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Comment by motters | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately this model doesn't seem to work. If you look at what's getting votes it's things like pictures of girls and kittens.

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It may not work. It's still too early to tell. If you look at other content sites that have tried to pay out to contributors (think Mahalo), their models didn't work either. Huffington post finds more success by paying nothing.

The difference is their money comes from ad revenue not from the users themselves. Didnt huffington post sell for quite a lot of money to AOL and the people who actually built it got nothing ?

I think the problem here is that the introduction of payment changes the psychology from one of sharing information to one of maximizing income (gift Vs capital). In the latter mode of operation the quality of the information is a secondary concern.

I had similar misgivings/feelings while using the product. However: Two observations: 1.) they did include user-selected charities lately in their distribution of "upvote" profits; 2.) The point is less about making money, more about adverse selection (keeping out trolls). Nobody could subsist off of this in any real kind of way. If they did--the value they would have to provide would be immense.

Hopefully the small amounts we are dealing with makes it less worthwhile for spammers as well as not seem like a purely profit driven incentive. All things in moderation as they say.

Well if that's what people are willing to pay for then let them have it. I don't see how it doesn't work.

There is a cost if the articles isn't popular(which rules submitting any old crap)

There is a cost of voting up articles, which rules out people with too much time(and not enough money) on their hands scewing the numbers.

Perhaps it hasn't worked before, but then no one has tried doing this with bitcoin, that singular ingredient makes a lot of formerly impossible things very achievable.

That's the same argument that the tabloid newspapers use, and it doesn't work for them either. What readers end up with is low quality information, popular conspiracy theories, sensationalism, voyeurism, etc. What's really needed is some kind of system which sets up a virtuous cycle rather than a downward spiral.

"What readers end up with is low quality information, popular conspiracy theories, sensationalism, voyeurism, etc."

Readers end up with this because this is what readers want. We know this is what they want because it's what they pay for, which works just fine for tabloid newspapers.

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