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Show HN: Pay to Play Social Media

niceplace.network

19 pointsseekuk10 comments

Interesting experiment! What type of content do you expect to attract? How do you foresee users behaving in response to the incentives set up?

My gut reaction is a worry that because people in general tend to upvote things they already know and agree with, giving extra value to upvotes might create even more bias toward boring conformity. I imagine it would deter users with different interests or opinions from participating, since they wouldn't want to spend money just to risk being ignored or shown the door.

I think successful communities fight such stagnation by being focused and moderated; people join because they care about the topic the community discusses rather than the people in it, and trust moderators to trim upvote-farming relatable memes, over-discussed subjects, and interpersonal drama, to keep the spotlight on topical discussion. Anything else tends to lead to 4chan /b/.

When I read statements like "minority mobs can't cancel users", I assume the intent here is to build a right-wing social network like Gab or Parler. Is that the intent? If that is not the intent, you should consider revising your materials.

I also have a general skepticism towards sites that want my email address for nothing, and I fear the money math is simply untenable (you're going to pay for all the credit card fees and such? $50,000 from users will not mean $50,000 available to redistribute) and you would also have to worry about issuing 1099s and similar problems if you pay people. It also seems like a voting pool could make sure they capture most of the revenue by upvoting within their pool.

Ah yes, another right wing circle jerk. If you can't moderate, I'm not interested. I don't have time for the racists, fascists, and other far right loons you are going to attract.

It's social media, not a debating free for all. If I wanted to read shitty takes all day, I'd take an intro to debate class. No different then if you were opening a resteraunt or a store front or a bar, I'm not here for shit flinging monkey free for all's, I'm here for an enjoyable time, I don't care if some racist ass hole gets kicked off and banned, in fact I welcome that as do many others.

It's intellectually lazy to offload the moderation to your users. But I guess as long as you sell data and get a loony patron like parler did, then you'll be personally set.

Hi there, appreciate your opinion. Shame to hear you're not interested, because your voice could be valuable as the platform's culture develops.

Our belief is that the average human is not a bad person, so if we leave moderation to them, bad people will be removed. We're taking a wait-and-see approach rather than proactively treating our users like criminals despite their current positivity and respect for each other.

Every decision on the platform's direction will be taken with the user's utility in mind. We don't see selling user data as being helpful for users, so we won't be doing this.

While the concept is interesting, wouldn't it be a turn off to pay without being sure you will get money in the end? What if people want to help but aren't really influencial? Some people do their best to help and be supportive on all these platforms but don't get upvoted a lot, or just receive one reply from the author of the post… Wouldn't it cause some kind of fights for visibility?

Good question. One of the things we've done is build it so you can't post a status/photo/video to build a following that way. All you can do is post either a question or a discussion topic, or comment on/answer one of those.

So far this has meant that the influencer-types haven't taken all the credit and all the money, and that the points you generate are all about how useful your answers are in the context of the discussion/question. We're going to keep monitoring this and make adjustments where necessary, but right now we're happy with the balance.

I would emphasize that this site pays its users, not just charges them. Otherwise it invites comparisons to ihave50dollars.com, the 'real-time social feed for people who have $50.'

https://web.archive.org/web/20120819031531/http://ihave50dol...

The idea is nice, but I think implementing something like that well is going to be very challenging.

One one hand, you'll have users trying hard to game the system (if you think karma is motivating, try actual money), populism, and on the other hand filter bubbles. I think these are strong forces, and it would be hard to stir it away from being full of low effort emotional-appealing posts.

I think you're right - these are risks. One thing we've done is build it so you can't just post (a status). All you can do is ask a question or start a discussion. The answers/comments could then be low effort and emotional, but we'll rely on the community to determine this and outvote those answers.

why reinvent the wheel when metafilter has existed with a similar subscription-to-post premise since 1999?

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