Do you wish we could cash in our lurve?

No, I don’t. It would change the dynamic most horribly, I think, if it were worth anything, even as little as, say, a dollar per thousand points. I wouldn’t even like to see an item of free Fluther merchandise awarded for every 50k. All of a sudden we’d see ugly behavior where it hasn’t been seen before.

I happen to think that the mechanics of the lurve system, including the caps and limits, are brilliant. It’s a wonder that the young Fluthergods in their wisdom ever managed to come up with something that would work so well and stand up so well to the pressure of time and use.

Do I want the money if I can cash in right now? Sure. Do I think it’s fundamentally a good idea to be able to use lurve for money or gifts? No. I rarely look at my lurve total, but I do at times look at the amount of lurve given to my answers.

To be honest, I think people would be more inclined to give helpful & thoughtful answers.

What? Whose answer isn’t helpful or thoughtful? Jeruba? Me?

She’s saying she believed if lurve had monetary value people would give better answers.

I’d call that overly optimistic…

^^Oh, I see. I interpreted her answer incorrectly. I think it’s overly optimistic also. In fact, it might promote more meaningless answers.

Not to mention that as soon as the black hat forums found out about this we’d be so inundated with spam that the servers would crash.

No

When Askville first started they had a store where you could redeem your points for merchandise. That was before my time there, and the old-timers regularly brought it up. Not because it changed the site content in any way, but because they wanted free stuff.

Askville makes no mention of Fluther. I don’t know if I can still log in and edit at Wiki or not.

Does anyone know if it’s intentional that there is no Wiki page for Fluther? Shouldn’t someone write one?

People have gamed the lurve system as it is (sad though that behaviour is!). Imagine if lurve had a monetary value? How many people would game the system then? No, people get wound up enough about a meaningless, fun system, without putting a real $$ value on it.

@ibstubro Various members have submitted Wiki pages for Fluther several times, and they get rejected every time. We have no idea why.

Those are interesting revelations regarding Askville & Wikipedia. The Lurve for profit thing would be a fascinating but almost certainly destructive exercise. To me it would almost be worth it as an experiment, except for the fact that no experiment is necessary to predict the certainty of one bad outcome or another. But this question gives rise to a bunch of others such as:

I spent one month on Askville in 2008 and found the atmosphere oppressive and toxic. That’s what brought me here: one departing group posted a message on its way out that pointed to Fluther. Even in its lowest moments, Fluther hasn’t been like that. But an overt appeal to greed and a spurring of competition among members would accomplish it.

But it won’t happen, in any event, because there’s no more development here. In spite of the fact that I had a few wishlist items that never came to pass, I think the end of development of the Fluther site has done more good than harm.

“Lurve for sale”
Sounds like a Barry White song about the Chicken Ranch, most disagreeable.

Yes and no; yes because it may keep me around longer, no, because the back patting Atta boys would go through the ceiling with me making tons of folk rich.

I don’t mean like expensive prizes, I was thinking more of the way some arcades work, where you spend $60 for basically $1 worth of crap toys from China.
I would want a fluther Keychain, because why the fuck not?, but I don’t want one enough to spend money on it, however, I would use my lurve to get one if I could since it’s not worth anything else.
I highly doubt very many people are going to be willing to invest their time cheating lurve for a keychain, there is already a limit to the amount of lurve you can give another user so they wouldn’t get very far.

I’d trade mine for one of the Fluther pillows from the store we have here.