Like john_moscow has pointed out, though, that deters people from becoming Patreon creators. It's very normal for people to underestimate the difficulty of what others do or the real worth of their work. Besides that, supporting someone economically in a capitalist environment is giving them your vote for them to continue doing what they're doing. Not voting for them, when you otherwise would, solely because you can see they have some quantity of votes already, disrupts that.
I would like this type of economy to flourish, as it seems like a very viable way to get good economic support for open-source. However, if this is a common occurrence, it seems developers will continue to be better off working on closed-source.
What deters people from becoming Patreon creators is not being supported. I certainly would never voluntarily support someone if I for all I know they could already be grossly overpaid for what they do.
If supporting someone with X€ is any kind of "vote", it's a vote that they should get X€ more than they currently get for their work. It may be hard to make an educated decision about that, but it's impossible without knowing a creator's current income level to begin with.
> If supporting someone with X€ is any kind of "vote", it's a vote that they should get X€ more than they currently get for their work.
No, think of each unit of currency as equaling 1 vote.
It's a vote that, between the various things that they could be doing, they should continue doing what they're currently doing.
For example, in a programmer's case, he could be employed by a company which will give $X votes. He could also be working freelancing gigs and earn $Y votes. He could start his own SaaS business and earn $Z votes. He could do open source work and earn through Patreon $W votes.
Only he will know where he stands in each of those markets, and, on average, you can bet that he will do what gives the most votes (i.e. money).
Not voting because you think he's got enough votes, is like not voting for a presidential candidate because you think he's got enough votes, despite otherwise wanting to vote for him/her. Imagine presidential voting was done such that you can see, in real-time, the votes of your preferred presidential candidate (without needing to vote for him/her) but not being able to see the votes of other candidates. That's pretty messed up, right? You see 10,000 people have voted for your candidate and think, "that's enough for him; he doesn't need my vote", and it turns out that other candidates have 100,000's of votes. It could be that the majority of the voting population would prefer your candidate, but because many of the people that preferred him didn't express themselves through their vote, someone else ended up being picked as president. That means the voting system failed, and that's why such transparency here is disruptive.
Votes and currency work completely differently. In an election, you have one vote. You can use it to support someone or not. If you don't vote, you don't get to keep your vote and use it for a different election. Equating votes and money just does not work.
If:
- I believe that someone's work is worth 50,000€
- They currently get 50,000€ from Patreon
- Because their earnings are secret I give them another 1000€
- Because of my support, they refuse an offer for 50,500€
then the resource allocation system failed. The creator is now doing work worth 50,000€ even though they could be doing work worth 50,500€.
(For the sake of argument, I'm making some assumptions that are clearly wrong but required for markets to make sense as allocation mechanisms in the first place)
(If you go to the bottom of the article, you can see a blue box that says "Electoral Systems" with "[show]" on the right. You can click that to have the box display a variety of voting systems and related articles.)
> If you don't vote, you don't get to keep your vote and use it for a different election.
I agree that it's different in that there is no formal, delimited election time, like in other voting systems. Here it's like the election is always ongoing in various dimensions. Despite that, I believe the way capitalism works remains very similar to voting systems.
> If:
> - I believe that someone's work is worth 50,000€
> - They currently get 50,000€ from Patreon
> - Because their earnings are secret I give them another 1000€
> - Because of my support, they refuse an offer for 50,500€
> then the resource allocation system failed. The creator is now doing work worth 50,000€ even though they could be doing work worth 50,500€.
I feel that logic is weird. When you go to a service provider (like a freelancer), do you wish you could see what they earned monthly so you can decide whether to offer to pay them to do your job request or to just request of them to do it for free because otherwise you'd feel they'd be earning too much? I would think not. Why do you insist on deciding what to pay based on what their earnings are?
I think what you decide to pay them should only be based on the benefit you receive. What is "fair" is naturally decided by the economic system, not the individuals.
I would like this type of economy to flourish, as it seems like a very viable way to get good economic support for open-source. However, if this is a common occurrence, it seems developers will continue to be better off working on closed-source.