this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
137 points (99.3% liked)
Asklemmy
43944 readers
487 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I know that it is not a popular topic in 2023 but a blockchain currency that allows users to 'award' posts/comments (similar to tipping in /r/dogecoin days) could provide instance owners with a source of income by taking a small portion of tips on their server.
Such a system would likely scale alongside user activity (read server load) and would encourage higher quality content. Would love to hear peoples thoughts on this.
Sounds good as long as it doesn't provide an incentive to pay for posts or comments to rise to visibility because then there'll just be advertising everywhere
Yes I agree.
One alternative is something similar to awards on reddit. However one could argue that it would impact the visibility of awarded posts by making them more 'eye-catching'. The only way such a system would not impact post/comment visibility is if it is a private transfer of value.
Honestly I would hate that, but if that's what keeps the lights on then I'll deal with it. I would prefer to move to an anonymous donation model like Wikipedia but I'm skeptical that will work.
Why would it have to be blockchain? Plus like the other commenter said, that provides incentive to bot comments and such. Donation based stuff works fine.
Blockchain has been used previously (see dogetipbot) in a similar concept and worked well.
Since tips would be given at the discretion of users finding certain comments particularly good, a bot would only be able to abuse the system by creating good comments.
I have seen of many instances not being funded sufficiently through donations. If the level of user donations is able to cover only 50% of operation costs for an instance, if monthly upkeep is say $60, then it is reasonable for an owner to subsidize the rest. But, as lemmy (and consequently each community) grows in popularity, a 50% coverage of operational costs is simply not sustainable. That is, without a tactic such as Wikipedia's notorious pity-ware ad banners.
Providing an alternative method of funding could assist instance owners to keep the community running.