That’s the idea. Growth creates demands on our time, it creates costs, it carries the risk of us being marginalized as new users transform the site into something different. A subscription limits growth to those who are willing to assume a small amount of responsibility for the welfare of the community.
You’re right. In practice it probably makes more sense to have free/subscription membership levels.
That having been said, I’m resistant to the “pro-blogger” mentality, where our object is to expand our reach and then find some way of monetizing that. I’d rather be a Mason’s lodge. If we say at the outset that we’re a subscription site and that growth is not our main priority, we can spare ourselves the headaches that every single blog and zine complains about. Rather, a club with dues, operating strictly for the benefit of its members, can do things that free blogs and zines cannot. It’s a different model from what everyone else is doing, and I’m interested in where it might take us.
This might seem tangential to the topic of this thread, but the question of if and how we compensate people are closely related to how demanding it is to maintain this site. My point is that if we keep it small, we keep it non-demanding, and then it’s much easier to compensate people.
I’m not married to the idea of a compulsory subscription, but IMHO, once we start slinging Amazon links, we’ve lost the opportunity to explore something truly different. Most people on the Internet expect content to be free, but what happens if those who don’t band together?
On the subject of compensation:
I can perhaps afford to take a view on this because I am retired and with a reasonable income. So YMMV.
Both I and my wife are involved with voluntary organisations. I am currently a trustee of one and I provide IT support to another. I have recently resigned as a director of a third because I could not persuade some of the people running it that being unpaid did not allow them to treat it as a toy.
The problem is that there is always tension between the paid workers and the volunteer workers, especially when the voluntary workers are more competent in their fields than the paid workers. Which happens. In the end my own conclusion is that there should be only one paid job and that is the financial controller. That is because it is the most boring job and it’s the one where nobody ever gave you work because they saw what you did with X and they liked it. Instead the moment they find you do unpaid financial work, they want you to do it for them.
My short answer for everything else is that people doing specific jobs should not have to pay a subscription and everybody else should. And there should be no scope creep other than a ratio of, say, 1 moderator to Y subscribers.
But, as I say, YMMV. I consider that advertising has become such a great evil, so pernicious, that an ad free social media site is worth the subscription. (Back in the day before it was taken over by the alt-right I used to subscribe to /. even though I was eligible for ad-free viewing without a subscription. The only problem with the /.model is that it lends itself to being taken over by an active group of people of similar views, so like government then.)
I have some software options for managing subscriptions.
I don’t think $1/month will turn off anyone; we can offer a “free trial” of 3 months and then enroll people.
As someone who moderated a large site with no payment, yes, it got old. What I really wanted was a way to promote my own business, more than money from the moderation itself. This is something I baked into my new business model.
I am going to write up a post about my business model and show you what I created, as it is another alternative for funding.
For the time being, Patreon is the easy way to do something now.
For a legal entity, I think I might have some fillable legal forms that I own. Let me explore.
The frequency of money fights will be O(n2) where n is the number of people involved.
An alternative is to handle everything as in-kind donations, with no funds ever moving from one mutant to another. If somebody volunteers to pay the hosting bill, then that mutant sends a check to the ISP that month. They don’t give money to LockeCJ and then argue with him about where the money went.
And these secondary benefits shouldn’t be understated. There are a lot of people here who are business owners, freelancers, or who could otherwise benefit from exposure.
I’ve been an outspoken opponent of affiliates links, but I earn almost half my income selling my own products on Amazon. And by that same token, I have a $100 logo that desperately needs an upgrade and designs for a website that’s a touch too advanced for my skill level. When the time is right, I would definitely hire someone from here—I’ve had bad experiences and need someone I can trust. I would also be more than happy to barter with my own products.
I think it’s important that friendship remain the basis of this site—that it doesn’t devolve into cynical networking and self-promotion—but if people are freely investing a lot of their time/resources into this site, then I see no problem with offering them ad space, or whatever sort of platform they might need to pursue their own interests. If our “business plan” doesn’t involve paying people, it can at least dovetail with the business plans of its volunteers.
I’ve said “Masons lodge” a million times by now—part of the reason people join the Masons is to build business relationships. Maybe that’s the social currency we need.
Which is one of the reasons I wanted to get this discussion started. Friendship can erode quickly when people feel their professional skills are being abused. There probably isn’t a specialist professional around who hasn’t had that happen (oh, Bob’s an artist. He can whip that up for us, can’t you Bob. Bob, can you help me design my wedding invitations? Hey, Bob, you don’t mind doing the backdrops for the church play, do you?) and not just the creatives.
I don’t want to lose the friendship side of things, either. That’s why I brought this up: better an honest conversation than misunderstandings all round.
We’re on the same page there, but let’s recall that we’re building this site for ourselves. It’s not somebody else’s wedding, it’s our party and people have been contributing because they benefit if it’s successful. In that sense, X’s design concept is a fair trade for Y’s moderation, is a fair trade for Z’s administration, and so on—the pay-off accrues to us collectively in the form of the online community that we all set out to build.
If we make demands on specific people, then those people should be individually compensated (preferably with money). This would include overt requests (“You’re a web programmer, can you do this for us?”) and situations where the group depends upon a specific person (“Without X’s tireless efforts, this site would never function”). Whether the skills involved are professional, creative, or mere grunt work is only relevant in the sense that people with specialized skills are more likely to have specific demands placed upon them.
I wasn’t talking about “if you design our logo, you can say that you designed our logo.” I was talking about payment in kind. Ad space, for instance, has actual monetary value.
I’ve expressed a willingness to contribute financially and compensate people for their work, but we’re not a business and there are limits to how much we can pay people out of member subscriptions, so it makes sense to think about what other assets the site might be able to offer.
My stated preference is to keep it small and non-demanding in order to minimize issues like these.
And, to be honest, the hypothetically-popular version of this site had started to feel more like an abstract debate topic than something which is actually on its way to happening.
Online community: Drives traffic to site; allows people to emerge as natural subject matter authorities
Business incubator: Supports the people who have emerged as authorities to start related businesses with online coaching, access to people who can teach business skills in a way that focuses on service rather than making a lot of money
Shopify Store: Anyone who has been a part of the community can sell on the platform; I make money through a markup on the goods
Invanto Course hosting/membership site: There are three schools - one for teaching skills, one for teacher training (train the trainer), and one for business skills. I own 20 schools and 20 membership sites on this platform and have reserved 5 for my own business.
I’ve done a lot of work in alternative currencies (karma, not crypto) so I’d be happy to help in some way on this. I even have my own time-based alternative currency platform that I’ve developed; goodnik.net. I’d be happy to set up a community there for EC folks, or work with someone to whitelabel that platform for our use.
That said, I’m not sure karma currency is the solution that @MalevolentPixy is looking for. There is an alternative currency that can be created with the formation of any company though; stock. If we had an equity based compensation system, it would reward people for their contributions and that could be structured in such a way that the longer someone is part of this place, and the more they contribute, the more shares they get. If there is ever any revenue, distributions could be made based on the number of shares. The shares could also develop their own value, and could be connected to voting rights. I’m not saying that the corporate shareholders model is perfect, but it could be a starting point for conversation about compensation and governance.
I like the comparison to old fashioned, non-internet clubs. For example, I’m a member of the National Model Railroad Association, where our dues pay for some of the administration, a monthly magazine, operation of a website – but a great deal of work is done by volunteers. I imagine there internet-only versions of these out there, but I’m not that much aware of any.
On one condition: I move that we hold our funerals early. Think I’ll schedule mine for next summer. I’ll be damned if anybody will hold a party for me like that when I’m too dead to enjoy it!
