zlacker

Daniel Ariely had a great analogy for this:

Your grandmother cooks an amazing dinner each Thanksgiving, for nothing but your love and thanks.

If at the end of the meal you said, “Great dinner, Gran, here’s for your trouble,” and handed her a $20, how do you think she’d react?

>>gcanyo+(OP)
Presumably this board is populated by pseudoanonymous people, not my grandma though. I don’t feel weird about paying a stranger to cook my food, I feel weird about paying someone I know because it changes a familial relationship into something it never was: a transactional one.

But this does suggest that it would be different to comment on a board like this. People wouldn’t just be making comments for the joy of discussion, they would be making comments with their hands out for a tip.

I think this incentivizes low investment drive-by comments, but perhaps this could be fixed as well. For example, you don’t have to display the actual upvotes/downvotes score of a comment, you can display and sort by a score which is a function of those things and additional information about the quality of that comment, incentivizing comments which are both popular and insightful.

>>janals+b8
It's not about how you feel paying your gran; it's about how she feels being paid by you.

The key factor is that people who have a sense of belonging or ownership will donate their time and expertise. People on /r/AskHistorians go to extreme lengths to provide ultra-high-quality answers for free because that's what it takes to be part of that community. The one time I felt like I actually had something to contribute I started my comment (a reply to another comment, there's zero chance I'll ever be qualified to provide a top-level response) with "It's an amazing day, I actually have something to contribute here!" And many people start their comments that way.

A paid environment -- especially one where the compensation is likely to be trivially small -- is far less likely to engender that sort of participation and support.