Another moderation risk is that whoever is moderating has an incentive to delete people’s potentially successful posts and repost under their own or a friend’s alt account

People attach a lot of value to fake internet points, so these bad behaviours are already incentivised.

What will be interesting is how they are incentivised differently. Different people attach different relative value to fake internet points and less-fake currency points, so you'll get different behaviour from different sets of people.

Well, if there's money attached, it will be guaranteed to be constantly gamed and abused.

Whereas if there are fake internet points attached, it is only almost certain to be gamed and abused.

But it will be gamed and abused by people that care about fake internet points. Those are very different people from those who want to extract as much money by any means available

If it gets successful enough that people really want to game it, the creator will have proven their concept and can try to tweak it as necessary. I think that would be a fine problem to have.

The basic incentive of money drives all sorts of things. Maybe the best “exploit” will be to find interesting and novel links.

Perhaps meta-moderation would work in this scenario? Randomly assign previous moderation choices (anonymizing the moderator) for users to rank. This could to identify moderators that are out of line. It could also lead to echo chambers though.

If meta-moderation powers were assigned randomly and uniformly, this could be gamed by just spam-creating tons of accounts. Any system that accepts user input needs to have a robust answer to the question "What if a significant percentage of my users are actually bots under control of a single person?"

You could disincentivize them by having access to the metamoderation queue behind the subscription. Thus it's $2/mo/user account.

I wonder how much would a government intelligence or defense department who controls millions of bot accounts be willing to pay per month in order to have even a small percentage of power over who gets to mod (for example) r/ukraine?

Considering 1 patriot missile costs several millions, it would be pocket change.

Yes, and to some extent, what's at stake is to get to choose the next president (or future dictator) in the US.

What's that worth for, say Xi in China - look at how much he is ok with spending on invading Taiwan. And how much he'd save, if a to him a more friendly person (Trump) became the president. Then compare that with $2

I do like /. meta-moderation, but I also feel that the ones contributing the most, interacting the most (via votes/comments) should have a vote to who they want their moderators to be on a regular basis.

Man: We're an anarcho-syndicalist commune. We're taking turns to act as a sort of executive-officer-for-the-week--

Arthur: (uninterested) Yes...

Man: But all the decisions of that officer 'ave to be ratified at a special bi-weekly meeting--

Arthur: (perturbed) Yes I see!

Man: By a simple majority, in the case of purely internal affairs--

Arthur: (mad) Be quiet!

Man: But by a two-thirds majority, in the case of more major--

Arthur: (very angry) Be quiet! I order you to be quiet!

when you dont rely on advertiser support you arent beholden to their desires of moderation

when a sub-forum crosses a threshold of insensitivity, just remove it from search and let those fans direct link

sub forums can remain popularity contests where community decides if anything there is a good fit. theyre already echo chambers and nobody is aiming to solve that so just run it that way

A moderator who does this consistently will be crucified, and no one will want to post in the community while they remain.

I think the simplest around that is to pay the moderators. So given the $2

- $1 goes to the server

- $.67 goes to the users you upvote

- $.33 goes to the moderator(s) of the group you upvoted in.

So there's actual incentive to want to mod to begin with, and less incentive to risk that by trying to game for post votes as well.

Now ofc I already see a half dozen issues here, so we'd need to deviate strongly from reddit to make this work:

- you can't just create subs willy-nilly. You don't even want that in the beginning anyway because you shouldn't splinter a small community. There would need to be a formal way to talk to an admin and request any new sub. Or at least, we need to delineate from a monetized sub vs. non-monetized, with ways to transition from one to the other.

- This encourages small mod groups and you don't want mods to be able to pick/kick at will now that money is involved. Again, new mods would need some more admin intervention for moderator changes.

- As you can assume, A senior mod won't be equal to a newly recruited mod. So it probably isn't the best idea to spread that mod fund equally per se.

- Mod posts would need to be taken into account as well. Maybe moderators (and possible alts) can't make money off their own posts to avoid double dipping

Lot of interesting ideas to go about. So I hope this site does at least get some visibility

That sounds good on paper, but I can only imagine it would lead to even worse lowest-common-denominator chasing than exists on reddit right now. Why would the moderators choose to enforce quality standards when crappy (but highly upvoted) memes make them more money?

Ideally that's up to the community. The ideal counter-reaction of this is "Well I'll make my own sub, and attract people tired of memes". In this model, there will hopefully be a sizeable subscriber community, so you don't need to appeal to the masses if the ones willing to put their money where they mouths make the move.

But if not, and if memes are what subscribers want to use all their votes on, well... the experiment fails in my eyes (even if it may be a success as a business).

That's also why I feel we need at least two tiers of votes, personally. There will be times where you want to vote on a cheap but funny meme but you don't exactly want to say "yes, this is the content I pay for". A version of vote that says "I don't mind it but obviously you shouldn't make money on this" may help curb that as more of the super votes go to actual quality content. But nothing is bullet proof when you let the people decide.

I think that split sounds ripe for abuse. If a mod earns for every upvote, the incentive to just allow memes is just to high.

Pay all mods of all subs a fixed amount no matter what. Solved

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.

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.

I really do love the idea. But in addition to the moderation risks others have mentioned, are you prepared to issue tax documents to every jurisdiction where you might be rendering payments?

Yes ish, as currently I'm doing payouts via Stripe Connect (and likewise only paying out in countries that Stripe Connect supports, as it takes care of that aspect). Everything is theoretical until battle-tested however.

Personally, if i signed up, i would not be interested in getting payouts. I'd have to declare them on my tax return, and it's just not worth it for such small amounts. So a checkbox to donate any payouts to a charity (the EFF, perhaps?) would be great.

A really great idea. Love that as well. I've also considered adding a threshold for payouts (i.e. $50 withdrawal minimum) to help with the reporting aspects.

Are you dead set on paying out directly? Internet communities always get worse when there's money involved. It will be a constant fight between moderation and clickbait. People will make it their job to game the system. You could, instead, have votes go toward paying a user's subscription fee instead of cash.

> I've also considered adding a threshold for payouts (i.e. $50 withdrawal minimum) to help with the reporting aspects.

Do this anyway. You don't want to be paying out every cent immediately to people reposting things that otherwise warrant moderation.

Another option is to have a "play it forward" option, where your earnings are passed on to things that you voted for during the month.

This is the way. Minimum threshold. That's how Adsense works.

How about doing this _instead_ of paying out to the creators? When you sign up, you choose which charity should get the payouts for your created content? Maybe start with a searchable list of well-known charities, let users propose new as the site grows.

I think that might stem a lot of the potential abuse of the system to earn money, and it gives users a good feeling.

Earning money from this site doesn't particularly interest me. Raising money for charities, and using that as a fun bragging metric to friends totally does. If you want the community to have a great vibe to it, seeing top level users who have donated thousands to charities is a great way to start that. It's a bit hard to troll the community when your raising money for sick kids at the same time.

In every jurisdiction where tax exists a receipt would suffice, which even the most ghetto payment implementation will have (it being the case that the receipt is essentially how the total is made).

Ditto. I hate this idea. We all know the type of content that revenue drives: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc. I want a site that rewards quality, not view counts.

> I want a site that rewards quality, not view counts.

That's what the objective of the site is. Viewing doesn't reward anything (whereas views do reward in the video you just linked). My hope as well is that for nonio, knowing you're contributing a share of your monthly pool will make people more conscientious about what they upvote, thus improving quality.

As an option, to rank items, you can use the amount of money that the item has earned instead of just the number of upvotes. You can even replace upvotes number in the UI as well. This way frequent meme-upvoters will have less sway over more picky users. It'd be easier to register astroturfing accounts and to promote something to the top, though.

One issue is that the amount per upvote is only known at the end of the month - only then you know how many upvoted to split the $1 over.

You could keep updating the weight you give to each upvote. That would mean upvotes you make at the start of each month are valued too highly before getting valued less, but as long as the creation date of all the accounts are distributed evenly across the month that should even out.

Alternatively you could base it on the number of upvotes a user gave last month, before correcting it at the end of the month, although that system might be easy to game.

> do you have any long-term plans to IPO this if it becomes successful? If not, some kind of guarantee that this platform is immune to enshittification would probably be very, very popular.

This is a solid call out. Part of me wants to keep things private in order to maintain the "user is the customer" alignment. One issue with going public is it then means shareholders become your primary customer, with your users becoming second tier. I'm not quite sure what the answer is.

This also brings me to the question of funding - on one hand, proper funding here would help drastically with launching, on the other hand it comes with expectations and requirements.

Part of the reason why I want paid users though is it means the site can be self-sustaining without that funding, if it can get past the network effect threshold.

Lots to think about.

The thing to keep in mind that alignment is often good initially but deviates over time. Funds have horizons that they want to respect lest they get in trouble with the LPs or end up with piles of money allocated but not turning a profit for them (because of the sunset clauses on management fees). Shareholders may see eye to eye - for a while - and then split up due to unforeseen development (that's when you'll find out how good that shareholder agreement really is). All in all this is a tricky thing and you will want to get yourself very well informed before pulling the trigger on any investment.

Please make it possible to pay without a credit card. I want to support the site but without sacrificing privacy or anonymity.

Literally the only way to have those things and still give money is to support monero, which is a giant pita for a first draft. Creditcards and other major payment gateways are very easy. If you're serious about services offering such things, you should think about offering such an easy payment integration for folks that maintain services.

> maybe an unintentional experiment in unintended consequences

Just charging $2 might be a huge improvement over reddit because it makes sock puppets cost too much to scale.

Paying out for upvotes, I fear will incentivize lowest-common-denominator content. If you go to a quality tech subreddit and sort by "Top" comments, they will mostly be memes. They won't be from an expert solving your very specific problem. And more generally, I worry it will reward that twitter-style, shrill political dunking, binary thinking, maximalism and in-group point scoring. This may be a recipe for an even more toxic r/politics.

Very interesting trying to puzzle out how a given incentive structure will play out in practice.

Sounds like I prime example of Moral Hazard where people would justify shitty behavior because they pay for it. It's also more difficult to ban people in one way or another because they are paying customers now.

I wonder though whether people will upvote differently knowing that there's real money involved.

Maybe for the better. I think personally I’d be more inclined to upvote posts/content that I enjoy if I knew it directly supported them.

Same reason I buy albums that I love despite me already having Spotify—to give back to the creators.

I was thinking this too. I'd be even less inclined to upvote low-effort posts, knowing that I'd also be paying them for that low effort. And more inclined to upvote high effort, less visible posts - both because I think they deserve my money more, and because being more upvoted = being more seen = getting paid more by others as well.

I'd also give out upvotes more sparsely overall, since upvoting a post reduces the amount my previously upvoted posts will get paid.

I keep thinking there should be two upvotes. One that is just internet points and one that is a paying-upvote.

That way you can interact with the site and upvote shitty memes as you normally would, but when it is time to be serious you'll using the paying-upvote instead.

Reddit kinda landes on a similar formula with Reddit gold.

I remember back in the Slashdot days their moderation system didn’t give out Karma points for “+1 Funny” moderations so you could make fun of a hysterical or simply wrong comment by upvoting. Also you could stack negative mods with funny mods to really nail their karma.

If I pay to upvote I’m not pushing meme for sure. Only content that I actually read and that I enjoy.

You don't pay to upvote, you pay to use the site and then upvoting changes where your money goes. It doesn't affect you are much you are paying.

Do you actually think sock puppets will be too expensive? The value of the bot only has to be more than $2 to justify paying it for the bot operator, and if there is monetary incentive to get upvotes/attention seems like it could pencil out (if N bots can generate some multiplier of attention)

Actually, yes. many trolls do it simply because it's easy to do. adding even a $1 barrier to entry would cull a lot.

Ofc there are determined and financuially comfortable trolls out there that would still make a few dozen, but those few are easier to stamp out without the noise of low effort trolls.

>if there is monetary incentive to get upvotes/attention seems like it could pencil out

worst case, it helps pay for the server. But yes, this is the equivalent of a KS campaign being partially self-funded to make it seem like others are interested. There are likely dozens of other tricks that such a community would reveal.

> financuially comfortable trolls out there that would still make a few dozen

No, tens of thousands.

Nation state actors have troll armies, and $2 extra per astro turfing account would be coffee money compared to the salaries they already pay their trolls.

Websearch for 50 cent army

This doesn't work well. How do you pay the $2? With a credit card? Tens of thousands of accounts all with the same one? Tens of thousands of credit cards?

In a 50 army, one individual can be paid a third world wage to register free accounts all day long to post comments. The cost of $2 per comment would massively outweigh their wages.

China is not a third world country any longer. It's competing with the US and Xi is doing fine.

Tens of thousands of credit cards or phone numbers or whatever - why not, do you think that would be a problem for such a nation state actor

> China is not a third world country any longer.

You miss the point. A 50 cent army is feasible when you are paying third world wages. If Chinese wage increases price them out of the market, then you can just hire people from somewhere else. But it's the low wages that make such an attack possible. Low wages vs high wages don't matter much when you are spending $200/hr per soldier on Reddit account fees.

If China wants to launch a state-level attack on Reddit they are probably better off pressuring Tencent to pressure Reddit to just do what they want.

$200/h per person, you guessed.

I don't think it's a good guess,

nevertheless, for 10 000 people, it's nothing, it's coffee money for the CCP.

Interesting anyway to have heard your thoughts. Have a nice day (probably won't reply any more)

> If you go to a quality tech subreddit and sort by "Top" comments, they will mostly be memes. They won't be from an expert solving your very specific problem.

Wouldn't it be highly coincidental if the Top posts contain a solution to your specific problem.

Completely disagree re: moderation. The goal for sites like this is never "high quality content", it's "maximum traffic".

If he can get 50k paying users, he's a millionaire. If that means low effort meme posts, who are you to slap those dollars out of his hand?

The "intelligentsia" of the Internet need to get a grip on what people want; these sites are for entertainment not elucidation and discovery.

Given the popularity of searching for things like product reviews or good restaurants in a new town by appending “Reddit.com” to the search query, I think elucidation and discovery are at least part of what drives people to such platforms.

Not really a given, that’s just how you use the platform.

You’d have to show thats a substantial part of Reddit’s traffic and therefore revenue, for it to actually be given.

To be clear, that’s not how I use the platform (I’m not sure I’ve ever searched that way). But it’s a common enough pattern that there have been widely read articles referencing it:

> This means you’ll no longer have to add “Reddit” to your searches when you’re looking for thoughts from actual humans, not empty answers from websites just trying to get clicks.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/20/23034024/brave-search-fea...

> It turns out that almost 70% of polled readers add 'Reddit' to their search results at least sometimes.

https://www.androidauthority.com/reddit-web-search-queries-p...

I can’t say that it’s a substantial portion of Reddit’s traffic, of course. But clearly it’s not just a mrtranscendence idiosyncrasy.

Then I don't think what you've said is a given. Maybe many people do it, but does that matter to Reddit? That's not certain, and it is even less clear that such a thing would be relevant to Non.io.

Besides, there are many routes to profitability here that have absolutely nothing to do with replicating all of Reddit's value for a user. Presuming this needs to be a 1:1 clone of Reddit seems needlessly reductive.

If it’s true that a fair portion of those who search Google specify “reddit.com” at least sometimes, as seems likely, I’m comfortable that users looking for “elucidation and discovery” are at least somewhat relevant to Reddit or those who wish to compete with Reddit.

I’m not saying this needs to be a clone of Reddit; I don’t think I implied that, or intended to at least.

> If he can get 50k paying users, he's a millionaire.

How did you reach that conclusion?

Estimation skills and general understanding that the exact value is less important than the larger point.

Multi-millionaire as the typical valuations of start-ups go. Getting 50K paying users would be absolutely amazing out of the gate. Many web properties with a fraction of that are worth in the millions.

> The goal for sites like this is never "high quality content", it's "maximum traffic".

so how do you feel about HN personally?

>If that means low effort meme posts, who are you to slap those dollars out of his hand?

If so, congrats. I'll keep searching and be glad some rags to riches site came about in a time of multibillion dollar empires.

>these sites are for entertainment not elucidation and discovery.

put it this way. I've been on the internet for decades, and I know that to really find quality content you gotta either pay for it in money behind a paywall, or in a lot of time digging through the muck. I have done both.

I'm not going to pretend there won't be a lot of muck to dig through here, even with the idea of a paid subscription site. But the goal here is that there will be enough nuggets underneath to make it worth it. And currently, that line is pretty low given what I dig through reddit to find.

You are not a very desirable user for a company to attempt to sell ads to. You don’t fall for tricks, you don’t click on bait, you don’t generate value easily for the sites you use.

The people who like memes are a lot easier to make money off of than you, and as much as people pretend to hare money, it’s the way we survive in this world.

>You are not a very desirable user for a company to attempt to sell ads to.

hence why a website that is not attempting to sell ads to me but has a sound monetization scheme is appealing. Not that I mind a site that uses ads (I have adblock but I wouldn't mind subscribing to something of value to get rid of ads), but one trying to rely on "non-desirable monetization" may have less memes in such a community.

I can certainly be wrong, but again: it's an interesting experiment I wouldn't mind trying out.

Why are we talking about selling ads on a thread entirely about a website whose whole shtick is that they don't sell ads.

I liked someone's idea in non.io #feedback of subscribing to multiple moderators, whose filters are applied to your view. Makes the moderator's job easier too, if its more distributed.

I could subscribe to a couple moderator's idea of "low effort", a few more for "spam" moderation, etc . Could even have "#racist" and "#woke" mods, whatever bubble you choose to subscribe to.

I can already see people justifying gaming the system with multiple paid accounts if they know that farming those upvotes back to themselves will recoup costs. Especially if the farmed votes get more attention from other paid votes.

I would say reward "good posters" with additional free time vs the $2 per year or whatever it would otherwise charge.

That puts an upper limit on how much of an "attention whore" you can reasonably be.

Yeah, earning money for posting on a service like this sounds good at first, but it's often a magnet for folks that don't really care about contributing to the platform beyond that. These usually fall into 2 categories:

1. Hustlers and schemers, who want to get rich quick (usually the folks that like spam, blackhat SEO and 'hustle culture').

2. Folks in 3rd world countries who see this as a ticket out of poverty.

The former are a disaster for any good community site or service, and the latter have the potential to become the former, since 'spam the crap out of a service for the chance to make more money' becomes an enticing proposition. A big digital marketing forum shut down its revenue sharing because these folks flooded it with low quality crap, the likes of Medium and Quora have become hellholes due to the same incentives, and crypto based 'pay to earn' games have literally led to people starting up sweatshops to make money in them.

Having it also cost money to use the site will help a bit, but it'll also filter out many good users due to not wanting to spend money on a subscription, and create a mental calculus of "can I make more from my content than it'll cost me to sign up", which isn't ideal in itself.

>Having it also cost money to use the site will help a bit, but it'll also filter out many good users due to not wanting to spend money on a subscription

from my experience, there will be a LOT more ne'er do wells being filtered than good users. Not because there aren't a lot of good users, but simply because there are a lot more low effort ne'er do wells attracted to internet forums.

Other users can still browse at the very least. I think this will capture that nice medium of "good user who doesn't mind a little incentive". Because ofc the highest quality users aren't posting their ideas on public forums at all

> Because ofc the highest quality users aren't posting their ideas on public forums at all

I don't think that's true. I published some of my privat projects only on reddit because I want to put them out there, but do not expect people to interact too much.

are these projects you pitched to acedemia? ones you would post in white papers? One you may consider selling on some sort of asset store for profit?

Not saying your project isn't high quality, but generally the most consistent stream of high quality projects has someone paying for them.

> are these projects you pitched to acedemia? ones you would post in white papers? One you may consider selling on some sort of asset store for profit?

No, for privat projects I am mostly reinventing wheels. But, in some sense, I actually pitched them collectively during my job hunt.

My interests are spread pretty far, so my hobby projects range from building ambisonic microphones over reimplementing interesting algorithms like WFC to implementing Navient Stokes equations in JAX to optimize airfoils in a differentiable CFD simulator.

My new job reflects that, I am pretty happy with that :-)

Stacker News has succesfully use satoshis instead of fake internet points.

> The idea of posters getting real money instead of fake internet points when their posts do well seems interesting, but maybe an unintentional experiment in unintended consequences.

I foresee some company suing because their content is being monetised by other people.

Have you considered a limit on user interactions per day? 10 posts/comments a day and 10 upvotes a day?

It seems counterintuitive to restrict users interacting with your platform, but I could also see it working the other way (I want to login and use my daily allowance instead of losing it).

>Moderation will be extremely important to prevent low-effort memes and content regurgitation and the like from saturating your main channels

This idea more or less surfaces in the book "Fall; or, Dodge in Hell", where in the not-too-distant future the internet is so polluted that you are pretty much expected to hire a full-time "editor" to curate your social media feed. This doesn't scale particularly well, of course, so in reality particularly wealthy families hire an editor to present a cohesive stream of social media to their whole family-tree. Meanwhile the masses typically subscribe to an "off the shelf" stream (or several?) that most closely matches their tastes.

I want a social site where you: Pay to sign up ($10.00), pay to upvote ($0.01 = 1 vote), get paid when your content is upvoted. There's no advertising system because everything is an ad.