Dear @read.cash,
I love the idea of the read.cash fund, but I think it can be dramatically improved. Currently the fund is distributed based on a complicated points system that rewards users for interacting with the site. For example, you earn 20 points for posting an article over 500 characters and 4 points for posting comments with 60 characters or more. If your article gets 100 views, you get another 20 points, and 50 points for 10 thumbs up, and so on. I understand the thought process was to have these points encourage more engagement with the site, but I believe high quality content will do that on its own.
It's fascinating how quickly people's behaviors changed once the incentives changed. Suddenly I see the same people posting comments on every article just to get those 4 points. It takes almost no effort for them to do this, but it also provides almost no value, maybe even negative value, to the site. Same for posting an article that doesn't get viewed by anyone. I am sometimes seeing the same person posting article after article with zero views to earn 20 points for each one. The people who are doing this are siphoning away funds from actual content creators who are putting their time and energy into producing quality content, not to mention the work to promote that content through various channels. Basically, it makes no sense to me that someone who wrote an article that gets 100 views earns the same amount of points as someone who posts 2 articles that get 0 views.
With that said, in my humble opinion the points system should be changed to only factor in views and thumbs up. This way you don't encourage low quality comments or articles. You encourage people to produce quality content as well as encouraging them to promote that content as much as they can. For example, ever since the fund was created, I generally get a disbursement of around $0.20/day. This is definitely not enough to attract quality content creators. Had the fund been based purely on views over the past 24 hours, I would have earned about $5, which is at least enough to buy a cheap meal. I calculated this by quickly seeing how many total views the approximately 200 articles posted in the last 24 hours received (1866 views). Now imagine a real content creator came along and posted something that generated 18,000 views. That person would have earned ~$20, which isn't going to make them rich, but it might make it worth their while to promote this site, especially if they could generate that much on a daily basis.
I love read.cash and think it has the potential to be a killer app. But it needs more content creators, high quality content creators, and I think the best way to attract them is by rewarding them appropriately. I know there could be flaws in this proposed system I haven't considered, but I believe it would definitely be an improvement over the current system. Perhaps half the funds awarded solely based on views, and the other half based on total thumbs up.
For a while now, I've seen this site as an opportunity to see how well a true meritocracy can work. I think that if the incentives are aligned properly, we could see a huge increase in traffic. The more traffic the site gets, the more paid sponsors will show up, and the more money the site will earn overall, a portion of which can be redirected to the fund. Imagine if the fund reached $1,000,000. That would be $5000 distributed to content creators on a daily basis, definitely a great incentive for people to think up new ways to draw people to their articles.
My last post wasn't my normal fare, but I've been experimenting with different types of articles to see how many views I can generate. I recently wrote a review of the Cryptopia documentary, commissioned a transcription of the latest Coinspice podcast, as well as the click-baity post on the top 5 worst replies to the Rowling tweet. I think more people would try different ways to generate views if they believed it would be worth their time.
Being able to tip content creators directly is awesome, but I think the real power of this site comes from it being built on top of BCH, allowing for fast, cheap and reliable transactions that makes something like the read.cash fund even possible. I have no doubt this site can be a preeminent example of what can be achieved with a truly merit based ecosystem. Rewarding someone for just trying is socialist. Let's not hand out participation trophies like the rest of society.
Please know I greatly admire what you have done with this site and am amazed at how much progress has been made in such a short period of time. I hope you read this and know that it comes from a passionate user who simply wants what's best for the site. My guess is you are already working on improving it and didn't need to hear it from me, but I thought I'd put this out there anyway.
P.S. I also think the thumbs up and thumbs down should show all reactions. The more information the better. I'd rather know I got 50 thumbs up and 40 thumbs down than just the net number overall. I know Reddit just shows the overall as well, but I think this site can be infinitely better than Reddit.
Good