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 users, each upvote might give anywhere from zero to a few hundred points, but no more than 2% of daily points;
A single featured community cannot give more than 5% of total daily points;
No points for comments anywhere;
No points for any other action too (100/1000 views, 10/100 thumbs up, signing up, logging in, etc...);
When you delete an article or short post that got you points we still deduct the exact amount we gave you;
Personalized point rate stays;
Moderators in featured communities still get 20%, affiliates still get 10%;
You are better off not thinking about how the random rewarder works at all :) after all it's quite random;
Next big upcoming change - you will only be able to submit article to one community (and re-submit to different one if it wasn't accepted) or not submit at all.
Longer version
A lot of people now think about the point system as of their job, so much so that we constantly get angry letters that somebody's point rate is low, like we had a contract with them or something.
I guess when you have a "system" people kind of expect to get "paid" (and on time!)
What's even worse, they think that we're buying characters, so they are producing them at break-neck speed. Some of them producing 1000 points per day of ultra-low quality content. That's like 50 articles per day! Assuming he/she sleeps 8 hours and types all other time - that's an article every 19 minutes round the clock without even a bathroom visit. Yet they still bug us that their point rate is too low ("I'm not spamming or anything!")
In reality the fund, despite being $13,000 is far too small to give "work" for 6,500 users (yikes!), even if we gave away everything right now.
It would be only $2 per user.
One-time payment of $2... and that's it, the fund is gone!
Having established that the fund is totally not suited to "hire" people, we understood that we need a new role for the fund.
We are much better off using the fund as a random reward mechanism, so that some people are rewarded sometimes for some of the good things they do.
That's why we're renaming the points system to the random rewarder. Don't let the name confuse you - it doesn't give points to the random people for random letters, it's still pretty strict.
We can't reward everybody all the time, we can't even reward some people all the time. The only thing left is to reward some people sometimes. That's the best we can do for now. Otherwise it's always a race to the bottom. Who can produce more of articles exactly 500-letters in length.
That's not what the fund was supposed to stimulate at all.
Ok, enough of chit-chat, let's get to the details and why's.
Details
As previously noted 70% of the daily fund spending will go towards actions approved by moderators in featured communities.
However, there are two situations we want to avoid: having too active/powerful communities and moderator corruption.
Too active/powerful communities
Today we have approved one of the first non-English communities to be featured 🎉 - that is "Bengali Recipe (ea62)" - at least we didn't find any big problems with it (it's a single topic, single language, no plagiarism - our OC checker seems to be giving us a green light on "no plagiarism" in the community and it's pretty hard with recipes, most of them usually are copy-pasted from the Internet), but the problem is that this community produces two times more content in a day than every other featured community combined.
Do we really want to give away 66% of all daily fund spending to motivate a single community, leaving just 33% for all of other communities?
No, no and no.
That's why we're putting a limit of 5% of daily points on a community. For now. We might decrease it later.
No community will be able to give away more than 5% of all daily points combined given out by the random rewarder.
For example, if the random rewarder gave 10,000 points in a day, that means that one community will only be able to give away 500 points that day.
...but that leads us to another problem:
Moderator corruption
In theory moderation teams don't care about who they approve as long as content isn't going to lose them their featured status.
However, when you have a limited amount of points to give away (5% of daily spending) you might be tempted to approve your friends first (or people who give you a kickback) while the points last, and everyone else - later, not giving them any points.
To avoid this we're lowering the chance to get 20 points for the approved article or 5 points for the approved short post to 50%. In that case the moderator doesn't know whether his friend will or will not get any points, so there is a significantly higher chance that moderators won't be corrupted.
There is an indicator that shows that the community is no longer giving points for now (until enough time passes so that total is less than 5%):
No points for 100/1000 views, 10/100 thumbs up, signing up, logging in
All these have been subject to huge abuse (upvoting rings, buying traffic, registering hundreds of accounts), so we're putting a stop to this too.
No points for comments
Comments currently are responsible for nearly 50% of points given out daily. Yet 99% of them are useless. We will stop motivating people to create this kind of useless content, so that the only motivation there will be left would be to communicate with author. However, you can still get points for comments via "Random upvotes by power users"
Random upvotes by power users
How do we motivate people that don't yet have any good content to post to featured communities?
We're trying an experiment that we wrote about a bit earlier - we're dedicating up to 30% of daily points given by the random rewarder towards upvotes by power users, so that somebody upvoting (thumbs up) your article/post or even comment outside of featured communities might get you anywhere from zero to a few hundred points (but no more than 2% of daily points).
Yes, that means that your older content might get you points too. It also means that you should be upvoting good content and downvoting bad content, who know - maybe you will give somebody nice a few hundred points doing that.
Live now
We expect the number of daily points generated to drop from 50000 points to probably a few thousand points.
We still hope that this will motivate people to write and communicate, which is what the fund is there to do, but it won't seem like we're giving you a job, because frankly at $70 per day for 6,500 people it's simply impossible.
However, by producing interesting articles, by communicating, you are creating a better version of read.cash that will get more money to the fund and will be paying more to the people.
Next big upcoming change - you will only be able to submit article to one community...
...and re-submit to different one if it wasn't accepted) or not submit at all.
The reason for this is this:
25 communities! 25 discussions, 25 versions of one article. But it also makes communities useless. Can you even guess what this article is about, judging from the communities it has been submitted to? Team Readcash? Be yourself? Earn money for free? Share your apps? In reality, the post is about cartoon characters... It's a nice post, but this kind of thing makes community participation worthless and very confusing.
We will limit it now so that you either submit your article to a community or not. That way we'll have only one discussion and person will have to really choose a good community. Just like it works now with short posts - one community - one submission. That will make everyone's life easier - one discussion page and no more confusion with which version of the article you're looking at.
We will give you the optional ability to choose one community to select for your older articles (rest will redirect to the new one).
Why did we even make it? Well, when we launched communities back about 6 months ago, we barely had any idea how they should work. It seemed like a good idea to be able to put your article to multiple communities. However, now we understand that it diminishes the value of each community. The author doesn't even think about where this article should belong.
What to do if you want people in other communities to know about your article? Write a relevant short post with a link to your article. BTW after we're finally done with the random rewarder - we might finally get to improving the short posts (to add images and better way to add links) and comments editor.
This cat-and-mouse game with people thinking read.cash hired them to type is really tiring. We want to return to doing something else to improve the site, not teaching our exclusive content detector how to convert Greek letters to English or whatever this crap is. Note though how many communities accepted this kind of crap. That's a big reason why we need to limit the submissions to one.
If you need money - there are plenty of better ways to earn money (for ex. learn programming - there are tons of free courses on YouTube; within a few years you'll be earning really well).
Please stay on read.cash only if you like to write.
Thank you for the info read.cash, I will try to stay on read.cash even if my tips stop, I like to write about crypto and my life in the hope that my writing hobby can ease the burden on my mind because it has come out in written form, but my message is read .cash is not a stepchild of new users, if they are wrong it's normal, because they are just learning, thank you.