If I contribute, it's normally because I think I have something of value to offer that's otherwise missing. Passing up the opportunity to do that feels bad, which is my incentive to do it (although it's often outweighed by other factors). If I were instead motivated by the rewards you suggest I think the quality of my contributions would plummet dramatically even from its current mediocre level.
Ask HN: I need you but have no money. What can I offer you instead?
31–37 of 37 posts
Re: Ask HN: I need you but have no money. What can I offer you instead?
#32Yes, Money , Swag , and Beta releases out the yang.
Re: Ask HN: I need you but have no money. What can I offer you instead?
#33You have to be very careful when you start offering real rewards. People will game the system for free, but nothing like the level of gaming that goes on for a reward. You'll end up with absolute crap. And don't assume that people 'working for free' are getting nothing of it. They obviously enjoy it, or they wouldn't do it. Offering a tangible reward will change their motivation. The result of both of those is often…
I've done some projects on Mechanical Turk (spent enough to get an account rep!) and I can definitely say that offers of money will bring in people who will (1) rip you off or (2) do the minimum work required to get paid. The type (1)'s are easy to deal with because there are ways to check people's work. They just don't get paid. The type (2)'s are harder -- there's a population of Turks that I call Superturks that s…
Reject mediocrity in all aspects of life. Spend money on good tools, and shun anyone who makes less-than-good tools.
Re: Ask HN: I need you but have no money. What can I offer you instead?
#34It depends on a lot of things!
We'll assume that whatever it is you are having people do is something that is intrinsically rewarding, benefits them, and is not taking up their entire life. We're not talking about having interns come in and work 8 hr days on projects you specify for no pay and you retain original copyright ownership as work for hire without pay. It's more like Stack Overflow answers.
As has been pointed out, in such a system by offering cold hard cash, you can and will attract gamers and the wrong element by paying, and you can and will also destroy the intrinsic motivation of the many sincere people who enjoyed contributing for free before.
At some level of contribution there needs to be pay off though, especially if you are directly monetizing contributions. I am thinking of youtube here. There are now professional youtube performers, people who make a living writing original comedy and commentary and skits for youtube and earning money from the shared ad revenue. This is only done with top earners who are making enough from ads to actually be able to fund doing it as a full time job. The result has been higher quality material and more stickiness from popular contributors.
Re: Ask HN: I need you but have no money. What can I offer you instead?
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does Badge/Karma work with all types of audience?
Not really. Don't think of badges & karma too literally. They are just tools to provide gratification. It wouldn't be effective for Wikipedia since only the feeling that you are contributing to the most popular encyclopedia in the world gives you enough gratification to do it. Linux contributors don't need badges for the very similar reasons too. But of course, the smaller you are, more tools and tricks you need to u…
I was under the impression that most Linux contributors were actually paid by some other employer who happened to use the Linux kernel in their own products and contributed their patches and drivers back upstream. That said, there are still a large portion who do the same sort of work completely for free.
Re: Ask HN: I need you but have no money. What can I offer you instead?
#36Offer users a competition. The competitive nature in most people can be enough motivation for them to work for free short-term.
A small prize/perk for the winners is good, but only if multiple users can't join together to increase their chances of winning.
Re: Ask HN: I need you but have no money. What can I offer you instead?
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stack Overflow points also help to unlock additional features of the site, for example you can't comment on a post until you have 100 points, which unlocks that feature for you.
But most of these additional features seem to be mostly about being allowed more advanced ways to contribute to the community, e.g. editing other users' comments, locking articles etc. None of the features (that I know of, my SO karma is nothing to brag about) make Stackoverflow more USEFUL to the high-karma user, than to the low-karma one.
Slashdot experimenting for a while with letting high-karma users disable ads.
They didn't disable them by default -- they just started showing a checkbox in the sidebar providing the option as a thank-you for "your contributions to the site" or something like that.
I don't see the checkbox anymore (I never bothered to check it; I don't visit much nowadays), so perhaps they decided the experiment wasn't a success.