Given that there is some probability of winning a question, let’s just guess it’s 20% on any particular question I might try to answer. This suggests to me a bounty of 5x whatever I would be willing to answer the question for in order to make me willing to do it. Assuming a question takes about a day of work (8 hours) to answer fully and successfully, and given our 5x multiplier, I’d be willing to try to answer a question I wasn’t already excited to answer for other reasons if it paid about $1800.
Many others may have lower opportunity costs, though (and I undercounted a bit because I assume any question I would answer would deliver me at least some sense of value beyond the money; otherwise my number would probably jump up closer to $2500).
Yeah, there’s two issues this points at that we’ve been thinking about:
1. “bounties” come with an issue where you’re not sure you’ll succeed, so if you’re actually relying on it for “real money” (instead of using the money as an indicator that someone cared which might motivate you enough to do it for fun), you need much more money for it to work
2. I actually expect a “well functioning” Q&A system works by having lots of people tackle small parts of a problem, in ways that are harder to assign credit for. (Or, at least, credit is distributed among many people)
Two approaches we’ve thought about include:
be more like “craigslist for intellectual progress”, where one section of LW is more like a contact-job-finding board. (This runs into usual issues of “job finding is hard both for employers and employees”, but would mean that you don’t need the 5x multiplier)
instead of “there’s one bounty that goes to the best thing”, a common pattern ends up being “question-asker puts forth the total amount they’re willing to spend on a thing”, with a vague goal of “distribute that money fairly towards people who contributed.”
Relatedly, we’ve considered something like a “tip jar” feature, where you can put a link to your paypal/patreon/whatever that shows up as a (not-too-obtrusive, but available) button when you mouse over someone’s username, or something). So that it’s easier to see “oh, this person did something that’s worth about $10 to me, I’mma give them $10.” And this might lend itself towards rewarding the person who took an initial step of “refactor your confusing question into 3 separate less confusing ones.”
If people provided this as a service, they might be risk-averse (it might make sense for people to be risk-averse with their runway), which means you’d have to pay more than hourly rate/chance of winning.
This might not be a problem, as long as the market does the cool thing markets do: allowing you to find someone with a lower opportunity cost than you for doing something.
Given that there is some probability of winning a question, let’s just guess it’s 20% on any particular question I might try to answer. This suggests to me a bounty of 5x whatever I would be willing to answer the question for in order to make me willing to do it. Assuming a question takes about a day of work (8 hours) to answer fully and successfully, and given our 5x multiplier, I’d be willing to try to answer a question I wasn’t already excited to answer for other reasons if it paid about $1800.
Many others may have lower opportunity costs, though (and I undercounted a bit because I assume any question I would answer would deliver me at least some sense of value beyond the money; otherwise my number would probably jump up closer to $2500).
Yeah, there’s two issues this points at that we’ve been thinking about:
1. “bounties” come with an issue where you’re not sure you’ll succeed, so if you’re actually relying on it for “real money” (instead of using the money as an indicator that someone cared which might motivate you enough to do it for fun), you need much more money for it to work
2. I actually expect a “well functioning” Q&A system works by having lots of people tackle small parts of a problem, in ways that are harder to assign credit for. (Or, at least, credit is distributed among many people)
Two approaches we’ve thought about include:
be more like “craigslist for intellectual progress”, where one section of LW is more like a contact-job-finding board. (This runs into usual issues of “job finding is hard both for employers and employees”, but would mean that you don’t need the 5x multiplier)
instead of “there’s one bounty that goes to the best thing”, a common pattern ends up being “question-asker puts forth the total amount they’re willing to spend on a thing”, with a vague goal of “distribute that money fairly towards people who contributed.”
Relatedly, we’ve considered something like a “tip jar” feature, where you can put a link to your paypal/patreon/whatever that shows up as a (not-too-obtrusive, but available) button when you mouse over someone’s username, or something). So that it’s easier to see “oh, this person did something that’s worth about $10 to me, I’mma give them $10.” And this might lend itself towards rewarding the person who took an initial step of “refactor your confusing question into 3 separate less confusing ones.”
If people provided this as a service, they might be risk-averse (it might make sense for people to be risk-averse with their runway), which means you’d have to pay more than hourly rate/chance of winning.
This might not be a problem, as long as the market does the cool thing markets do: allowing you to find someone with a lower opportunity cost than you for doing something.