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Comment by jv22222 | Hacker News Reader

I built a knowledge sharing startup back in 2001 called Woyano.

One thing we learned, as a general rule, it is difficult to effectively pay people to create good content on a social network.

The best and most knowledgeable people want to create content based on intrinsic motivations rather than financial ones.

One only need look at Wikipedia, Stackoverflow, Quora, etc to see intrinsic motivation inspiring good content.

I guess the main point is that once you start paying people then the intrinsically motivated people aren't as likely to post on the same place.

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What about with moderation?

I've found reddit's "anybody can be a moderator" model to be disasterous myself. It creates cliques founded entirely on fluff and plastic fakery, which is horrible to see.

On the other hand, HN is moderated by a couple of people on payroll.

I understand (might be wrong, but I think this is true) that Imgur uses volunteers, but puts them under NDA. Objectively makes sense for a site aimed for maximum ad impressions above all else, but only objectively.

I would really, really like to find out if it's possible to find a good balance. I'm not sure if the /. model is at the cutting edge (per se) of social/technical interaction.

You can always create an alternative frontend, which will moderate content which you like. Steem gives you freedom. You can build on top of it any kind of frontend with any filter.

For example guys from EOS decided to build own forum based on STEEM: https://eostalk.io/

They filter out everything not related to EOS :) Of course all content is available via generic websites/blockexplorers like steemit/steemdb.

But there are many more people who would love to create things, and get paid for their labor.

The "best" and "most knowledgeable" I know are all either employed or get paid in some way.

Maybe the distinction lies in the filtering. Stackoverflow and Wikipedia have high quality because only people that really care about a subject (and thus usually know a lot) will invest time for free.

Once you start paying people, the much larger audience of 'people that want money' starts posting and the good people get drowned out.

Your friends who are employed were filtered by the hiring process. I imagine Google would be much worse if they hired everyone who applied.

> Once you start paying people, the much larger audience of 'people that want money' starts posting and the good people get drowned out.

Yep. Seen this on a forum called Digitalpoint, back when they had revenue sharing for posts. In theory, that should have made people post higher quality content given the financial reward for doing so. In practice? It inspired thousands of people from third world countries to join and post uninspired gibberish for the chance to get their Adsense ID used in every thread they posted in. A site that already had problems with spammers registering and posting meaningless content for signature backlinks ended up getting flooded by people who saw it as a convenient get rich quick scheme.

I disagree.

Photoshop is objectively better than GIMP.

With larger audience you will have a greater variety, more bad and good content. Good content tends to float to the top, bad one is ignored, on average. Everyone benefits.

This is missing the last point of my argument though. Paid professionals like those that build Photoshop or Google are filtered by the hiring process.

Steemit (and I assume Woyano in the parent) is lacking both the GIMP/Wikipedia filter of people who are willing to work for free and the Photoshop/Google filter of screening people for ability before paying them to do something. This can land it in an unhappy valley where people are encouraged to churn out whatever and sheer volume makes it harder for good content to rise to the top.

I’m not saying it’s impossible for a model like this to work, just that it’s easy to fall into a trap where the best strategy to make money is to churn out low-quality content and so that’s what you get flooded with. Think of it as similar to the clickbait problem in online journalism.

There is a difference between paying people to create content in a desert and allowing anyone to monetize their audience. In every current social network there are people profiting from the content that they share or create. About good content, I think it's more a question of the tools offered to discover, selection and moderation of what is created.

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