Conditional payments for paywalled content (after you pay for a piece of downloadable content and view it, you can decide after the fact if payments should go to the author or to proportionately refund previous readers)
Also it incentivizes you to read the newest articles, because if they happen to be crap, greater chance of refund. Wait, perhaps that is not a problem, only a balance, because the older articles will typically come recommended by someone, which also reduces the chance of crap.
OK, the actual problem with this proposal is that if you happen to read some crap, you are now incentivized to share it, so that more people can contribute to your refund. Thus the internet reverts to its usual.
If someone shared a bad article with me so I would contribute to their refund, I think I would not like them as much afterward :P
One way to keep people from sharing bad content is to display the proportion of previous viewers who paid to the author. This would be a useful way for readers to find good content, too. But the big problem I see is that, unless a reader is scrupulously honest, their payment decision is fairly arbitrary, which might lead them to refund every article (while expecting the same in return).
They wouldn’t share directly with you, but on a Facebook page—more impact. ;)
I am pretty sure humans would find ways to game any metric. For example, paying yourself for reading your own articles… increases the proportion of happy readers. It would help if you could first set the price to $0.001, give yourself 1000 happy reads, then set the price to $1 (or whatever would be usual).
-- Vitalik Buterin, On Radical Markets
This is genius!
Also it incentivizes you to read the newest articles, because if they happen to be crap, greater chance of refund. Wait, perhaps that is not a problem, only a balance, because the older articles will typically come recommended by someone, which also reduces the chance of crap.
OK, the actual problem with this proposal is that if you happen to read some crap, you are now incentivized to share it, so that more people can contribute to your refund. Thus the internet reverts to its usual.
If someone shared a bad article with me so I would contribute to their refund, I think I would not like them as much afterward :P
One way to keep people from sharing bad content is to display the proportion of previous viewers who paid to the author. This would be a useful way for readers to find good content, too. But the big problem I see is that, unless a reader is scrupulously honest, their payment decision is fairly arbitrary, which might lead them to refund every article (while expecting the same in return).
They wouldn’t share directly with you, but on a Facebook page—more impact. ;)
I am pretty sure humans would find ways to game any metric. For example, paying yourself for reading your own articles… increases the proportion of happy readers. It would help if you could first set the price to $0.001, give yourself 1000 happy reads, then set the price to $1 (or whatever would be usual).