This occurred to me, too, but I'm reminded of this xkcd comic. While it can definitely be corrupted, what if all this does is produce posters obsessed with sharing high quality content? I find this experiment fascinating and am optimistic.
I'm worried about this cheapening the content, more than anything. I love hubski the way it is, but I'm afraid that, as it gets bigger, people will start posting easily digestible content that doesn't promote thoughtfulness...which becomes a slippery slope when you add in monetary rewards. I don't want Hubski to become Reddit, and we know how that karma system has promoted frequent low-quality posts for the sake of, "Karma-Whoring." I'm afraid that giving money to users for posting something popular could lead us down that same path.
This is very early in the testing process, but already I find I'm a bit more stingy with my boops and shares knowing I have a finite amount of funds to give out. If I know I'm giving away my hard earned money with every share, I want to make sure it's spent on quality content. I suppose a problem would arise if a majority of users felt their money is better spent on content featuring memes and tired jokes instead of articles on current politics and technology, for example. Thankfully those type of users are sparse on Hubski.
I think another aspect is that I don't really know how much each of these bits is worth. Like, I've been told, but that has no real meaning since I got them for free. At first I was just giving out 4 bits per boop (awesome sentence), but then my bit count went up by a ton after only a few boops. I felt that social pressure to adjust my valuation of bits and give out more per boop. Once it's tied to a dollar value, I wonder how I'll actually react. I'm trying to pretend, but it's hard since it's just not my money.
I'm doing a 100 bits per boop (bpb?) right now. I figure that should allow me to run through the 35000 bits I have in the two weeks we have. Or at least a large portion of them. The 35000 bits corresponds to about 10 real dollars. I could see myself investing 10 bucks in Hubski every two weeks.
Ooh, that makes me think of something that could (potentially) make this work, in that even if people put money in, there's a hard limit to how much you can put in per month, for example. That way people will remain somewhat stingy with who they award because they can only do it so much in a month, and it could help prevent the value of it from cheapening and people wouldn't have much reason to make pandering posts. Still wouldn't solve all issues concerning that, though, I realize after writing this out.
It's certainly possible. Maybe I'm too optimistic, but my hope is the expense to the user up-hubbing results in some restraint. Whether it's credit I've received or paid for, I'll think twice about sharing a cute picture of a cat or up-hubbing a witty but low effort comment. In a world with no down votes, having a small expense to sharing a link hopefully steers users toward posts they find valuable rather than merely amusing.
I thought about this too but couldn't get past the "pay to win" model. If, for example, hubski gets super popular, what's to stop an ad agency from buying 1,000,000 and flooding the site? Credits are cheap and $5000 is a drop in the bucket of a major ad campaign.
What's stopping them from creating a bunch of accounts and doing that now? These bits are buying you anything. We're not saying you can't share if you don't have money. Interactions are remaining the same but now your vote has a bit more value.
Oh, I was replying specifically to the idea that submissions should cost some nominal amount of bits.
Honestly, it could work really well, I'm merely trying to express my fears. I hope that the system goes exactly how mk and friends have planned, I'm just a bit too cynical. If this system went live, I would certainly buy in for a small amount just to feed the system and support hubski.
This seems the most likely downfall of this approach. Still, it seems odd that the low quality content would have the advantage when there is a greater cost associated with it proliferating it. No doubt, there may be a stronger incentive to produce it now. If these factors are at play, I wonder how they will balance out. That said, the motivation to experiment like this is because we want to create something that can scale and maintain its integrity and purpose. Other funding models aren't well-aligned. IMO it's an open question if we can find a better one, but this will likely help us in the search.
Of course! Which is why I'm glad we're doing this experiment in the first place--I want to see how this plays out. I don't think hubski has reached the critical mass of popularity where the content starts declining in popularity, and this system may work very well with how the community currently exists. I'm a little excited to see what direction this gets taken--it could be awful, or it could be really cool!