Ask HN: Idea Sunday

This isn't exactly what I was thinking. When you sign up on Goodst.org you sign up to a plan that charges your credit card about $6.00 a month. Even though they let you choose where to direct .25 cents each day. So overall you have to be willing to give at least $6.00 a month.

I was hoping to really lower the barrier to donating by only asking for a .10 - .20 cent donation per person, per month. I think many more people would be willing to donate .10 - .20 cents per month instead of $6.00 per month.

.10 - .20 cents a month would not be a noticeable difference to most people, so people would sign up without any concern about their own finances. As long as they could trust the payment options and donation service.

Lets take a look at a possible scenario here. Currently amazon micropayments charges credit cards 5% of transaction value + $0.05 for transactions anywhere between $.05 - $9.99.

Lets consider single transactions between .10 - .20 cents. Any transaction in this range comes with a 6 cent transaction fee. So you would receive a net payment of .04 - .14 cents per person per month.

Imagine an example where each person donates .20 cents and we receive .14 cents net per person after transaction fee. How many user do we need to get $500,000? About 3.57 million users.

Seems like a lot of people but it is only about .01% of the United States population. And since the website could take donations from anyone in the world willing to give .20 cents a month, I think attaining practical large sums would be achievable. And extremely affordable!

So .25 cents a day is good if you can afford it, but .20 cents a month is soo extremely affordable for most people and with scale it could add up to a lot!

you can make a simple database app for this in Ragic (https://www.ragic.com/)

That's the thing. If this service is implemented properly, you want users to game the system for profit. It'd have to be so airtight that the only way to "game" the system would be to go out and try to think of something intelligent to contribute. Another commenter discussed the possibility of astroturfing -- The astroturfing would have to be so well concealed that it'd be content users would actually like. So, it's still corporate-supported advertising, but it's smart corporate-supported advertising. Which is still awesome. Reminds me of this : https://xkcd.com/810/.

What you said about a system of experts and trained users determining whether your comment is worth exposing to the public ... eh. It sounds like it'd take a shit-ton of time and debating, especially as the service expands to handle a lot of content.

Also, isn't that just modern journalism? As a journalist, you apply to write an article for, or get a job at writing articles for, a well-established high-quality media company like the NY times or the New Yorker. A system of trained experts review your application and approve or deny it accordingly. Then you write articles and they get shown to the public after you've been approved.

I'm not saying it's a bad process, I'm saying it already exists. The problem is, it's slow and it takes a shit ton of time to determine who's a great writer and who gets limited participation and who doesn't. And when you allow the process to get faster, you have to give up the expert-authority, and well, you get something like Reddit.

This service would have to find a way to keep submissions and distribution extremely fast, like Reddit, but also keep the quality of discourse high, like NY Times.

The proposed solution is : money. People who submit stupid cat pictures to Reddit aren't dumb themselves, they've just been exposed to a forum for discourse that allows dumb content. Meaning, if you asked them : "Do you really think that cat picture is going to allow for quality discourse?", they'd definitely say "No."

So I'm willing to trust ilovekatpictures1998 on his judgment of discourse, if not his ability to create such discourse. So if we can trust the users to have good judgment, all we have to do is create a system that forces them to use their judgment, which Reddit doesn't do. And telling them to put their money where their mouth is by making them pay is the best way to force them to use their judgment.

The only reason it wouldn't get as big as Reddit is, people don't want to put their money where their mouth is. Well, most people. But then again, there are a lot of niches ...

Exciting rhetoric.

How do you expect people to discern between Reddit reputation and TheWebsAlzheimersCure.com's (drop the "the" -- just WebsAlzheimersCure. Cleaner.) reputation?

That depends on the degree to which money equals power in that setup, I suppose. It doesn't have to be smart if you're willing to pay for enough accounts just to create a buzz.

Although granted - for the site to be worth the effort it would already have to be popular.