What if it paid to visit Fluther, would you visit more often or less?

I heard of a site that did that. I didn’t like it because people were trying to do it just for money. It was stupid.

One of the other sites I participate in has contests three or four times a year with prizes including $500 Amazon gift certificate, and other similar prizes. I usually take time off all other sites to join in the competition, and I have been on the award list.

I don’t think GA’s are a good way to judge the answers, but I would certainly be interested.

I think a random prize drawing would be useful in encouraging some users, as long as the only way to enter was to login and post at least one question and one answer.

Sure, why not?

Wait! You mean we’re not getting paid for lurve?.. Darn! I just crossed 5000!

@worriedguy ROFL! That made my day! Sorry, I guess you do not pass “Go” do not get the Cartier watch, and no bass boat. Certianly no money…..darn it. I WILL give you one larvae ROFL :-)

1) Where would this money come from? Current revenue comes from ads (shown to unregistered members) and a few investors. This pays for 4 staff on a low wage. So either the team would have to start charging money for people to come to this site, or they’d have to bog it down with advertising for all people, in order to pay for people to give answers.
2) This would really promote lurve-gaming, and “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch your back” methods, for optimize money.
3) It would also promote people simply answering everything they can, even if they don’t actually know what they’re talking about, in hopes that somebody will give them a GA.
4) Would this be restricted only to informative answers? How would the system differentiate? Will we now have two different forms of a GA? One for “This made me lol” and one for “This was informative”? Or will silly/funny quips be worth just as much as incredibly informative quips? Or what about those GA’s given for quips that people just agree with? Those ones typically show up on controversial questions.

While I’d love to get money for doing what I already do, there’s just no good system to do this without bogging down the website with trash, in terms of unnecessary new features, as adverts everywhere, and bad quips.

Heck No! Money always interferes with these things.

I’m in complete agreement with @Sarcasm. Bad idea. We already have people that game the lurve system, and it’s not even worth anything! Throw real money into the pot, and it will be a real mess.

Sarcasm 1) Where would this money come from? Of course someone will pay, there is no such thing as a free lunch. I would see it coming from ad revenue but that doesn’t mean the site would be bogged down with them. It could be like the CBS, and ABC sites etc. I can watch rebroadcast of shows free because they are sponsored by different businesses.

2) This would really promote lurve-gaming, and “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch your back” methods, for optimize money. The beauty of software, you can have a program that would track the activity between members and either shut it down automatically report it to the moderators.

3) It would also promote people simply answering everything they can, even if they don’t actually know what they’re talking about, in hopes that somebody will give them a GA. That would likely backfire because of the before mentioned point, also if one has to get a certain amount of larvae to count, for example, simply answering anything and everything any way will trigger the software and still not get you enough to meld points.

Or will silly/funny quips be worth just as much as incredibly informative quips? Or what about those GA’s given for quips that people just agree with? Just has your word processor can tell if your grammar is off or what word you were trying to spell if you got close but not quite, programming, I believe, can decipher the question and see how well by way of key words or other algorithms to rank the answer’s relevance, so quips will have little chance and software can even tip off moderatos who will ax them as they do now.

Done right it would not be bogged down with ads or loaded with crap.

Why use lurve as a way to enter a contest/win money? Just showing up and participating in one question or a bajillion to enter a random drawing once a day would work, and the only problem in terms of gaming the system would be users making multiple accounts, which, after using some sort of cookie mechanism, is deterred by only using the first-used account each day to enter the drawing for one IP address.

You do get paid to visit Fluther. You get knowledge. You’re welcome. Money isn’t everything.

Same as I do now :)

I reboot every 5k or 10k because of the silliness of lurve whoring and award playing. If it became a complete video game heer, with pay-per-awards – then I’d rather play another game where you can at least shoot people and get rewards (virtually, of course).

I barely ever ask questions. I’m here to help people and to learn about stuff I never thought about.

I don’t really care about anything else. I get all my friends in the chatroom.

I’d prefer others advantages than money. Like if you’ve reached certain level/lurve you’ll get some special feature/right or something like that. I love a competitive site anyway.

I’m here a lot anyway and so, I don’t think I can heathily spend anymore time here. I would use it the same but I would enjoy being able to earn money from a site I love.

<<< WILL EXCHANGE LURVE FOR SEX.

It would ruin the quality of the questions answers, and I’d end up using Fluther far less.

@Kraigmo Elucidate more please. :-)

@Hypocrisy_Central , hi it would attract people who are addicted to the chasing of the prize as their primary goal here, rather than curiosity and discussion. Those people would then pollute the field of questions with inane stuff. It would turn something thoughtful, into something gamey and frantic.

@Kraigmo Moderators, moderators, moderators. If you post X mumber of questions that are moderated as asinine you get your account suspended for a period of time, and on your 2nd offence longer and on your 3rd time a year ban. No….....they won’t be able to open another account off that same computer because their IP adress would be barred. That would help solve that.

@Hypocrisy_Central , I wouldn’t favor that solution, because I feel Fluther needs less moderation, not more. But not none, either.

@Hypocrisy_Central Many of the worst offenders use public IP’s and therefore their address cannot be barred.

@YARNLADY Of course they could, they will still have their log in junk and user name. And unless they wanted to go through the trouble to try to create fake identities echa and every time they would end up on a perminant “no go” list. Most of their activity one would never see or not see it for long as comments here disapear quite rapidly at times. And what would it serve the douche doing it? If they need good answers to acheive a ranking or malmus high enough to garner the reward getting shut down after each guestion to 3rd question is rather silly on their part. And simply have extra sets when creating an account from a public IP. We put man on the Moon this is not rocket science, you can’t stop everyone all the time but I think 93% could be stopped cold.