For sure - striking the right design balance is tough. If it were me, I'd try to keep content in the user's face as much as possible, and maybe inform the user about the unique value-add with non-intrusive sidebars, header/footers or system generated PMs.

It's not easy, and the value of an expert UX designer really shines when walking the tight-rope between informing and annoying your users.

Also, consider investing in reliable A/B testing infrastructure if you haven't already. One of the biggest mistakes I've seen is trying to grow a product while driving half-blind based on napkin sql queries as metrics. Understand who is using the site, how often, when they are experiencing errors, and which types of changes actually encourage growth KPIs - but be careful, loading up the site with 3rd party trackers and intrusive js will introduce bugs and kill site performance - another balancing act hehe.

To be honest I don't completely agree. The business model itself is what makes thin interesting, not to users, but to creators. Take me for example, I write tech articles from time to time, and the occasional video, presentation, or coding live stream. As it stands I don't make any money on this, I just do it for fun. But with a site like non.io there's no reason for me _not_ to post my content there. As long as you get some publicity out there (like you're doing with this) creators should hopefully start contributing. And once the creators are there, so will the users be! I agree though that the splash page is a bit strange, maybe throw up a popup over the content for people who aren't logged in and haven't visited the site before? Or at least put this info in a sidebar. The business model is as you say the core value proposition here, so if people don't get it right away the interest could quickly fade.

Wish you the best of luck with this. And I'll look into posting my stuff on there as well, as I said there really isn't any reason not to

> As it stands I don't make any money on this, I just do it for fun. But with a site like non.io there's no reason for me _not_ to post my content there.

I’m obviously not targeting this at you but a business model likes this (paying fractions of a penny per upvote) is not likely to attract high quality content. In fact the opposite it incentives a quantity over quality approach (i.e. content has to be just good enough to get upvoted spending more effort is wasted)

Niche groups, high quality content, users who don't upvote everything I think is the goal. Not up voting 100 cat videos or memes and then wishing you could upvote a post that really helps you out on something or leads to good discussion. I think it tries to place weight on your upvote to mean more than just ticking something up but remind you that you are putting your money into someone's else's pocket and has what they provided you with worth it? It'd small enough that you don't feel like you're out too much monthly, but probably big enough for posts with upvotes in the thousands to give back to quality content creators (haven't done any math but yeah)

Exactly. Of course everyone used Reddit differently, but personally I basically never upvoted anything unless I really enjoyed it. The big question for me would be what happens to my funds if I don't upvote anyone in a given month, do they roll-over to the next month? Do they go to server management? Do they go into a separate pool to do something else fun with?

In a way Reddit did distinguish their usual "this content is better than the one below" upvote with "this is amazing content" by giving Reddit gold. A similar system could be used here. One thing that made Reddit great was that since people up (and maybe more importantly) downvoted content good stuff would float to the top. It would be pretty bad if upvotes where too meaningful as that would drive away engagement.

What if there was a large button for upvote, and beside a smaller button for 100x upvote?

Regular users can upvote 100 cat pictures for their dopamine hit, and when they find an ACTUALLY VALUABLE post they can look for the small button.

Medium did this with "claps". Press once for a single clap. Press and hold to add multiple claps proportional to the time you hold it.

Like Reddit gold you mean? (before they created all these silly other awards)

Fractions of a penny from people who upvote a lot. A full dollar if it's someone's only upvote for the month. I'm not convinced quantity wins... although I am very much not convinced that it doesn't, either.

I think if the product itself is a web page, then the root www.domain.name needs to point to the product itself, not a description of the product. Imagine if I went to www.amazon.com and instead of the store, that page was a marketing template listing Amazon's business case and a few screenshots of what shopping at Amazon looks like.

IMO the only good reason to have a marketing/business-case landing page is if the product itself hasn't been built yet. Once the product exists, move the marketing page over to /about

For a forum you could have a story/post be your about page and just sticky it initially.

maybe make the first 10,000 or 100,000 accounts free for life?

you need to build momentum somehow

maybe summarise what your users need to understand in a sidebar or closeable top-bar?

You could also incentivize early adopters. For example, if you're in the first 100k users, your money/upvote goes twice as far. Something like that.

Or something like, seed quality content for rewards (post links that end up getting lots of upvotes = free subscription) sounds pretty close to OPs original idea anyway, just give better terms for early adopters.

In a way this feels similar to nebula - nebula currently has no comment functionality and points to reddit threads for communities around their videos. Wonder if that group would be interested in experimenting given the heavy overlap in business model.

An idea I mull over occasionally: what if you could spend your karma points to boost any given post? This would ultimately be another form of paid advertising, except that the currency used would be earned by contributing to the community. Then, allow people to sell their karma points for fiat currency. Companies would buy karma points directly from users in order to promote their self-promotional posts, but those posts would be subject to the same rules and moderation as any other post. That way you're actually paying your best users rather than charging them.

This has been tried in the cryptocurrency space, people start faking accounts to upvote their content and make money.

So basically what already happens with reddit/twitter/etc but amplified because you give them a direct financial incentive to upvote low effort crap.

I think it can be solved by personalizing the top page(s), so you mostly see the kind of stuff you upvote. If there are a few people up-voting crap you wont see it, but they will see all of it.

I'm building https://linklonk.com which works this way - you get content ranked based on what you upvoted. This is to make the incentives for voting aligned and help prevent abuse.

I think the problem with karma/reputation systems is that the source of karma are fungible - anyone's upvote has the same effect on the reputation. And this makes it gameable.

A personalized system can solve this by replacing global reputation with user-to-user trust. Now it matters who upvoted - a random bot or a user whose past contributions have been useful to you.

>Now it matters who upvoted - a random bot or a user whose past contributions have been useful to you. //

In that system how do you create a ranked list of content for a user to browse? Isn't it going to be very heavy on processing demand?

You can do the processing in a worker. Maybe even offload it to the client. If there is a live stream a pretrained machine learning model could be used and it could infear who will like what

Yes, it requires keeping track of how much each user trusts each other user. And then when you rank content for user A, you use the trust table of user A as weights of upvotes.

This is more computationally intensive than sorting by the raw number of upvotes or weight upvotes by karma/popularity.

But I think this is a useful computation - the user can be more confident that the content they is is not astroturfed and comes from trustworthy users.

Details of how trust is calculated: https://linklonk.com/item/3292763817660940288

That doesn't really work when they have to pay for each account they use to upvote though.

Even if they boost their own post a bit for it to get the attention of others, they're still paying $2 per upvote for that. And if their post is no good, people might even just cancel those out with downvotes.

It is essentially a perfect recipe for money laundering.

This would be the most inefficient way to launder money ever. You'd get at most 50% of the money you took in (realistically, more like 30-40% with taxes if you were transferring significant volume), and you'd have to have an active account that posted a lot of legitimate-sounding comments, and at least 10K sockpuppet accounts which you'd then need to script a way to upvote all the posts by the account you're intending to launder it through.

That's assuming the site lets 10K+ users sign up and pay with crypto, or you have the time to track down and signup for 10K prepaid burner cards. Then, after allo that, you'd have to hope that the site never detects the vote manipulation, since you'd have an account that's getting tons of upvotes from a specific set of users.

Really.. I think this is the worst idea for laundering money I've ever heard of. You'd be better off walking into a casino and putting it all on blackjack until you win a big hand, then reporting the winnings.

Agreed. It's way more efficient to sell $10,000 cabinets named "Julia" on Wayfair.

tweakers.net (a Dutch tech site that's been around since the 1998) allows you to spend your karma points in their Karmastore on things like custom-css, RSS-feeds in tracker and custom newsletter.

Why not pin your business model as the top post for awhile until it catches on?

This right here is the way to do it.

you should try and get an API that has full parity with Reddit, an app that does that will replace Reddit because all third party apps simply need to change urls for Reddit to your domain.

THIS. This is the pro move.