Comment by robinhouston | Hacker News Reader

Comment by robinhouston | Hacker News Reader

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This is a great article. The writer has obviously spent a lot of time speaking to Mochizuki’s colleagues, and has explained the whole strange situation in a way that is layman-friendly without being wrong. It’s interesting that it’s part of an experiment in donation-funded journalism: I was sufficiently impressed that I donated a few dollars, but I fear that is not likely to be a common enough response to be a viable way of funding this sort of time-consuming journalism. I would love to be wrong about that.

There are interesting parallels and contrasts with Thomas Hales’s proof of the Kepler conjecture. In that case, as far as I know Hales did everything possible to help his colleagues understand the proof, but even so it was so long and involved that the referees declared themselves unable to be certain it was correct. Since then, he has been working on a formal machine-verifiable version of the proof under the banner of the Flyspeck Project: http://code.google.com/p/flyspeck/

I wonder what would happen if, say, I allocated $10 per month to compensating articles and journalists I enjoyed.

And then it was distributed evenly by time I spent on the page, every single day. So if I spent 30 minutes reading this article, 10 minutes reading another, 2 minutes on 10 others, this author would get $0.16 ($0.33 per day, times (30 mins, out of 60 total mins of time = 0.5)).

That's really not that much. With 10,000 people all following this same path, the author would "only" get $1600. Readership is likely to drop off exponentially after the initial publicity. Publishing two articles of similar quality per month would get the author a nice living wage; not too bad, but only if they can reach an audience of 10,000 interested readers who are in on this compensation system. Slim chance.

Perhaps it works as a supplementary reward system. Another question: does this incentivize the right things? Will such metrics lead to longer articles which aren't necessarily interesting to read, but just take a long time? Does it disincentivize quality in any way?

More questions: how much would people be willing to contribute—$10 per month? $30 per month? How is it distributed—manually or automatically, by time or by rating? Is the small bit better than nothing? Does this incentivize people to a) produce good content, or b) pay for its consumption? Would people voluntarily buy into this system, or does it need to be a restrictive thing where only contributors can read articles?

Just thinking.

There is a micro-payment service called Flattr [1] which does something like this. It was founded by Peter Sunde, one of the pirate bay founders.

It's actually quite successfull in the German web community especially for podcasters. There are German podcasters which earn about 1000 Euro per month via Flattr.

[1] https://flattr.com

Someone actually mentioned Flattr to me today as a way to take donations for my own writings; I've always begged off because I've never wanted to take the time to set it up and clutter my site (more), but now here I see Flattr brought up again... Is there any way of even roughly estimating how much Flattr might bring in?

> Is there any way of even roughly estimating how much Flattr might bring in?

Of course: you try it, write up a massive future post about the results, and voila! But that probably wasn't the answer you wanted. I have no idea how many people are using it, but the idea sounds pretty great and if there's a good crowd to try it out on then HN readers wouldn't be a bad bet. I don't think anyone would mind another small button between PayPal and BTC.

> Of course: you try it, write up a massive future post about the results, and voila!

~-~

> I don't think anyone would mind another small button between PayPal and BTC.

Yes, fair enough... I think I may just be making excuses at this point to not try it out.

Just put it in my website footer [0]. Flattr is very flexible. You can use various methods with more or less or no JavaScript. Also you can link stuff like Github, so starring a repo leads to flattr compensation.

[0] http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/articles.html

Yeah, I just added it to http://www.gwern.net/ . At first I was all 'o.0 you expect me to load a bunch of JavaScript just to add a button' but then I spotted that there was a purely static version and added it without a problem. We'll see how it goes.

Cool, I was aware of it, I was just thinking about making it automatic. :) Easy extension to flattr though. Excellent, thanks.

The only problem I see with this is that value isn't always proportional to time. Sometimes I spend a long time reading an article because it is written in an inscrutable style and it takes a long time to see what the author is saying. Other authors write so well that I can follow their arguments as fast as I can read. All other things being equal, the later article is more valuable, but I spend more time on the former article.

Readability tried something like this. Among the problems: authors / publishers didn't sign up, and money collected had to be distributed or reimbursed. Unclaimed funds eventually were awarded to a charity.

Though I believe Readability had good intent, they took a great deal of flack for this.

Money weirds things.

Most of the weirdness in the case of Readability came from charging their users before they had established the relationships to pass the funds along. Collecting funds for authors sort of advertises that you are paying them, doing it while not being able to pay them is pretty shady.

I guess a better way to bootstrap such a thing would be as part of some sort of time tracker, show the user where they spent their time at the end of the month and wire it up to a tip jar system.

I don't know the situation, I wasn't there.

I can see this being the management team getting out in front of itself though. I can understand how others would criticize. I don't see any obvious signs of intentional malfeasance. Perhaps poor judgement.

The solution they proposed is one that I've been thinking should be applied to online content for some time.

This is exactly the sort of thing that I wish I could use something like bitcoin for. I groaned when I clicked "Pay Now" and saw PayPal. It doubles my time-investment in the article and significantly drags down my average enjoyment per minute.

I couldn't agree more - this is a great article on a complex topic. It's hands down the best article I've read in months and I also donated. It gives me hope that quality can thrive on the internet.

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