.
Not saying your project isn't high quality, but generally the most consistent stream of high quality projects has someone paying for them.
Tens of thousands of credit cards or phone numbers or whatever - why not, do you think that would be a problem for such a nation state actor
No, for privat projects I am mostly reinventing wheels. But, in some sense, I actually pitched them collectively during my job hunt.
My interests are spread pretty far, so my hobby projects range from building ambisonic microphones over reimplementing interesting algorithms like WFC to implementing Navient Stokes equations in JAX to optimize airfoils in a differentiable CFD simulator.
My new job reflects that, I am pretty happy with that :-)
You miss the point. A 50 cent army is feasible when you are paying third world wages. If Chinese wage increases price them out of the market, then you can just hire people from somewhere else. But it's the low wages that make such an attack possible. Low wages vs high wages don't matter much when you are spending $200/hr per soldier on Reddit account fees.
If China wants to launch a state-level attack on Reddit they are probably better off pressuring Tencent to pressure Reddit to just do what they want.
I don't think it's a good guess,
nevertheless, for 10 000 people, it's nothing, it's coffee money for the CCP.
Interesting anyway to have heard your thoughts. Have a nice day (probably won't reply any more)