Coderwall (YC W12) launches Assembly
venturebeat.com
venturebeat.com
1) Voting on each others work introduces perverse incentives when money is involved. It also potentially undermines the very spirit of community which Assembly is trying to capitalize on. Instead of having to judge each other a couple times a year (in a traditional peer review), we're constantly judging each other and thinking about how we'll be judged.
2) I think the 5% reward unfairly justifies the notion that ideas are worth something. They're worth maybe 1% (at most) of most startup success. Success comes from persistence, execution, and luck. Reaffirming the notion that "idea people" are worth much doesn't help anyone.
3) Big, boring, important tasks will likely never get accomplished due to the incentive structure. Every community member can only give one point to a contribution. (https://assemblymade.com/help/profits#profits-2) So that massive implementation you made that laid the groundwork for the entire backend will only get 1 point from each other developer. (And the number of people in the particular "community" qualified enough to understand this kind of work isn't large enough for crowds to work well.) So instead people are incentivized to do lots of quick & simple front-endy tasks.
All together, the politics of this really worry me.
1) The voting is not a judgement of people's contributions, it's more the community's valuation of a particular piece of work. The votes help prioritise the importance of a task or feature which can then be claimed by anyone who completes the work.
2) It's a tricky thing, what is the idea worth? 1%, 2%, 10%? 5% felt about right to us but we'll definitely be reviewing this over time.
3) We're going to actively keep WIPs small where we can to help avoid this problem. We also have a core team that helps guide the community towards a shared vision. They can promote certain tasks so they attract more upvotes which in turn makes them more enticing for people to complete.
Thanks for the feedback, we're expecting to do a lot of iterating and working with the community to keep evolving the process.