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If everyone chips in $1, and their $1 is split between all the things they’ve upvoted, isn’t the financial incentive to produce posts that are upvoted by people who don’t typically upvote? That actually seems like a pretty interesting incentive.

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Yes it seems quite clever. People who upvote zero effort memes willy nilly will spread their share thin.

There are a lot more people who upvote zero effort memes though.

But you see, intuitively we think that the number of upvotes in that model is a “dollar payout” for this post. But actually it isn’t! In a meme community, a post with 1000 upvotes would bring its author 1000 * (1/1000) = 1 dollar, but in a hardcore geek community it would be something like 1000 * 1 = 1000 dollars.

It makes me think, what if the upvote counter was the same, i.e. you have only one upvote per month, and it gets split between all upvoted posts. And maybe it would be nice if you could accumulate your upvotes over several months...

If upvote count results in higher visibility, having visibility and payout governed by two different equations might make it harder to optimize, which seems good.

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