Comment by janalsncm
3 years ago
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
> “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
>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.
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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.
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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.
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"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!"
Overjustification effect in action.
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!