Monetization is often a struggle for big open-source projects, donations are nice but I think they often fall short.
Something to consider is to add Rewards people get if they donate, which they can then hand out to posts or comments that they like. I feel this could add a lot to PieFed and is a great feature to have.
The potential extra income from people buying rewards could be used for better servers, more storage, to cover dev costs etc.
I have no clue how Federation would work around this it’s probably complex. Thoughts?
Edit: We could have a option to hide badges for those that don’t want this feature. It’s purely cosmetic
Money ruins everything, don’t do this.
Perhaps, but sadly we do need money to make things work. If PieFed grows to 1 Million+ users I don’t think donations are going to cut it.
Are we talking about PieFed the software or piefed.social the instance? We should seperate development cost from hosting cost.
If PieFed the software grows to 1M users and the users are distributed across a lot of instances, the cost for hosting is split between all instances.
If the instance piefed.social grows to 1M users we have a different problem and that is centralization.
Money can pay for new features like the ability to upload videos or keep images longer etc. Currently I think images older than x years get deleted, money can solve this.
Thought experiment: Reddit has 400 million weekly active users. Let’s say PieFed grows to 10% of that.
That means that there will likely be multiple instances with over 4 million weekly active users, how do they pay for that? Who pays for all the images (and hopefully video) that those users share?
These type of sites don’t need to host video. Hell, I’d argue they don’t need to host images either for the most part. They’re huge drains on it. People can embed from external sources.
The Fediverse is not remotely ready to incorporate anything like this currently, it would cause too much anger.
I disagree, images add a lot and it’s already built into PieFed quite nicely. Relying on things like imgur to host your images comes with a lot of problems, adds friction and is bad UX.
If PieFed becomes 10% the size of reddit, which I hope it does, how do you propose the hosing costs of the ~40 million weekly active users are paid for?
Piefed is a long, long way from that. Cross that bridge if it happens. I personally doubt it will.
Easy Cop-out
Money can pay for new features like the ability to upload videos or keep images longer etc. Currently I think images older than x years get deleted
that’s unrelated to the software, it’s an option for the instance admin to choose how much they want to host
It’s important to separate piefed software development cost, and cost to host instances.
Images/video if that was a feature is a burden for the instance admin in terms of storage cost, not the software developer.
That’s be like donating to a game developer for more FPS for your game. The burden of FPS would be on the user and the GPU and hardware they decide to use.
Please don’t
Yeah, I have to say I’m also critical of this. One side is the gamification aspect, which I don’t really think is beneficial to healthy discussion. The other is the possibility for abuse; these awards give trolls a superpower by tagging other people’s posts with highly inappropriate “awards” that could be very badly received.
I see the value of monetization, but maybe something as simple as an optional “PieFed donor” flair on user profiles of people who send monthly contributions could achieve some of this benefit without the possibility for abuse.
There could be a option to turn it off/hide it
Aside from monetization, I think being able to give people awards/trophies/badges would just be a fun thing. I collected some weird ones on Stackoverflow back in the day.
My problem with awards (as they were implemented on reddit) is twofold:
- They act as a “super-upvote,” because a post/comment that gets an award will often end up upvoted to the top of a thread. This is essentially allowing someone to pay to increase the visibility of one particular view over others. This is counter to the democratic forum nature of the up/downvoting system.
- They incentivise least-common-denominator behaviour from commenters who then race to be the first to make the most obvious joke or reply so that they might get awarded for it. It doesn’t engender good and thoughtful content.
Edit: thanks for the gold, kind stranger!
post/comment that gets an award will often end up upvoted to the top of a thread
Maybe that’s because it’s a good comment? Or because Reddit treats it that way in their proprietary algorithm, of which there’s no such thing here, and as far as I can tell, is not part of this pitch.
They incentivise least-common-denominator behaviour from commenters who then race to be the first to make the most obvious joke or reply
Why would anyone be farming these meaningless awards?
It doesn’t engender good and thoughtful content.
Why would a comment with no good or thoughtful content get an award?
I guess you never used reddit back in the olden days.
I guess you didn’t read the comments you replied to.
Derp a derp
Such an enlightened addition to this thought-provoking discussion…
no u
Yes, the awards I was thinking of would only show up on someone’s profile, not in the discussion.
Edit: thanks for the gold, kind stranger!
That would drive me nuts. Same with people who would edit their comments to freak out and thank everyone for the upvotes like it was an oscar award speech. There was a lot of strange behavior the developed over time. I like the idea of awards as a source of monetization as long as it doesn’t influence the conversation. Like what was said elsewhere just a cosmetic change.
I’m proposing it purely for cosmetics, it won’t boost your comment or post with default sort.
And users can opt out of seeing any rewards.
It’s just a nice fun thing to have, and something small you get for making a donation
visual flare will influence how people subconsciously vote. if somebody gave a comment gold then they obviously thought it was of greater value, which will influence others to find it more valuable too, resulting in more upvotes which repeats the cycle. that’s why comment awards are an excellent catalyst for mimetic desire and in turn social manipulation.
The idea clearly comes from a good intention, i like rewards in themselves but i dislike the fact that people with more money have more advantages, even slight ones. I admit that this is kind of a moralist take, and that in practice it’s what makes some great projects possible via crowdfunding. I also admit that not wanting to encourage user contributions can lead to enterprise/state contribution being necessary or more tempting, which is probably worse. But i disliked that part on Reddit, and i would be a bit disappointed to have it on foss federative projects as well.
Purely cosmetic vanity items are pretty ok I feel. Someone is putting a badge “I supported this with $5” someone else “I had 5k USD to spare, look at how rich I am”, that does not bother me. It is actually informative and not necessarily the badge of honor they think. We decide what it means.
Eh, i give it to you that we can just ignore it in the end. And anyway it’s certainly one of the least bad option. It’s more that im not comfortable with it, and i struggle reasoning this discomfort away.
does PieFed having the classic “cover our monthly hosting costs” progress bar OG reddit used to have?
donating used to give you account gold (which didn’t allow you to give awards) but still gave you access to extra features (like saved posts I believe)
since PieFed is open source maybe these could be tied to extra hosting capacity and not paywalling features? ie you donate X amount you get to upload Y amount more images/video to share on the instance?
I’d be weary of being able to pay to give others awards as that allows actors with more capital to sway conversations and astroturf a forum that’s supposed to be democratic.
I think rewards need to be purely cosmetic and not influence default ordering. Users should also be able to turn off reward viability.
That way you get all of the benefits with none of the drawbacks.
I think it’s a good idea and would vote in favor.
I suppose the technology to federate it wouldn’t be too hard. A badge or award or custom reaction could get federated with the same mechanism we federate a flair or an upvote. I mean ActivityPub is very broad and lenient with things and we rely on mutual trust between instances anyway. I suppose money being involved incentivises people to do weird stuff, but same applies to some political arguments and trolls and we have that somewhat covered.
I’m pro achievement badges. Paid content can come where there are many achievements already.
Perhaps as a trial run active users could get 1 Gold, 2 Silver and 3 Bronze rewards per month.
