Building Community Through Compensated Contributions

[Architect]

At first I thought I understood what this topic was about but now am confused.

The first post has a quote from Sam at other topic this discussion branched from, where he had mentioned idea of a virtual currency that could be used for members to make donations for running a site that could be passed directly on to discourse (I believe this would be for a site hosted by discourse). This is the excerpt from that which Sam responded to:

@papyrophilia

What would really be awesome is if Discourse had a donation plug-in that could facilitate contributions from community members directly into that community’s account with Discourse. This would maintain anonymity and remove any individual modmin from the responsibility and scrutiny of accounting. And it would be easy to track. #FeatureRequest

Full post:

Forum maintenance cost

@Discoursecurious we are also a small not-for-profit community with no organized income source. Right now, we are simply relying on donations from certain users who have volunteered to donate and are powerfully vested in our success. I find it likely that at some point soon we will also need to solicit donations from the community, so I am curious what you end up deciding to do, how you do it, and how it goes. I honestly thought about something as simple as BuyMeACoffee or just setting up a ded…

The new idea for this topic was different:

@westes

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.

Now I realize I missed the part of this idea stating that members could be hypothetically paid by Discourse, when I had first read that I was thinking that said members could be paid by independent site administrators or different members.

I’m not sure how that could make sense and responses from team members are clearly not in support of that. A feature to allow members to make donations for a hosted account while being anonymous to the site administrators/moderators but not necessarily to the discourse team is a completely different feature request idea.

For independent site administrators if they wanted to offer payments to members to contribute that is already possible, but there are definitely risks with how and why that is offered will affect community environment. Since some sites have a paywall to even be a member in the first place, reverse of that is to offer payment for people to become members, say micro amount of $10 U.S.D. a month I remember mentioning idea of offering payment like that for new members to launch community. Psychology of community building can be fragile and if it’s built on payments then if the payments stop that may show members don’t stay involved without that.