Comment by mickdaisy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mickdaisy | Hacker News Reader

Hi all - Thank you for killing my baby!

In short, the thinking here is that instead of building a community with the intent to monetize the users and their data, we can become sustainable through patron contributions - half of which get redistributed to the users. My thinking is that this incentivizes us all to keep costs very low and also incentivizes members to impress one another, instead of exploiting one another with clickbait or "lead-generation" (advertising for-profit stuff is strictly disallowed).

RE "socialism": this isn't intended to be socialism as a religion ~ more like, "the model we're working with right now is having some painful side-effects and maybe it's worth trying a hypermodern coop / WSDE model that addresses some of the root causes of these symptoms (data abuses, CCP exerting control over our information flow / free speech, cambridge analytics stuff, LGBTQ+/small creators struggling on YouTube, etc)" which happens to align with some socialist principles, from what I gather.

Here's the Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/karmafm

This is very young and experimental, and so far there's only been a single distribution (a whopping $4 (post-fees) sent to a member from a $10 patron contribution) but the Patron contributions have since quadrupled to $40!

Forgive my brevity as I attempt to keep this thing breathing and thank you for taking a look.

Just some feedback:

* Anything with a sign-up feature needs an elevator pitch somewhere on the homepage: "What" and "Why" for the layman, two short paragraphs but ideally a single-sentence elevator pitch.

* Eliminate the ideology, focus messaging on the value and support. "Socialist" is a very broad and burdened term.

* Explain how tf this is socially owned. All I see a dictator, however benevolent, and a very inefficient donation system.

* Player Guide is... bad. Super hand-wavy on the stuff that should be specific (community guidelines), lots of ideology, and straight up fluff. Write assuming every reader is blind and ADD - some of them are, and everyone else will benefit.

Thank you for this. I've added each of these to the Retrospective post here:

https://www.karma.fm/p/67VCB/karma-retrospective-1014

RE the first bullet: did the introduction modal not pop up for you? If not, there's a bug. Anyone who hasn't visited should see the following:

https://i.imgur.com/p4J4oib.png

Thanks for taking time out of your day for this.

> * Eliminate the ideology, focus messaging on the value and support. "Socialist" is a very broad and burdened term.

No. Eliminating the ideology is never possible. If you try, you implicitly support the dominant one. Avoiding the term is a good idea though.

What do you think about embracing the controversy embedded within the term as a means of educating people around its underlying principles, getting people talking/thinking about it, etc?

I'm afraid the term makes many people stop thinking. They hear Karma is socialist and conclude that it's bad. Ideally, you would tell people Karma is socialist only after they have evaluated it.

On the other hand, even the most faithful anti-socialist should recognize that you aren't building a totalitarian dictatorship here. So it may make them think after all.

Hey anoncake ~ just wanted to thank you for planting this seed. You and a few other members had the same ideas, and they're manifesting into a lower-friction articulation of what this thing is all about: https://www.karma.fm/p/S09A4/dialing-down-the-socialism-and-...

Many thanks for the impact.

Thanks for clarifying, it sounds more like you're talking about Voluntaryism and Libertarian ideas.

People paying an amount that they feel is fair vs prescribed is very forward thinking and I wish you luck!

PS: I'd avoid anything that actually returns funds since its likely to end up being called a Ponzi scheme...

Sure thing, thanks for taking an interest. And yeah, that sounds about right. Although my dream is to gradually push this into the hands of some kind of meritocratic collective ownership, where the "workers" own the "means of production", which in this case would be the students/activists being able to fork the data, app code, and devops for free at any time.

RE ponzi scheme... hmmm... so when a Patron makes a $10 contribution, they can then choose which user receives half of their contribution. I wonder how to prevent the perception from turning Ponzi with this model...

Meritocratic -> You could look at postings/content as "points" and then keep a running tally and let people use their "points" for things. Medium does this AFAIK (although apparently they turn them into dollars for their pro authors).

HN just uses karma points for moderation/access so its not quite as handy but I think people respect people with lots of Karma. Like I know there's one person with over 300k karma points here, he's a pretty cool dude and I think his points reflect that.

Love this. Thank you.

My "cobbled together" implementation is as follows: every user begins with a fixed number of "bolts"; they can unlock more bolts through various "virtuous deeds" (TBD), or they can earn bolts through their comments/posts; their general "bolt throughput" is a proxy to how much "karma" they've earned and given to others.

Though this was cobbled together without any real understanding of behavioral economics and with a whole bunch of untested assumptions, so as it evolves, I'll have to study the tried-and-tested models of Medium, Reddit, HN, and think about what works, what doesn't, what Karma users need/want, and then innovate upon that assessment if needed. I have some thoughts on that but I'm still battling some stability dragons over here...

Thanks again for poking around and helping out.

>RE "socialism": this isn't intended to be socialism as a religion

It was a poor choice of words to put it in the tagline then, for a number of reasons.

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