Totally agree re: incentives. We're watching it play out with about half a million communities now on the reddit network -- Steve + I didn't know this back in 2005, but we had a hunch internet points would be better than $ to get the desired outcome.
http://calacanis.com/2006/07/18/...
That said, there's no value in investors/VCs just bullshitting about an idea -- go build it!
I'd never say reddit's reign is "insurmountable." That'd be stupid: http://techcrunch.com/2008/06/18...
@alexisohanian what do you think about motivating a community not with cash, but with equity. An appcoin tied to the valuation of a company with strict restrictions on the liquidity. I like the idea of my community members who have poured so much time into the site being rewarded for helping it succeed. I think cash has obvious issues as a tool for motivating a community, but I think there is a possibility of using equity as it has more of a feel-good "increase the value for everyone" motivation factor.
@StuartKearney sounds like Assembly, which I'm a big fan of.
I've seriously been thinking about how I can involve the Product Hunt community more in the creation of the product but it's not easy (legally and logistically). (cc'ing the CEO @mdeiters)
@rrhoover yep, I've been looking into that as well as a bunch of other prior art (ethereum, bitshares etc). I'm currently investigating a approach for giving community members equity that's tied into the karma/badge system + SO style moderation elections. I'm hoping by abstracting equity into an appcoin, and having the members invest via time instead of cash we can sidestep some of the legal issues.
If you want to involve the community into the development of the product I would suggest a discourse instance to centralise the discussion in a great format. Look at the activity on https://meta.discourse.org/ of their community improving the product. Pretty amazing and you can get one up and running in Docker really easily (I can do one up for PH tonight if you like)
That's super generous of you, @StuartKearney. I don't want to bifurcate the conversation too much away from PH but I like the way you think. I'll noodle on this. :)
Agreed on the concern about splitting up the communities but three things:
1: you can brand it just like PH and have it on a meta.producthunt.co URL
2: you can have SSO so you can share logins across the two sites
3: having a dedicated place for the community to talk about itself might generate more discussion overall. Especially the kind of feedback you're chasing for PH.
@rrhoover I like the idea of having easy access to help different products. Especially mixed with this conversation around cryptos being fully integrated. I almost imagine a system where each product submits their requests, while product hunt is the central source where people can claim tasks. I wonder where the "Mining" is happening here vs just the pure prodcoin payments, maybe in vetting the submission accuracy i.e. time/skills requirements to complete?
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