I still want a payday (and because of that incentive this is why decentralised almost always fails vs a centralised focused startup) but if one of my users writes 50,000 stack overflow answers (or whatever) they deserve a piece of the pie IMO.
I keep thinking of ways to encourage this. I guess treat your customers/users like employees - have a vesting schedule based on number of winning answers or some other relevant metric for your app.
We strive to earn our users trust every day. We read every piece of feedback that comes in and try to make the product better. At the end of the day, we only make money if our users use our product and opt to pay for it, so our incentives are as aligned with our users as they can be.
The problem with that idea is that eventually people feel entitled to win tokens whether or not they made any achievements. They get so angry at not automatically being given tokens that the government mandates a minimum amount of tokens every employee must win per hour.
No. They shouldn't. They are publicly funded so efficiency of cash flow is important. No reward should be required in this circumstance apart from perhaps an acknowledgement.
They should operate an open submission policy though i.e. a bug report form and actually feed back to people.
You 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 losing your best, most loyal users.
I think the problem is that there are other tasks that require a high task approval rate, so by rejecting people's answers (so they don't get a payout) they are otherwise adversely affected. Perhaps there is a way to programmatically bonus people.
Also I don't think there's an easy way to force a choice between taking different tasks.
Fair point, yep. Generalizing your statement slightly:
> Be generous if you expect additional <reward> to come from this generosity.
Options for reward could include (without being limited to): "profit", "platform adoption", "trust".. and those rewards often affect each other over time.
Proposal: When something is completed according to the devs a bonus is posted. For every vulnerability discovered by all the other devs in the company a portion of the bonus gets paid out. If an 'x' period has passed and no vulnerabilities have been discovered the remainder is paid out to the original devs.
You'll find that users only looking for a reward are more than happy to jump through one or two hoops to get their reward. An incentivized user is often no better than no user, especially when the reward is tangible like a gift certificate.
Ah I see, so the incentive value is just too plain... people may not have the hope that they will get a large enough incentive to make it worthwhile. This is something I hadn't considered... I like your suggestions, especially the first one with 50%. We used to have the incentive more competitive, the top 10 people who had the most friends signed up would get a free shirt, but once again that would mean you'd have to think more about your sharing and check back in.
It’s a problem everywhere in software, the ones who give back the least feel the most entitled. Having a some form of a treshold is good, whether that is money, or some sort of on-boarding (e.g. can’t comment until you are a member for x days)
Usually the ones with loudest mouths have the shortest attention span and don’t bother with those things. I have seen this in many communities.
A reward system is something nice for new contributors in my opinion. I am currently thinking of something similar for the Debian project to incentivize new contributors with a bit of opt-in gamification.
However I did not understood why NFTs were necessary. We had badge systems way before NFT became fashionable, on forums for example.
I'm bias as i'm in competition with these guys although we're trying to make something more social with a proper backend for earning badges, no referrals, twitter support and other cool things.
But this sounds worse for the Merchant and user.
User: Has to sort out a rebate for something they already paid for, has to refer friends and get them to buy to earn.
Merchant: The user has no inventive to return as you're giving them money off.
If a user actually likes a product and if worth the merchants time and money giving them a reward like a coupon (25% off or a free item when they buy something else would be far more powerful) In my opinion at least.
I've been working on this since mid last year and am happy with our implementation but this shows what a big market this is going to be, the best of luck to them, although we are doing similar things I don't think we're close to the same.
Let's be honest it's going to be rare that anyone will earn a rebate so giving them a code to return would mean they earn something and the merchant has the hook.
This is where failing a few times gives you the insight to know when you have a winner on your hands. Those of us with a lot of attempts but no winners would kill to have users waiting to pay.
Yeah. It seems if people are forced into doing something to be able to earn money that's enough incentive. It's a little silly, but maybe it allows them to better curate people / review applications?
That doesn't really answer the OP claim -- what are the realities of this?
I like the idea and can think of many rewards I could post, but the hard problem remains: how do we guarantee fairness? The reward poster would be incentivized to be picky with accept, the submitter would want to minimize the work to receive the reward.
One common solution to problems like these are reputation based (eg. eBay) or 3rd party mediation. There are probably others, but I don't immediately see anything done towards this.
I keep thinking of ways to encourage this. I guess treat your customers/users like employees - have a vesting schedule based on number of winning answers or some other relevant metric for your app.
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