By slaves I mean the hundreds of thousands of admins who give all of their time for free answering questions and producing content, so that FB shareholders can monetize their efforts.
If they didn’t already offer money? Still lots as there are many channels that simply do not have the subscribers/clicks to make money off the platform
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So you are referring to ppl who choose to give their time for something they believe in without the need for monetary gains. Isn’t it amazing that not all ppl do things needing monetary gains as incentive? You have just proven it is not needed as a core idea of community building as proven by
- Meta/FB
- Discord
- Mastodon
- Telegram
- Scored & many others including many Discourse powered forums & other forum software.
- YouTube(by those who don’t worry about gains and do it for pure passion) to which also includes:
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- Tik Tok
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- Twitch
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- X/Twitter
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- Blue Sky
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-
To put it simply there are many ways to build a thriving community that do not need it require monetary incentives. Monetary incentives is the proverbial carrot on a string. And as such can encourage ppl to also make low effort contributions. It is really all in the hands of those who choose to contribute to any given platform because they like the space & atmosphere it embodies
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YouTube would have 1/10th the content and the quality wouldn’t be nearly as good, if they weren’t paying for it. In any case, it simply isn’t the case that you can make everyone feel good about spending hours of their day writing on a forum for free. If some people choose to do it great.
For every Mother Teresa who dedicates her life in service for free, there are thousands of people who probably have to limit the time they spend doing an activity if it is all for free. I am not questioning the right of people to dedicate themselves to causes for free. I am questioning your insistence that this is the only form of conversation worth having.
If that was actually true many YT channels wouldn’t also use Patreon. Though your hypothesis is not possible to explore except with other similar video media platforms out there that have quality content and not much financial incentives.
You’re participation and being the Op of this discussion works against your premise. Not everyone is dedicated to producing content for financial gain. Many do I because it is a passion vs trying to make it a job.
You will find there are more “mother Theresas” in the world then ppl trying to profit on their passions and can manage their time effectively creating balance.
Many not to be confused with all, find that turning a passion into a job for money can kill their passion they had to blog, Videoblog etc.. And may need to step away temporarily or even choose to move in completely.
This thread seems to have devolved into a discussion about motivations and implications on quality of contributions.
The head post is, in effect, a request for an official feature. Responses from the team seem - to me - to be clearly signalling that Discourse as a commercial entity will not implement this feature.
It seems to me that the next step would be to request a plugin, perhaps as a paid piece of work. If someone wants the facility, let them pay for it.
In my opinion, debating whether or not the feature is worth having isn’t getting anywhere - opinions differ, and always will.
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Probably that is right.
Can someone expand on what might be possible with a plugin? The feature I am imagining would require an extra button on every post, and it might require several additional user interfaces for someone to explore their “points” status. There is also a business process behind payouts that would need some serious thought.
All of this can (and should) be bundled into a plugin purpose built for this use case.
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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:
Full post:
The new idea for this topic was different:
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.
Essentially you would be looking for something similar in scipee to what Steemit uses.
A basic idea would be to have a donation button on posts where it maybe does a base deposit into a site account and perhaps once a month transfers maybe into the user’s PayPal account a total minus the site fee, maybe a 5-10% cut for sure operations. Where a minimal payout has to be net before sending a payment or a frequency like quarterly.
Just thinking out loud. So akin to how some affiliate links work
How is that already possible (efficiently)?
The Subscriptions plugin, I believe.
Subscriptions are payments to the host, not rewarding the contributions?
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Efficiency is dependent on member’s ability to accept a payment, for international communities that might be more difficult and there isn’t a way through the discourse app directly already developed for that I’m aware of so perhaps that is what a new plugin/feature could help with.
If it’s a local community can just offer payment in cash, or using common apps like paypal/venmo. Also can just write and deliver or mail a check for anyone who still accepts checks and doesn’t want to loose a 2%+ fee to 3rd party. (venmo doesn’t charge that fee for personal transactions, but business account transactions do have fees and sales tax).
If members have their own business with other means of accepting a payment such as with stripe or other debit/credit card processor that can be better but then there are also fees with that.
Anyway it seems like one of the important parts of this discussion at a philosophical level is the impact financial gain incentive can have on individual community members as well as a community as a whole. Offering payments for individual post amount/quality may have more risk then a consistent salary method of payment. $10 a month is obviously not close to a living wage for anyone, that is just arbitrary amount that could represent someone being present and occasionally starting new topics or responding to other topics at a community site.
A system like that could make sense for members to be able to make payment donations to other members through the site platform instead of just individually between members, that can be safer for the site admin to run a system for that to protect individual members from possible scammer/fraudulent member accounts. Some platforms like YouTube and Rumble have systems like that for donations, I recall the percentage cut for those are much higher like 30% for YouTube and 20% Rumble although that was a few years ago I remember hearing someone mention that who did video streaming talk show on both platforms.
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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.
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GitHub - Canapin/Discourse-progress-bar: Adds a progress bar below Discourse's header that can serve various purposes. Not released on Theme component yet, as a refactor is needed. But it works.
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Maybe what the OP is looking for is some sort of integration with buy me a coffee, github donations, or sinilar online micropayment platform? It would be neat to be able to click a button to thank someone here with a small payment when they provide an answer that helps me bring my site back up.
But I agree such a feature would have to be carefully and thoughtfully implemented.