@Read.Cash
@Read.Cash
Advertising? Paid by users? Our last article detailed how we plan to go further. However, some users in comments weren't quite happy by the fact that we mentioned advertising as the revenue source in the future. https://read.cash/@Read.Cash/advertising-paid-by-users-46ae93d0 *Be very careful: introducing advertisement breaks the expectations for the platform to be paid-for by users. I will not stay on read.cash if it shifts revenue from fee-for-service to revenue from…
@Read.Cash
Shutting down forums Forums will be closed on June 10th. There is nobody to moderate them and they have turned into a spam factory. You are **not earning any points** for posting to the forum anymore.
@Read.Cash
Communities just got that more important As we have detailed in our previous article, we're slowly giving more *importance* to our communities. https://read.cash/@Read.Cash/some-plans-for-communities-3b38e8ce#our-plan **As of now**, if you want to get some points for your articles, you need to *write* to a community or *submit* your *own* article to a relevant community. Only your own submission will get you points and only when accepted. First community to accept your post…
@Read.Cash
You now get 10% of points for your affiliates If you visit "Your affiliates" page now, you'll notice that now you are getting points from actions that your invited users do. Each time your invited user gets some points, you get 10% of that.
@Read.Cash
OC detector is back, in communities As of now, community admins can enable plagiarism detector tool in the community settings for their community admins and moderators. After you enable this, you get these hints in the moderation queue: In first case you can click it and see this: Please note that this tool is not ideal. Take it as a hint only. It might be that the original author is trying to submit his/her own article to multiple places (which is not bad, if the author is…
@Read.Cash
Today we're releasing short posts. Now you don't have to write a full article if you want to just share some simple thoughts or ask a question. Short posts are different in that they don't send out notifications, they (currently) don't have any images or links (Markdown is allowed if you know what that is) and they exist only in one community. They also give you 5 points if approved by the moderator. Lets hope @Koush approves this post :) We understand that this will add…
@Read.Cash
Short posts Today we're releasing short posts. To test the system I've added a short post to unofficial Read.Cash (f4d8) community by @Koush : https://read.cash/c/readcash-f4d8 Well, that's about all I have to say about this. :) Except maybe that short posts are very much in beta and probably contain bugs. P.S I forgot to mention that short posts are qualified for points exactly like comments - **60 characters minimum**. But since there's some initial moderation involved,…
@Read.Cash
We've hit 4,000 users registered on read.cash! 🎉
@Read.Cash
Since a lot of users still are confused about how the point system works: Basically, it's like this. The fund distributes 0.5% each day, so right now it's $15,000 * 0.005 = about $75 per day. Yesterday, all users accumulated about 20,000 points, so each point on average is $75/20000=$0.00375. But then [the personalized rate](https://read.cash/@Read.Cash/personalized-payouts-from-the-fund-f5d2f9c0) kicks in - if you are writing good interesting original content and publish it…
@Read.Cash
A few more updates come for moderators today. First of all, you can now approve some users so that their posts in future don't require your approval. It is a pretty important feature for communities, since we don't want moderators approving every post from good users. Secondly, you now get to see the stats of the users. Something like [Accepted: 2, Rejected: 0], so that you kind of get a feeling about the user history within the community before you auto-approve her or him.…
@Read.Cash
For anyone wondering how does one share a short post with other community - just post its link. We have a few nice updates for moderators today: https://read.cash/c/readcash-f4d8/post-fac83b3d
@Read.Cash
Important update Yesterday we have released the "Auto-approve" feature. https://read.cash/c/readcash-f4d8/post-fac83b3d Despite our extensive testing, there was a bug that prevented it from working correctly. Under some conditions submissions by the auto-approved authors were approved in **other** communities instead. We fixed the bug, but unfortunately there was no way to figure out which submissions by these authors were wrongly approved. So we moved all latest submissions…
@Read.Cash
Non-exclusive content As you probably have noticed we have added a Stats page to our site and that we've been gaining a lot of users lately: https://read.cash/stats 4910... 🎉 So-o-o-on..... Big step soon. What's even more interesting is that the number of points given in any day is skyrocketing and due to that the point price has been dropping: So, we've decided to take a look at what exactly users are getting points for: 15000 points for publishing articles! 15000 points…
@Read.Cash
Power users A few days ago we have discovered one more way some people are abusing the point system. https://read.cash/@Read.Cash/the-point-system-fa56be9b When we created the point system it seemed very hard for anyone to get 10 thumbs up: So, we decided that if writing an article was 20 points then achieving 10 thumbs up should be at least 50 points and something like 40 points is really a super-worthy article, so at least 160 points more. We did of course guess that some…
@Read.Cash
Publishing same article over and over again and more... Some people thought it would be fun to publish the same thing over and over again: **EDIT: We have removed information about the second instance, since the guy said he was sorry for doing it.** However, we're adding a check to published articles, so you will not be able to republish article that is too similar to your previous ones. 👆 That's the explanation why. But we also discovered something even more interesting,…
@Read.Cash
A lot of people often ask us "Why don't we limit number of (articles/comments/posts) per user per (day/hour/week)? 3/5/10 should be enough!" Frankly I've replied to this too many times, so posting it as a post. 1) You can register a new account in 1 minute. A rebuttal to that usually is that "You need to check IP addresses" or "You need to fingerprint the user's computer": You can get thousands of new IP addresses with $3/m VPN account or less. They provide thousands of…
@Read.Cash
Exclusive/points problem Yesterday one of our servers died that was responsible for OC checks. Due to that some articles didn't get the exclusive badge, some users didn't get their points for the articles. That also led to your points being converted about 10 hours later than usual, but the conversion has been done correctly. We're still recovering and we'll re-check all articles, so everyone should get their points for the original articles.
@Read.Cash
Upvoting groups Some of our users decided it would be a great idea to form upvoting groups (otherwise known as "upvoting rings"), where members upvote each other in exchange for upvotes by other members. Dear upvoting group participants, let me tell you this: you are spamming read.cash, you are taking our fund money dishonestly and therefore you will be **punished***,* unless you stop **right now**. You are spamming because you upvote content based on random group…
@Read.Cash
Lost drafts When we read "How I lost my writings by not saving to Draft" by @Vanjinks we though we ought to do something about it. And we did. Now all of your writings are saved in your browser every few seconds, so that if your browser crashed or something you'll still have a chance to restore your draft: https://read.cash/@Vanjinks/how-i-lost-my-writings-by-not-saving-to-draft-68393b6e
@Read.Cash
Featured community rules As we have discussed in "Some plans for communities" we are proceeding by declaring the rules by which we'll select communities to be give the **featured** status: https://read.cash/@Read.Cash/some-plans-for-communities-3b38e8ce#our-plan We will give the **featured** status to the communities that fullfil the following criteria: **Single language** You can select a language in your community settings. Accept only articles in that language. For…
@Read.Cash
Why is my point rate so low? A lot of people are asking us about the point rate. Some of them remember that you could have gotten $1 for 200 points back when the point system was introduced in April. https://read.cash/@Read.Cash/the-point-system-fa56be9b Let us explain once more - the fund pays out 0.5% every day of the amount it holds (which is about $70 today). There are many actions that generate points. At the end of the day this amount of $70 is divided by the total…
@Read.Cash
Yet another experiment with points to non-featured communities We have finished going through the list of eligible communities (those which have at least 10 approved submissions) and the featured list for now is complete. Only about 5% of communities made it through. It's pretty sad that we haven't found *any* community in non-English language that is single topic, single language (some of them have a week to try to remedy the situation, but the majority were "we accept…
@Read.Cash
A few small updates: 1) we've added charts of number of upvotes/downvotes https://read.cash/stats#Upvotes_per_day 2) comment box now reminds people to upvote or downvote the article they are commenting; 3) inserting sponsors block just got easier: https://read.cash/@Read.Cash/get-sponsors-a2b66c10
@Read.Cash
Upcoming changes to the point system **Note: These changes are live now.** **TLDR:** *The point system* is renamed to *the random rewarder*; Points for articles and short posts are given only in *featured* communities; Each submission gets *at most 50% chance* to get points and only in one community; Chance is to get 20 points for article or 5 points for short posts, still has to pass the exclusivity check; About 30% of daily points go towards *random* upvotes by power…
@Read.Cash
Myth: no points for comments or outside of featured communities Just now I have read this article by @Eybyoung called "Articles to write" and wanted to say a few things. @Eybyoung writes: *Once your articles are approved by the featured community you posted, that's the only time you'll receive a points.* It's not the only time you'll receive points. It's not even the best way to get points. ~530 upvotes today resulted in somebody getting points. About **110** (useful)…
@Read.Cash
Got even more "thoughts"? A lot of people have created communities about "thoughts" or "anything goes", like there's nothing else to write about. Well, guess what - there are a lot of things to write about. To help you with that, we've added a list of example topics in the "Create a community" page: https://read.cash/communities/create Click the link and you'll be presented with a never-ending list of ideas for what to write about: Assume that somebody has already created a…
@Read.Cash
Hiding communities, new authors, older posts A few updates for today, guys Hiding communities Ok, not everybody enjoys visiting read.cash and seeing mostly articles about read.cash, so now there's an easier way to hide any community (not only read.cash one): New authors We're also giving some space on the home page for new authors to get started faster. Older posts We're also showing some older, but still possibly interesting posts on the homepage:
@Read.Cash
The fund: $40,000 A huge shoutout to our biggest donor @MarcDeMesel for raising the fund amount up to $40,000 (a $27,000 increase!) Wow!
@Read.Cash
Fund spending We are changing how the fund spends its money. Previously we were spending 0.5% per day, because we had no idea how much is there going to be in the fund, but there is a problem with that. Let's assume the fund has $40,000 and the active monthly number of users that the fund pays grows at 500 users per month. Here's how much the fund will have in 12 months: It doesn't look that bad, we start with $40,000 and end up with about $7000. However, the problem lies…
@Read.Cash
As we have noted [four days ago](https://read.cash/@Read.Cash/upcoming-changes-to-the-point-system-f7c066c9#next-big-upcoming-change-you-will-only-be-able-to-submit-article-to-one-community) we're removing the ability to submit an article to multiple communities. Later we'll release an interface where you'll be able to merge each of your articles into a single community submission (merging comments into one tab). See [the…
@Read.Cash
The fund: $100,658 Our most generous donor @MarcDeMesel has decided increase his pledge to the read.cash fund to a total of $97,000 thereby getting our fund to **$100,000** ! **Huge thanks to** **Marc**! By the way, Marc has interesting YouTube channel with some great investment recommendations: https://www.youtube.com/user/Marcdemesel
@Read.Cash
Head's up: featured communities will be gone Yes, we're cancelling the features communities experiment. This means no more points for articles and short posts in featured communities, and for moderation too. So, yes moderation becomes an unpaid work. The "Featured" tab will be removed and replaced back with the "All" tab. https://read.cash/communities https://read.cash/communities?filter=all 100% of daily points will be given by the random rewarder.…
@Read.Cash
Blue dots, blue borders, new comment counts, previews A few upgrades for today. We are sponsoring a $150 contest on Freewriting, hosted by @wakeupkitty - check it out! https://read.cash/@wakeupkitty/join-write-and-win-657a56e0 The homepage now shows your communities along with blue dots whenever there are updates. **Writing to communities** now has a big benefit - you'll definitely attract some attention with that nice blue dot. Whenever inside the community you'll see the…