I can see it being helpful at first, but quickly turning into the usual group-think-fest of social media. If it takes off is there any plan to discourage pseudo-celebrity "influencers" from stealing all the likes and cash?
The obvious question to us hackers is, how can a bad actor game this?
I guess if your upvotes means you're paying a part of your $5 to that post, it would be your own money (so if you upvote 100 posts, each get 5 cents). But what will your downvotes do? If it gives you the poster's money, hah, BRB, I have a bot to write.
I guess the downvote can cancel someone else's upvote.
Another algorithm would be to count all the positively voted posts, and pay out the pool divided by votes. But then I should also write bots that downvote others' posts so I get a bigger share of the pool...
Subscribed. Cool idea. Will it be taken over by robots and people gaming the system for upvotes? Most definitely. But maybe there can be some interesting conversation before that happens.
If it takes off (huge if), it's more likely to be taken over by the fans of a few people with prominence (deserving or not), a few will end up talking about "controversial" topics and people will split between "the nice place shouldn't be about non-nice things" and "what is nice".
Thanks to everyone for the feedback and signups. We agree that there are lots of potential pitfalls to avoid. We have plenty of ideas, but I guess everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.
This was no.1 in Show HN because it seemed to be generating quite a lot of interest (and, quite rightly, scepticism), and for some reason has been downgraded to no.63. I feel like this perfectly illustrates the need for a platform where the majority of users aren't overruled by moderators and algorithms.
Great idea, although it lacks network effect at first.
I could imagine this being worth a lot more than $5 when it gets big, but hard to justify paying $5 for a brand new platform unless you attract good content creators to it.