Hacker News Reader

Comment by dbcurtis | Hacker News Reader

I really do love the idea. But in addition to the moderation risks others have mentioned, are you prepared to issue tax documents to every jurisdiction where you might be rendering payments?

View on HN

Yes ish, as currently I'm doing payouts via Stripe Connect (and likewise only paying out in countries that Stripe Connect supports, as it takes care of that aspect). Everything is theoretical until battle-tested however.

Personally, if i signed up, i would not be interested in getting payouts. I'd have to declare them on my tax return, and it's just not worth it for such small amounts. So a checkbox to donate any payouts to a charity (the EFF, perhaps?) would be great.

How about doing this _instead_ of paying out to the creators? When you sign up, you choose which charity should get the payouts for your created content? Maybe start with a searchable list of well-known charities, let users propose new as the site grows.

I think that might stem a lot of the potential abuse of the system to earn money, and it gives users a good feeling.

A really great idea. Love that as well. I've also considered adding a threshold for payouts (i.e. $50 withdrawal minimum) to help with the reporting aspects.

Are you dead set on paying out directly? Internet communities always get worse when there's money involved. It will be a constant fight between moderation and clickbait. People will make it their job to game the system. You could, instead, have votes go toward paying a user's subscription fee instead of cash.

Another option is to have a "play it forward" option, where your earnings are passed on to things that you voted for during the month.

> I've also considered adding a threshold for payouts (i.e. $50 withdrawal minimum) to help with the reporting aspects.

Do this anyway. You don't want to be paying out every cent immediately to people reposting things that otherwise warrant moderation.

This is the way. Minimum threshold. That's how Adsense works.

Earning money from this site doesn't particularly interest me. Raising money for charities, and using that as a fun bragging metric to friends totally does. If you want the community to have a great vibe to it, seeing top level users who have donated thousands to charities is a great way to start that. It's a bit hard to troll the community when your raising money for sick kids at the same time.

In every jurisdiction where tax exists a receipt would suffice, which even the most ghetto payment implementation will have (it being the case that the receipt is essentially how the total is made).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com