Pretty cool project
  1. I think its cool that one has to pay to write or signup
  2. Paying for an answer that one has not read yet is weird. What if somebody answers a shit answer but I only find out the answer was shit AFTER I payed for it.
My suggestion: Let the asker pay a bounty and the asker gives the bounty to his answer of choice. Let the people answering compete for the best answer!
This would also prohibit the typical stackoverflow shit answers like "why do you even ask, just do it like this: <completely different setup>".
I thought about doing it like that, but I realized that it's difficult to prevent someone from cheating:
  1. User creates a question with a 1 BTC bounty.
  2. User gets hundreds of high quality answers from people who want to win the bounty.
  3. User creates a sock-puppet account and gives himself the bounty, after reading all the answers.
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I think the stacker news model is working and a stackoverflow type of site would work perfectly with the same model. And then the viablilty of micropayments as a business model is a question of scale. In this model, any kind of engagement beyond just reading costs some sats. On the other hand, overly paywalled sites seem to languish for lack of engagement. Imho, even the people who don't boost/tip are providing the value of of their eyeballs, which incentives those that do engage.
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Could this be mitigated by charging a fee % of bounty + distributing to productive users like SN does?
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Let people vote for which is the best response!
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