Pay to post / money is the moderator is NOT popular
I spent some time last week posting on other forums about the mechanics of SN. I made a generic post describing how money might be used as a moderator (basically describing how we do things here), like this:
And then tried to have a conversation about the idea with the people on a bunch of different forums. This was a very enlightening exercise.
Money as a moderator is not popular with the lefties
I found a forum called 32-Bit Cafe that seems to enjoy meta conversations about moderation and online forums. They were not too enthusiastic to the idea of money being the moderator:
However, the thread eventually got to a more thoughtful level.
A surprising trend that showed up here and continued across other forums was that people thought the system would work better with pretend money or just points. I understood this to mean that I hadn't done a very good job expressing my concept.
The people on meta.discourse.org had a negative, knee-jerk reaction to my proposal:
However, the conversation got more thoughtful as it went on. Most people still assumed that not very many users would be willing to pay to post and that it would turn into rich rank (where the people with the most money controlled the conversation).
Also that running fees back into a rewards pool that pays out to users would be susceptible to gaming the system. A number of the people on the Discourse forum seemed open to the idea broadly, but the consensus seemed to be that it would create too much friction for to see much growth.
The normies also do not like the idea
I also posted the idea in the Odd Lots (a popular Bloomberg econ podcast) discord, with similarly negative responses:
The conversation got derailed into hating on SomethingAwful shortly after this.
(Curiously enough, SomethingAwful is now a pay-gated forum: you have to pay $10 to join.)
The Community Building StackExchange downvoted my question as not helpful or well researched and no one responded.
The XenForo users forum (XenForo is a popular paid forum software) also closed my suggestion that they implement money as a moderator with no discussion.
And the Admin Zone forum banned me as a spammer for making the post:
Weirdos are more open to the concept, but still probably nah
The people on a forum called AgoraRoad were also pretty hostile to the idea:
This forum had a much more irreverent tone which I really liked and the conversation eventually got interesting:
In the end though, I don't think they are gonna implement a pay to post campaign any time soon.
BitcoinTalk does not like the idea (nor, seemingly, Stacker News)
I posted the idea on this BitcoinTalk thread and it received near universal rejection. It seems most users thought I was proposing a change to Bitcointalk itself and were somewhat irate about the idea (even accusing me of having been put up to it by Theymos). When I tried to explain that I was not trying to talk propose any changes to BitcoinTalk but rather describing a different forum concept, I was accused of SEO spamming (I regrettably included a link to SN in one of my replies).
The Austrian Economists do like markets!
I then had the idea of seeing what more libertarian, Austrian economics-minded folks thought of the idea. I posted it in a thread on r/GoldandBlack and reposted it on r/Austrian_Economics where it was received with a little more interest.
But otherwise they seemed amenable to the idea. Once again the friction caused by a pay to post system seemed to be the biggest concern. Everybody seems to think it would be very difficult to grow the userbase of a pay-to-post forum..
I posted about it on the Ron Paul forums and someone pretty quickly connected it to the idea of using bitcoin, which was enheartening, but I wasn't able to generate very much conversation there.
Takeaways
I have a few more places I'm going to try to pitch money as the moderator, but the most obvious learning from this adventure is that unless you are in to Austrian Economics and Libertarianism, you probably have a very negative reaction to the idea of money as a moderator and paying to post.
Even the Austrians and Libertarians are doubtful of the concept -- language about markets I think will do better with them (Stacker News as an attention auction?, Stacker News as an information market?) than language about moderation.
Most people expressed some amount of being turned-off or off-put by the idea of paying to post.
Most people thought money as a moderator = richrank.
A tangential learning, but relevant, is that so many people have a negative opinion of bitcoin. Probably this is thanks to all the crypto scammers, but I found that most people immediately shut down when I brought up bitcoin.
I'm open to suggestions as to where I should bring the money is a moderator idea next.
Here's a list of all the threads I started if you'd like to read through them:
- https://discourse.32bit.cafe/t/can-you-use-money-as-the-only-moderator-of-a-forum/5063
- https://meta.discourse.org/t/can-money-be-the-only-moderator-of-a-forum/410209
- https://discord.com/channels/1072618859359654028/1072626260007731200/1539952189802291240
- https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/could-money-be-the-only-moderator-of-a-forum.9196/
- https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5591631.0
- https://www.reddit.com/r/GoldandBlack/comments/1vsu6te/could_a_price_system_take_the_place_of_moderation/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/austrian_economics/comments/1vtg2fs/could_a_price_system_take_the_place_of_moderation/
- https://ronpaulforums.com/threads/could-a-price-system-take-the-place-of-moderation-on-an-online-forum.575001/#post-7374036
Merefield has an interesting observation, but takes the diametrically incorrect conclusion from it. Will elaborate at length.
@remindme in 18 hours
Curious about what you saw there.
Same story I'm always harping: marginal value of contribution is negative, so you have to pay me for my attention. AI, infinite generation etc
waiting for it
I think we need to separate two things.
I think that if we were to reformulate "pay to post" into something that scares people less (as @SimpleStacker points out) and make it more coherent with the actual incentive of post bonds with an earning curve, emphasis on earning, then maybe you'll get to speak more to people's imagination.
I think part 2, "money is the sole moderator" is a dead experiment by now.
I agree about the initial approach certainly led to misconceptions, the replies showed that.
I will admit that I have not (and perhaps never have) thought of pay to post as a bond. But it's a nice way to phrase it -- at least for those who want to think. It may be too complicated an idea to expect people to get very quickly, though. Bonds aren't sexy.
On nostr and X, I've been emphasizing zaps and receiving zaps more than pay to post. But I'm not sure that is quite right either. I need to spend some time thinking about the idea of pay to post as a bond to see if we can't come up with something interesting there.
Maybe bond isn't the right framing. Maybe ante, like in hold'em?
On 4chan, I found that people were surprisingly open to the concept. I wished that I had made the thread much more aggressive (my title: "what if you could pay to post/reply?" what i should have asked "what if everyone had to pay to post/reply?"
4chan and something awful both have a paid feature: 4chan does it as a subscription that lets you not have to solve their INCREDIBLY ANNOYING captchas and somethingawful makes everyone who wants to post pay a fee to join. So both are perhaps more amenable to the idea.
All of which is to say, I think they don't mind the "pay to post" framing. So perhaps we don't need better language there, but rather better targeting.
Hmm if you're looking for an influx of stackers, like a practical outcome, then targeting is everything. Boost quantity / quality content on one of the niche rank 20-40 territories for a few months and see what happens. Provide stats about how much a post gets zapped, have something to show.
If we make a good plan I can do it with ~AI too. Though we're a bit in an AI dip because all the news is same old and fake lol. Can change that though. I'd just need to start consuming my papers feed again (but arxiv isn't as open as it was a year ago, they changed prerequisites)
If however you're looking for feedback / market intel more than immediate recruitment, then I'd a/b test some narratives. See what gets the most useful interaction.
That was the goal of this endeavor. I really wanted to get a sense of how normie forum users respond to the mechanics of SN. I have round two warmed up and we'll see how it does.
It seems to me that the most difficult part of this approach would be communicating to the outside world about the stats.
Also, I'm curious why you don't propose activating this model on the most popular Bitcoin/lightning/mining/nostr/econ territories? We do have this reality that users mostly need to know how use lightning to access posting here. It seems that we have two hurdles for a user who wants to come here to talk about food and drinks, but only one hurdle for a user who is interested in talking about lightning.
~DIY and ~security, with a 2-3x increase in content, can be good ones to start with I think, due to the techy nature. ~privacy could be awesome too (but expensive.) ~the_stacker_muse would be EPIC, I think, but I would have no clue how to approach that.
I also think targeting is the way forward more than branding.
I doubt we’re even at 1% of the people who would almost instantly get the point of Stacker News.
A couple of things:
Your observations are spot on.
My main goal was to find out what people thought of "money as a moderator" because it is something I've been using as my main pitch when I tell people about SN.
This is rings true. And I agree, but there is also some truth to listening to people when they tell you something. I don't think it is a coincidence that the response across so many different places was "no one will pay to post." The lesson I took from this is that I definitely need to change how I'm talking about things to outsiders...and that it might help to seek out outsiders who are more interested in what we are doing.
Pitching it in opposition to something else is an interesting point. I'll try that.
I think a way to describe it that might be more palatable to most people is "skin in the game"
Totally agree, but I also think we often have to read between the lines. The negative reaction is real, but the stated reason is often surface level. In other words, even though they say they wouldn't pay to post, don't assume that they really wouldn't. THey maybe would, if the process was made easy enough
This is good to remember, and I really do think it is true. If it's really really easy, we might get most anyone to use SN, but prior to this little exercise, I had somewhat cutely assumed that pay to post and money as a moderator were attractive ideas (perhaps because they are edgy or unexpected) and I think I have discovered that I underestimated how strong many people's reactions are to those concepts. I definitely need a new angle on these ideas.
Mmm... my view on it is that, again, the reaction is entirely vibes-based, not logic-based.
For example, the old SN motto: "Fixing online communities with economics" vibes better to people than "Money is the moderator". Leading with "Let's build communities where participants have skin in the game" garners a better reaction than "Let's build communities where people must pay to post" -- even if essentially they're the same concepts.
It is possible that we on SN have gotten so echo-chambery that we've lost sight of what kinds of words vibe well with people and what don't. I personally don't think that I've lost it though, maybe because I communicate economics to normies for a living.
I too was shocked that anyone would expect people to vibe with “money is the moderator”.
I love it and the kinds of people I want here would too, but we’re really fucking weird.
we oddballs are right, and they just dont like our words (but would like the content if properly explained/explored?) or we oddballs are wrong? Or, you know, general disagreement of values; no accounting for taste?
On this one, we oddballs are right. The incentives are just better, regardless of your tastes.
negative reaction is very common when you don’t have to spend your money to talk shit.
This <3
I very much like the idea of adding a small fee to speech, because, on one side, talk is cheap, especially in this internet age with social media, AI etc, but on the other side the consumption of it is not.
But there are other non monetary moderation mechanisms. One example coming to mind is ostracism, for example, the downvote on Stack Exchange and SN, or a beating like in the old days 😅
Which one is better, though?
Adding to the above, I like how on SN, even the downvote is also not free. Makes perfect sense, for the same reasons.
Have you told them that SN gives out a few sats to newbies? I never have had to use my own sats; I think that’s why I came around very quickly to the idea of paying to post
Me too!
I still remember the old times in which I generously forwarded sats to Stackers haha
No, in my efforts above, I wanted to emphasize that users must pay to post. If I also said you don't need to bring any money to the table, it sort of breaks the pay to post proposition.
One thing that many people on other forums picked up on was that while pay to post is straightforward, feeding fees into a rewards pool might mess it all up -- at least it certainly makes the incentives messier.
Most people also assume the extreme case: what if some rich user attacks the forum and tries to dominate all the front page? Is there a tipping point where they could make the majority of their expenses back and "short circuit" SN?
I want to come back and write a more detailed reply later - but for now thanks for going out and doing this research! Have some of my pretend money :).
I think it's one of those things you can't tell people, you have to show them.
People not liking it is a feature, they shouldn't like it, they should need it. People like shit, they need things that are useful.
They don't like Zuck/Elon's algo's either... but they need them to make the sites usable.
Nostrheads hate the idea of centralized algos, but what Nostr app do they mostly use? Primals, that uses an indexer and algos.
What's Nostr's value prop? A firehose of portable data for applying custom or competing algo's.
Money as the moderator is just an alternative algo, so the framing isn't pay-to-post, it's a better algorithm. You can't tell them that, you need to show them.
This is the case by default, ads, bot networks, astroturf campaigns, paid shills, and so on dominate legacy platforms.
SN isn't immunse to this, but at least it's transparent and reduces asymmetry. We know which scammer boosts all their own stuff and downzaps things they don't want you to see, but zaps allow the crowd to respond in-kind.
BBS is inherently niche so the showing part doesn't have great examples. There's also layers that need to come together, WoT also needs to have some weight in this new algo. Showing = building.
...and, importantly, the rest of us benefit from such behavior financially
It's interesting to me that people didn't seem to see mods and forum operators as the same category as people who might decide to use lots of money to influence things on a forum.
I tried to emphasize this in one of the threads. Personally, I find the transparency of the current SN model very pleasing. All the other algorithms in the world are opaque and confusing to me, but this one, it's just a matter of do you want to put 1000 sats behind the post so it goes up a bit -- and if that isn't enough, put another 1000. You can pretty much refresh the home page between zaps and see the results of your zapping.
I really like how you phrased this:
I need to think about how to phrase my pitch so that it descries something that people think they need.
Their attention is manipulated by richrank already, offer them transparency.
Personally, I like this approach. The lack of transparency in content moderation and citation on the rest of the internet is very frustrating.
But I don't think I have refined a very good pitch that tightly explains why pay to post and pay to like = transparency.
I found SN after having already spent time messing with Bitcoin and other crypto wallets to defi. There’s definitely a learning curve with lightning — I imagine plenty of people are hesitant to move and possibly lose Bitcoin to get it on L2 and then spend posting. It’s worse if the person is averse to Bitcoin, imagine how daunting the steps are to get a wallet funded just to banter around on the internet (yes I know there are many posts that are quality and rise above banter)
Great work!
I think they might change their minds when they're drowning in slop.
lol, the obsession with "those well off"/"those who have the means"
Wth is wrong with you people? "small" is a difficult concept...? Also: rewards pool act as a reimbursement for (top) content/activity
That's nice. Literally how it functions to me, too. I read top-zapped things, will engage with commentary/read your thoughts (like a Sybil attention fee) if you pay for my time
They aren't really thinking deeply. They have a negative aesthetic reaction, and they reach for reasons. It's not a deeply thought out analytical argument.
shocking, really... I can't go to online forums for "deeply thought-out analytical arguments"?
you can come here :D
I'm already here, eh
They aren't wrong that hooking fees up to user rewards causes some amount of mayhem or at least risk. If the cost of pay to post is important, we don't want to break it by giving refunds at the end of the day.
you'd get much less Den zapping (...of shitcoins, CCs...) unless there was a return of funds later.
Tho, to your point, I'd still gladly pay the ~7 sats to post and 100-ish sats to post.
I am (arguably) a lefty and I like pay to post as it is applied here on SNs.
Pay to post is simply a functional tax - to fund the platform free of advertising and to moderate content.
Taxes can be good when they serve those majority paying them...and pay to post demonstrably serves SNs 'citizens' by enabling reduced spam and a higher level of informative news and dialogue.
Pay to post is also an impressive use of the LN - both demonstrating its potential and strengthening its operational capacity.
Why do you think you get the appeal of the Stacker News model and Bitcoin, when most lefties are immediately turned off by both?
I enjoy the contrast in viewpoints here- there is probably a majority of Libertarian leaning people here and I find it fascinating to test my beliefs and views against those.
Regarding Bitcoin the power private banks have come to hold over our governments as corrupt and dangerous.
Bitcoin provides an alternative to the fiat monopoly imposed by banks and governments.
Some do not seem to see clearly enough the way in which private banks have gained more and more power over both politicians and the monetary system- since the increasing use of bank deposits as opposed to physical cash in the sum total of money in circulation means the ratio of fiat issued via debt issuance by private bankers has increased significantly.
The ratio of physical cash (issued by the state as debt free cash) to bank deposits (which are effectively an IOU promise to redeem for physical cash) has fallen significantly over the last ~70 years from around 50% to around 5%.
That means that the power of fiat has largely shifted from governments to private bankers.
Used properly it can be argued that fiat money can deliver positive results for the masses but since so much of fiat issuance has effectively shifted to private banks away from direct government issuance while at the same time as banker-corporate lobbyist capture of politicians from all major parties has occurred the whole system needs to be challenged- and Bitcoin does that.
it's not pay to post that is at the róot of the model.
it's pay to upvote.
it's pay to like.
People were not much more excited about that idea. The agora forum thread on particular discussed pay to like.
People are hooked on “free stuff” so these types of responses don’t surprise me.
The state of modern social media
I post
Pile up metrics
The awards means what? Def not sats!
Get nothing in return besides emotions
Blame the system for why everything sucks
GIVE US FREE STUFF?!
Like Saylor getting free bitcoin for issuing fiat liabilities. Yesyes, I get it
I really liked to read your research to know how ppl drown on the standard system of free post while eat ads think about SN. The overall message centered on the reward system overshadowed the pay to post/comment aspect. Receiving direct zap simply keeps engagement alive. Those unfamiliar with the system and bitcoin as real money won't feel comfortable, they will imagine things that aren't actually there, and this speculation often leads to ridiculous calls for regulation as has happened.
I think that those ppl don’t liked it too because they are inside forums/communities where shittalk and low effort content are the most common topics, otherwise they thought they would need to spend a lot of money and not a few sats (what is a lot if you think well)
who downvoted did it because didn’t like your proposal and its cheap just click, probably they will not put their money in game to downvote.
I also tried it out on 4chan, but I tried to soften the pitch and it didn't work:
https://boards.4chan.org/g/thread/109619410/what-if-you-could-pay-to-postreply
I think the challenge is that people see the cost before they see the incentives.
"Pay to post" sounds like a toll booth. In practice, SN feels more like a market for attention where value can flow in both directions.
The second part is hard to explain until someone actually spends time using it.
Your point on Bitcoin turning people off is spot on. Non-crypto folks hear sats and think scam. If you want objective feedback on the mechanics in normal forums, call it refundable deposits or micro-staking without mentioning crypto or sats up front.