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A pay-to-post/view social discussion site. Reddit starts out cool, then slowly becomes 'dumber' (discussion-focused articles turn into quick reaction images) a

A pay-to-post/view social discussion site. Reddit starts out cool, then slowly becomes 'dumber' (discussion-focused articles turn into quick reaction images) as it becomes more and more popular. Hacker News avoids this by purposefully not trying to be as popular as Reddit -- UI remains minimal, tries to stay out of search engines' ways, etc. But, in this way, HN is discussion focused through obscurity. What if you filtered out dumb crap by making it a cost to the user for posting? In that way, the user would have to really care about what h/she's posting about before h/she posts it. I.E.: thought-provoking discussion and not cheap images. That way, you can mass market and accept huge gains in popularity while being sure that the people who are posting/voting on the stuff care enough to pay for it. Want cheap (often not even funny) images? Go to Reddit. The best posters get compensated with the money that the voters paid. This creates a network of "I pay to post and I pay to vote but I get money from posting which incentivizes me to post but I only get paid if I get voted on a lot which means I'll want to encourage voting which means I'll have to vote a lot myself" : the voters and content contributors conflate in one genius network of money movement. It still wouldn't ever get as big as Reddit, simply because people don't like direct payment for services on the Internet. But it'd be an effective way to get a bunch of smart, dedicated people who would kill for thought-provoking discussion on the Internet, and also pay them for just that.

minimaxir 13y ago
The best posters get compensated with the money that the voters paid. Any service that offers a significant monetary incentive to cheat it, will implode.
- rgbrgb 13y ago
  Adsense is pretty far from imploding.
krapp 13y ago
I can easily see it becoming a platform for astroturfing and viral marketing campaigns by corporate accounts, and i'm not entirely certain i'm comfortable with directly linking a poster's ability to participate in a discussion with their disposable income. Would be an interesting experiment to see though.
- omarhegazy 13y ago
  The astroturfing would have to be so well concealing that it'd be content users would actually like. So, it's still corporate-supported advertising, but it's smart corporate-supported advertising. Reminds me of this : https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/.
  - krapp 13y ago
    That depends on the degree to which money equals power in that setup, I suppose. It doesn't have to be smart if you're willing to pay for enough accounts just to create a buzz. Although granted - for the site to be worth the effort it would already have to be popular.
FLUX-YOU 13y ago
Instead of cash, use a cryptocurrency. Dogecoin fits perfectly with this. As an aside, I'd like to see a torrent site that uses a cryptocurrency model to control access/leeching/improve seeding. I'd rather fry an ethernet card than a GPU!
roryokane 13y ago
The social discussion site MetaFilter uses part of this idea already. It requires users to pay $5 once before they are allowed to post anything (http://www.metafilter.com/newuser.mefi http://www.metafilter.com/newuser.mefi). But it does not charge or pay its users after that.
Detrus 13y ago
How do you handle users gaming the system for profit? I was thinking up various ways to introduce money to our communication systems to incentivize certain behaviors. But not from the modern Facetwitter perspective of a site that wastes your life by addicting you. The true measure should be the correctness of the content and money should pay for that. First a system where you have to pay to post and if you post is confirmed as not spam or abuse, then you get the money back. Otherwise the site takes your money. Should be a negligible amount. Mostly a way to make spam expensive and compensate for moderation, but of course a site can abuse a user this way as well. If a user posts some profound story/comment and others want to compensate him directly with an easy UI, they can add a monetary amount to their upvote. But there is little guarantee that the amount will be significant or the money will arrive promptly. Users should be able to undo money sent for well sounding but ultimately wrong info. This is to discourage participation driven by points and monetary rewards. If participation and content creation is driven by money even more than it is now, there will be a few new legitimate sources with useful information but the vast majority will be content farms. To discourage this "points" or "money" should accumulate, BUT should not be paid out for years until the accuracy of this content is confirmed by the passage of time, peer review, etc. If mistakes are found, all readers should be notified of corrections. There should be penalties for releasing misleading or mislabeled information (like tech blog posts that are really advertising but pretend not to be. You should pay to advertise and pay more for advertising what turns out to be crap after peer review.) A site should take its share for moderating content well and working on rules that incentivize useful content/services and penalize attention seeking of little utility. It's hard to predict effects of various new incentives. But a site should work on modifying the rules until desired results are reached. Users should not stray from normal behavior to satisfy some quick and dirty addicting point systems. If that means limiting participation to select trained users, releasing information to larger audiences only after it has been discussed by relevant experts (so no shocking attention grabbing studies are released) then so be it.
- hikigo_wanders 13y ago
  I like this idea a lot, thank you for sharing it. I might try this with http://hikigo.com http://hikigo.com. Like most things it might be hard to get the initial core of users. What I liked about the parent post is: It still wouldn't ever get as big as Reddit. When you find yourself thinking that way, you are probably onto something you actually want.
personlurking 13y ago
Isn't The Well pay-to-post (at least in a sense since there's a subscription fee)? http://www.well.com/ http://www.well.com/
- omarhegazy 13y ago
  I wish I knew. This site seems more interested in telling me about it's wondrous history than giving me a forum of discussion. Can I get a frontpage? Links to different subforums? A design that isnt from the late 90s?
miguelrochefort 13y ago
Money is not the solution. Reputation is. People are not currently penalized for contradicting themselves, being dishonest, being thoughtless. But they soon will. Let's cure the web's Alzheimer.
- omarhegazy 13y ago
  Exciting rhetoric. How do you expect people to discern between Reddit reputation and TheWebsAlzheimersCure.com's (drop the "the" -- just WebsAlzheimersCure. Cleaner.) reputation?

minimaxir 13y ago

The best posters get compensated with the money that the voters paid. Any service that offers a significant monetary incentive to cheat it, will implode.

rgbrgb 13y ago
Adsense is pretty far from imploding.

krapp 13y ago

I can easily see it becoming a platform for astroturfing and viral marketing campaigns by corporate accounts, and i'm not entirely certain i'm comfortable with directly linking a poster's ability to participate in a discussion with their disposable income. Would be an interesting experiment to see though.

omarhegazy 13y ago
The astroturfing would have to be so well concealing that it'd be content users would actually like. So, it's still corporate-supported advertising, but it's smart corporate-supported advertising. Reminds me of this : https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/.
- krapp 13y ago
  That depends on the degree to which money equals power in that setup, I suppose. It doesn't have to be smart if you're willing to pay for enough accounts just to create a buzz. Although granted - for the site to be worth the effort it would already have to be popular.

FLUX-YOU 13y ago

Instead of cash, use a cryptocurrency. Dogecoin fits perfectly with this. As an aside, I'd like to see a torrent site that uses a cryptocurrency model to control access/leeching/improve seeding. I'd rather fry an ethernet card than a GPU!

roryokane 13y ago

The social discussion site MetaFilter uses part of this idea already. It requires users to pay $5 once before they are allowed to post anything (http://www.metafilter.com/newuser.mefi http://www.metafilter.com/newuser.mefi). But it does not charge or pay its users after that.

Detrus 13y ago

How do you handle users gaming the system for profit? I was thinking up various ways to introduce money to our communication systems to incentivize certain behaviors. But not from the modern Facetwitter perspective of a site that wastes your life by addicting you. The true measure should be the correctness of the content and money should pay for that. First a system where you have to pay to post and if you post is confirmed as not spam or abuse, then you get the money back. Otherwise the site takes your money. Should be a negligible amount. Mostly a way to make spam expensive and compensate for moderation, but of course a site can abuse a user this way as well. If a user posts some profound story/comment and others want to compensate him directly with an easy UI, they can add a monetary amount to their upvote. But there is little guarantee that the amount will be significant or the money will arrive promptly. Users should be able to undo money sent for well sounding but ultimately wrong info. This is to discourage participation driven by points and monetary rewards. If participation and content creation is driven by money even more than it is now, there will be a few new legitimate sources with useful information but the vast majority will be content farms. To discourage this "points" or "money" should accumulate, BUT should not be paid out for years until the accuracy of this content is confirmed by the passage of time, peer review, etc. If mistakes are found, all readers should be notified of corrections. There should be penalties for releasing misleading or mislabeled information (like tech blog posts that are really advertising but pretend not to be. You should pay to advertise and pay more for advertising what turns out to be crap after peer review.) A site should take its share for moderating content well and working on rules that incentivize useful content/services and penalize attention seeking of little utility. It's hard to predict effects of various new incentives. But a site should work on modifying the rules until desired results are reached. Users should not stray from normal behavior to satisfy some quick and dirty addicting point systems. If that means limiting participation to select trained users, releasing information to larger audiences only after it has been discussed by relevant experts (so no shocking attention grabbing studies are released) then so be it.

hikigo_wanders 13y ago
I like this idea a lot, thank you for sharing it. I might try this with http://hikigo.com http://hikigo.com. Like most things it might be hard to get the initial core of users. What I liked about the parent post is: It still wouldn't ever get as big as Reddit. When you find yourself thinking that way, you are probably onto something you actually want.

personlurking 13y ago

Isn't The Well pay-to-post (at least in a sense since there's a subscription fee)? http://www.well.com/ http://www.well.com/

omarhegazy 13y ago
I wish I knew. This site seems more interested in telling me about it's wondrous history than giving me a forum of discussion. Can I get a frontpage? Links to different subforums? A design that isnt from the late 90s?

miguelrochefort 13y ago

Money is not the solution. Reputation is. People are not currently penalized for contradicting themselves, being dishonest, being thoughtless. But they soon will. Let's cure the web's Alzheimer.

omarhegazy 13y ago
Exciting rhetoric. How do you expect people to discern between Reddit reputation and TheWebsAlzheimersCure.com's (drop the "the" -- just WebsAlzheimersCure. Cleaner.) reputation?