I would like to share with the community some things I learned from Stacker.news lately, which I think that have a place on Discourse.
It all boils down to their economic scheme, regarding how they reward users and how they charge. The importance of this for discourse is that not only this scheme can (and does) incentive good quality interactions in a community, but it also can more easily help forums to be self-sustainable.
Compensation:
Users simply reward each other with any amount they want to pay for what anything they consider to be a good post or comment.
The platform daily redistributes internal fees among users depending on the scores of they overall daily contributions (either by receiving or giving).
Charging:
The platform charges users for commenting, “liking” and posting. “Liking” is made via “zapping”, which is the main way users show support to other users contributions.
Simplifying, the scheme charges progressively: commenting costs 1 satoshi, posting costs 100, and zapping can be set to any value by the user.
This scheme compensates and incentivizes good content, collaborative attitudes, and punishes spam and bad quality content.
What do you think?
(I will expand if there’s any interest)
Heh, it’s not a healthy or sustainable model for the types of communities consciously we build for. Definitely not something we would consider building into core but you could make it work with a plugin. Extrinsic motivators attract the wrong people for the wrong reasons, in my experience.
Healthy community ecosystems are driven by intrinsic motivation.
Just to clarify, I don’t personally need this functionality, I’m not operating my forum anymore, nor I need it here since my participation is nearly null. I agree that this wouldn’t be something for every kind of community, since more focused communities might not need it, but it could be useful for communities that are more close to be a social network due to having more loose thematics. Apart from that, while I can say that it does works properly from personal experience, it’s costless and effortless for anyone to go there and see it by himself (they will actually gladly give you some sats for doing just that, as a way of appreciation for the inquiry itself, for they are proud of their community).
(small note: I could have used my referral link to stacker news if I were interested in earning anything, I just wanted to bring this up because I value discourse and thought it could add to it)