That’s a nice idea, and extending on it you could let users in a forum “tip” each other’s comments, and then allow members to cash out and be paid by Discourse whenever their balance reaches some practical amount. That would create an entire economy around conversations and would reward smart people for their contributions. Maybe build the model so that a clear percentage of the tip goes to DIscourse, some percentage goes to the forum owner, and the majority goes to the person posting the content.
My main forum runs entirely on donations and I’ve added a small feature (using Ko-fi’s API) that helps reach the donations goal much faster than before:
You can see it live here: https://unicyclist.com (can’t be seen anymore since donation reached the goal in 2 days only… 
)
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Unfortunately this model doesn’t generally support healthy or sustainable communities. It extrinsically motivates people to engage for the wrong reasons and is rife for abuse.
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Abuse / fraud can be anticipated in the business model in a straightforward way. New posters would not qualify for tips unless they had been on a forum for some number of months and had contributed some number of posts with a particular feedback level. After new users qualify for payment they have to wait five months for the credit card payment to clear all possibility of a chargeback, so there is no incentive created for fraudulent charges.
And I completely disagree about incentives. Paying people for their time creates an economic incentive for excellent people to invest their time and say valuable things.
It certainly creates an incentive to post, but not the right one. In my experience, extrinsic motivators tend to drive prolific low value contributions. Experts don’t generally expect money for posting on forums.
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That’s an extremely “glass half empty” philosophy. No one pays money to posters who spam the board with large numbers of worthless posts. As long as you take care to make fraud impossible, the incentive is to create long and thoughtful content. Most people would not reward people for posting, so such rewards are reserved for the exceptional poster, not the average one.
Alot boils down to how something is implemented. There are a variety of platforms that do offer of sorts incentives.
.an interesting example is a company I help out. Ran a contest where users would vote on the contestants for a winner. The issue later in in hindsight was not enough planning
As there was no rules how old a forum members account was to qualify to cite or rules against having more than one account. As a result a contestant used these shady misses to help ensure a win
.naturally ppl were a bit upset. But there were no guard rails against it.
I would be interested in hearing the proposed mechanics you intend on using or are using with the applicable safety guards in place. I can see things like a frequency to choose too contributor(s) with some kind of rewarding.
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As long as you go to great lengths to prevent fraud, I would be fairly Laissez Faire and give people a wide berth for how they want to reward excellent members.
I would say a key structural failure of Facebook is that it does not value human beings at all. It does not value our time. It does not value the quality of our thought. It does not value the content we create. So having a place that does reward people for time, quality of thought, and quality content, would be highly desirable as a destination.
This is still greatly vague. Are you meaning the user’s choose to donate/reward other users directly?
As for FB there was an attempt to do a YouTube like idea version of Facebook called their but it failed.
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Sure, let users compensate each other directly for any reasons they like. They can compensate them for a good post. Or compensate them to fund an experiment…. Or compensate them just to cheer them up. Let them compensate them in private, or let them do it in public.
No one is going to do this to get rich. It’s a way of building community and building a sense that your contributions are recognized and valued. It’s an interesting social experiment.
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Just to note that the original question was about controlling costs. We’ve moved into answers about raising funds from users. And from that moved into discussion about motivating users to be excellent and active.
Edit: note this comment was made before the split into a new topic
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You control costs by raising funds from users. One of the founders here mentioned that this would require micropayments, and having such a system opens up many additional possibilities for creating economies within discussion groups.
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Indeed, but I think it’s a separate discussion - opinions will differ! We already have gamification, which some forums adopt strongly and others turn off.
Edit: note this comment was made before the split into a new topic
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Maybe, but it’s one based on 25 years of experience managing communities professionally.
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I have been involved in online communities since early days of USENET, and aside from observing the growth of scammers and the need to develop systems to control them, I don’t perceive in any way that the ability reward excellent posts would degrade the quality of a forum.
Well I have been involved since the mid 90s. But back then costs were really minimal and servers were just hone PCs with a dual up modem. 
A lot will depend on the type of forum/community your aiming to have. Engagement though imho shouldn’t rely on rewarding users as an incentive to generate content.
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And if not mistaken prior was Fido_net using mail maintenance runs to sync messages using more or less offline mail resder packages transfered from one BBS to another.
I noticed you glossed over steemit. Which is a platform using the reward each other ideology. A lot depends on your forum’s scope and essential Ly sine pre popularity. But like anything should not maybe be the core in getting quality content. But more of a reward for becoming a string driver of popular topics.
So few people would likely receive rewards that unlikely it would affect the behavior of 95% of users. No one is going to make a living off of being rewarded for posts. Rather, it’s a symbolic way of letting someone know they are appreciated.
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Ah but symbolic can also simply be done with badges and things like Gamification. People going for potential financial type rewards will be aiming for that. Much like those obsessed with gaining followers to that end in other monetary incentivized platforms.
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Often they also have ads and sponsors as well with affiliate links.
Discourse does have a lot of plugins, components and built in features using data explorer and AI you could indeed create a fairly robust system. To monitor types of reactions, number of followers and other si features that could be leveraged to create a system like you have been vague in mechanics & procedures with safe guards.
Then also add lite use if the adokugin to help feed the kitty while also providing another potential stream to help with maintenance and using overflow for maintenance and upgrades as a supplementary piece