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Comment by janalsncm | Hacker News Reader

On the flip side, the fact that this is a crowded space means that there’s a demand for it. And this isn’t a Reddit clone, it has a business model which is pretty close to the best anyone could hope for in my opinion. In any case, I applaud any efforts that could unseat Reddit or make them reconsider their greedy hard line.

I encourage the creator of Non.io to identify the key shortcomings of Reddit and improve upon them. Don’t just try to clone Reddit beyond the basic image/link board, otherwise you’ll just be playing their game. Change the game. There is a Folding Ideas video on this topic which has some great insights with respect to YouTube: https://youtu.be/r3snVCRo_bI

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> “it has a business model”

What’s that story about the economist who was trying to concentrate but there were kids playing soccer below his window and being noisy, so he went out and offered them $1 each if they come back and played tomorrow. The next day he offered them 50c, then 25c, and after that 5c, and the kids got annoyed “we wouldn’t come here to play for a measly five cents!” and stormed off, and didn’t come back.

I’ve put many hours into Reddit and Stackoverflow for free, but if you take $24 from me for a year and then offer me $0.0193 for my efforts based on upvotes I might feel a bit cheesed off about it.

Being forced to face how insignificant I am feels likely to drive me away, free upvotes at least let me feel important and they cost nothing.

Or the people who knit clothes saying things along the lines of “I’ll do it for a genuine thank you, but $10 is an insult; if this is a transaction, that doesn’t begin to cover my costs let alone my time”.

I’m not sure. I think it’s an interesting experiment at least. My prediction is that it will encourage clickbaity behavior similar to YouTube, which also has a profit sharing mechanism. Long form content has little chance to compete against drive-by laughs and memes. Maybe donations would help.

Medium is a prime example of monetization leading to poor content

haha right, the cultural problem is that when one has to pay $24 one should loudly cry how expensive it is tirelessly, again and again, all day, every day, until the server is shut down but when one is paid $24 one should be offended by what little money it is and as elaborately and tirelessly explain that your posts are worth so much more. You took whole minutes worth of valuable time out of your day to write them.

What if you pump it up with VC money?

When you pump it up with VC money, you get Reddit all over again.

Looking over the VC-funded tech landscape, Reddit is close to the best case outcome.

>but if you take $24 from me for a year and then offer me $0.0193 for my efforts based on upvotes I might feel a bit cheesed off about it.

is that how it works? I thought it was offering payments based on who creates posts or other community tools, not based on participation.

you are correct that 2 cents would be a pittance to me who doesn't even want to be paid to browse content. But if I and 1000 others gave that 2 cents to what we thought was quality content, that could make someone's day (not career per se. But $20 from random strangers feels good). At scale that's basically how YT/Twitch work, except they don't take money directly from us so much as time (for ads).

It reads to me like:

> "[your subscription fee over my $1 take] gets split evenly between everything you upvote that month."

So if I subscribe and pay $2/month, there's $1/month from me for that, so if I upvote ten things they each get $0.03 from me and if I upvote a ten things a day that's three hundred in a month, they each get $0.0033 from me.

I'm not clear if that covers comments or only top level submissions / posts, but if I comment and get upvoted ten times in a month, presumably I get some money from the upvoters, like $0.03. There are times I've spent well over an hour writing programming comments on Reddit, testing code or trying to explain a concept, things that could have been a blog post. Getting nothing for it is fine, that was the deal. Getting $0.03 for it is more like tipping a waitress a penny, I think. Getting $10 would need into the thousands of votes (which rarely happens on Reddit comments by comparison) and still wouldn't pay for my time wtiting it by minimum wage.

There needs to be a limit on things you can upvote each month based on how much you give as a subscription. Each upvote should be worth at least 1 penny. If you agree to subscribe for $2 a month, that gives you a max of 100 upvotes (1 for each penny over the dollar server costs).

The more you donate, the more upvotes you get ($5 per month would give you 400 votes).

How much do companies buy upvotes for on Reddit (or on HN?) at present? It would be interesting to compare that figure with any proposed pricing structure.

Idt tying upvotes to money is a good community model at all.

Many of the richest people in the world are also the worst kind of people.

You will not see diverse content being upvoted with this model and you will encourage rampant corruption (ie Trump campaign being upvoted using right wing corporate funds/"donations" to promote it).

Yeah, I see what you mean, and it's definitely not clear enough to say whether or not this is just for posters or also commenters.

I think this only works if you throttle votes (and assumedly, this only applies to voted on posts, not necessarily every comment), but that was one of the worst parts of Voat (from a technical standpoint, at least). There probably needs to be normal old infinite "I like this" votes and then treat your subscription votes as a form of gilding (except it actually does help pay someone, unlike reddit's gilding).

You can also propose that you do let non-subscribers vote, but a subscriber vote weighs more. Be it explicit* or not.

*(e.g. hover over votes and you see a split of which are "subsciber votes. Which say, counts as 5 votes or something. so A 30 point post with 2 subs votes = 20 normal voters + 2 subs)

I would just tell the bottom 95% of people they aren't getting anything at all. There is no point just paying somebody their subscription back. Now if you are posting your art regularly or similar, that's extra money that can go to you.

I'd rather not make it a winner take all arms race. We know that historically leads to sabatoge being the preferred tool of choice.

But sure, maybe it's better to set a floor for monetization, similar to how a YT channel needs 1000 subs to start being monetized. It's not valuable nor enticing for every user who posts something with 10 votes to collect 10 cents. Someone else did mention something about a $50 minimal withdrawal.

Maybe the solution is to weight upvotes by the number of upvotes cast that month in the "subreddit"

If there are 100K upvotes per month in some small city sub, and 100B in the videos sub, getting 1K upvotes in the city sub would would be the equivalent of 1B in the videos sub (in terms of your distribution)

This would encourage people to participate in smaller communities, which could be really nice for keeping the "small town" vibe of early reddit.

That's an interesting idea. It would need some kind of tweaking for low values otherwise it would be exploitable to generate as much revenue from a 10 people sub then from a bigger one.

> This would encourage people to participate in smaller communities, which could be really nice for keeping the "small town" vibe of early reddit.

Couldn't it also cause a fragmentation of content across different same-ish subs ?

Look at it more as a way to offset your subscription cost, not a possible side income. If you're a contributing member you get a content service for near free, with much better quality/spam control than something like Reddit.

Overjustification effect in action.

Daniel Ariely had a great analogy for this:

Your grandmother cooks an amazing dinner each Thanksgiving, for nothing but your love and thanks.

If at the end of the meal you said, “Great dinner, Gran, here’s for your trouble,” and handed her a $20, how do you think she’d react?

Presumably this board is populated by pseudoanonymous people, not my grandma though. I don’t feel weird about paying a stranger to cook my food, I feel weird about paying someone I know because it changes a familial relationship into something it never was: a transactional one.

But this does suggest that it would be different to comment on a board like this. People wouldn’t just be making comments for the joy of discussion, they would be making comments with their hands out for a tip.

I think this incentivizes low investment drive-by comments, but perhaps this could be fixed as well. For example, you don’t have to display the actual upvotes/downvotes score of a comment, you can display and sort by a score which is a function of those things and additional information about the quality of that comment, incentivizing comments which are both popular and insightful.

It's not about how you feel paying your gran; it's about how she feels being paid by you.

The key factor is that people who have a sense of belonging or ownership will donate their time and expertise. People on /r/AskHistorians go to extreme lengths to provide ultra-high-quality answers for free because that's what it takes to be part of that community. The one time I felt like I actually had something to contribute I started my comment (a reply to another comment, there's zero chance I'll ever be qualified to provide a top-level response) with "It's an amazing day, I actually have something to contribute here!" And many people start their comments that way.

A paid environment -- especially one where the compensation is likely to be trivially small -- is far less likely to engender that sort of participation and support.

"You see, officer, the reason I was paying children to play outside my house is because I didn't want them there! It's very clever actually! I got the idea from the internet! It's certainly not what it looks like!"

That folding ideas video is excellent. I implore anyone who wishes to unseat Reddit or any monopolistic website to watch it, so they don't fall into the trap of creating a clone with the same architectural flaws.

Thanks for the reference on the Folding Ideas, great video!

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