# Building Community Through Compensated Contributions **URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/building-community-through-compensated-contributions/392686 **Category:** Community Building **Created:** [January 2, 2026, 10:52pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/building-community-through-compensated-contributions/392686 "2026-01-02T22:52:04Z") **Posts on this page:** 1 **Showing post:** 57
### Author: ![Ed\_S](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/ed_s/32/134015_2.png) [@Ed\_S](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Ed_S) #### Post date: [January 17, 2026, 4:50pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/building-community-through-compensated-contributions/392686/57 "2026-01-17T16:50:31Z")
Anything which introduces the possibility of cash payments to members - especially automatic ones - makes me start wondering about how it might be exploited or abused. A possible way to soften that is, in the case where people subscribe to be a member in the first place, a person could accumulate credits as a discount against their next payment. So no cash rebate, just a discount. For the record, as I hinted earlier, this seems to me like an extreme version of gamification, and seems to me to be bad a idea, certainly for the sorts of community I’d want to be part of. But also as noted above, I don’t think it’s fruitful to debate whether or not this is a good idea, as if there’s a right answer, because there isn’t - it’s a matter of opinion. Someone who might eventually set up such a compensated micropayment community will discover how well it works, and anything else is speculation. --- _[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/building-community-through-compensated-contributions/392686)._