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> There’s a huge positive-feedback-loop problem in technology right now that needs to be solved to make projects viable.

> Never received even one donation/rating/comment/etc.? Be prepared to wait approximately forever.

> Got a few, especially publicly-visible? Suddenly things trickle in faster.

That's not tech specific; there's a reason that places with tip jars preseed them with an initial stash of visible tips, and advertising (for consumer products, charity, and even B2B productos) features endorsers known to the target audience. Human social behavior is strongly based in imitation.

The tech-specific differences are things like:

- Compared to setting up a coffee stand, it can take years to build really good technical solutions. (Longer, if you actually care and put in “invisible” effort like making it not crash or delete data regularly.) Yet, that app can still be lumped in with all the rest in the begging-for-scraps models of many monetization schemes.

- Unlike a coffee shop, where you can probably assume some amount of traffic and tips on a regular basis, software is often firmly set at ZERO. Or negative, if you consider any other cost. There isn’t a “software neighborhood” where people might walk by and see your project alongside only a couple others in the area.

- Unlike any “natural” recognition in the real world, tech projects are recognized in entirely unnatural ways. No one may know about an app for months; yet if/when knowledge finally spreads, the message is generally LOUD and everywhere. Say, being featured in the App Store: you go from “never heard of it” to “almost everyone in the world with an iPhone who checked top-10 lists this week”. That is far, far beyond the reach of normal ads, and also insane: it pretty much guarantees over-rewarding and under-rewarding developers across the board.

Thus the crazy amount of money that is spent on advertising and its silent twin sister, public relations. And bot nets. Don't forget the bot nets clicking on things.

Human social behavior is strongly based in imitation.

It's called social proof. It is a handy metric if you aren't that knowledgeable and can't judge quality directly for yourself. You look for evidence that other people judge it to be valuable.

Yes, it's manipulable. It isn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination. But in the absence of better ways to make such decisions, it beats having nothing to base it on.

That's not to be argumentative per se. Just elaborating on why it gets done that way.

> there's a reason that places with tip jars preseed them with an initial stash of visible tips

With software donations there's also the initial hump to get over. When you're at a coffee shop and you've just paid $5, it's not much of a stretch to toss another dollar into the jar. You already have your wallet out, and you've already spent money.

When you come across a donation link for some free software you've started using, you don't have any of that.

I even balk at $0.99 for a mobile app, even though I know that a dollar is inconsequential to me (and I believe I can even "return" it within 24 hours if I don't like it!), even though paying for it is only a single confirmation tap beyond what installing a free alternative would be.

It's astounding how much psychology and emotion governs what we do in this space. Very little has to do with logic or rational evaluation.

Ah, the cruelty of power law distributions. Problem is they come up everywhere, all the time -- as often, if not more often, than Gaussian distributions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law

As a little aside here, gaussian distributions aren't really that common. Even if we put ignore splitting hairs about "true" Gaussian versus approximate Gaussian (which would just be pedantic), Gaussian distributions seem to show up frequently for two reasons. The first reason is because they're attractive and useful as a model, so many measurements are specifically designed to approximate a Gaussian. These are usually artificial, not naturally occurring. The second reason is because it's easy to abuse the term to refer to anything that looks decently uniform visually, if not rigorously, and hand wave away the details as long as it gets the rhetorical point across.

The first phenomenon leads to many natural things being interpreted as Gaussian when that's just an artifact of measurement (as an example, see the BMI scale). The second is very similar to the way you can reliably hear people use the term "exponential" to describe a large absolute increase, even if that increase isn't even quadratic.

Well, the Gaussian shows up a lot because of the Central Limit Theorem. A lot of additive processes will converge to the Gaussian.

the distribution of distributions that you find in textbooks is power law distributed (or pretty close, iirc). at the top of that power law distribution is, ironically, the gaussian.

This is soul crushing when starting B2B companies. The valley of death between "first customer who breaks everything" and "ten customers happily using your product without customization" takes a (physically) painful amount of time. Much better to do pre-investment and get it out of the way.

[Disclaimer: that happened in France, not sure it applies in all countries] A friend of mine is a freelance worker, getting paid in public grants for doing 100% OSS dev for medical software. He has a skill that I have not: he spends 50% of his time filling forms, making proposals and hunting grants that often fail. The ones that succeed, however, pay him several months of time.

There are public funds out there, in France and in EU, at least. Getting them require a bit of networking (you usually need to be back up by a partner either a lab, a company or an institution) a lot of paperwork but it allows to get financed in a way that charity or donations will have a hard time achieving.

It's a business opportunity that someone should tackle anytime soon (like patreon). A company to be the umbrella for these important projects that no one care but use. Companies and people using some of these projects donate to this main company and it distributes to its "incubated" projects.

Does something like this already exist?

Sounds kind of like Apache. Or less similarly, but more successfully, Mozilla.

Or https://opencollective.com/

I know and contribute through https://opencollective.com, but I wouldn't be surprised if there are more platform like this.

ISC comes to mind - https://www.isc.org/

>There’s a huge positive-feedback-loop problem in technology right now that needs to be solved to make projects viable.

As others have said in this thread, it is not specific to technology.

Other words to describe it: Hipsters, teenager-(like)-wannabe-with-the-"in"-crowd-mentality (I see that a lot in adults), winner-take-all, network effects, (going back) "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" (or insert other popular bigco name here), ... , all the way back to the fundamental point - human nature.

Not very many people are discerning and try to make independent judgments/decisions. Much easier to follow the crowd or herd.

This isn't only a problem with technology: https://ofdollarsanddata.com/why-winners-keep-winning-4e7f22...

> Both King and Rowling’s foray into undercover writing reveals a harsh truth about success and social status — winners keep winning. This idea is formally known as cumulative advantage, or the Matthew effect, and explains how those who start with an advantage relative to others can retain that advantage over long periods of time. This effect has also been shown to describe how music gets popular, but applies to any domain that can result in fame or social status. I discovered this concept by reading Michael Mauboussin’s The Success Equation where he writes:

>> The Matthew effect explains how two people can start in nearly the same place and end up worlds apart. In these kinds of systems, initial conditions matter. And as time goes on, they matter more and more.

I feel like HN is an imperfect but not terrible partial solution. Yes, it is still based on likes and involves no small element of luck, but you can have a project that is not very well known, post it on HN, get 50-100 views minimum and if your project resonates and gets a bit lucky, it can be a good kickstart

It's still based on the same social feedback loops and marketing that causes the problem you describe, but it makes it easier for unknown projects to get seen and evaluated by a knowledgable, generally objective audience

>Well-known project with 5000 stars? Here, have more stars. Here, have more donations

agree with getting more stars, but donation? not yet :-/ :( https://github.com/learnbyexample/Command-line-text-processi...

You live in a competitive society, and that is the logical result of that. We should (especially the creative ones) fight for a society with wealth redistribution, so we wouldn't have to spent the whole day working just to survive and more people would be able to work in projects that are meaningful.

It shows the importance of self-promotion. If you don't self-promote then no one will know that you exist no matter how good or even how significant your project is.

It's easy to forget to self-promote when you're busy doing actual work though.

That was my problem as well because I created a popular open source project and I was focused on driving all the attention towards the project and none to myself. I created a Twitter account for the project, the GitHub repo was under an organization instead of my own personal profile, the blog I made was also named after the project.

The lesson I learned is that people don't care that much about projects and concepts, they need to see faces and names. Even among highly technical developer communities... So imagine how bad it must be in mainstream communities.

You could always hold the industry ransom. Proprietary everything, strict paid licensing, unions/guilds, etc. See how much people are willing to pay once the things they take for granted are gone

That problem has been described in sociology and is called a Matthew effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect

I agree with everything you say, and would like to note this:

You have just written a simple and alternative specification for "government" :)