How is a hackathon any different from a writeathon or a poetry contest?
You seem to be ignoring everything what I'm saying...
A successful software project can bring a lot of users, particularly paying users. And thus revenue. Potentially millions of people will buy Devcoins and use them for payments.
If you can do same with poetry contest, go ahead. But I just don't see how poetry contest can do that. You know, for some reason venture capitalists invest into software projects, not into poetry contest. And they kinda like market caps
And higher market cap means that more people can get paid. So it makes sense to focus on high-impact projects first, and later expand the program to get more people involved.
Please understand me correctly, I'm not against writers and artists. What I'm saying is that we need to get incentives right, i.e. to optimize for a thing we are optimizing.
Let's say I go to devtome.com, what do I see? An ugly page with tonnes and tonnes of mess on it. It is hard to find anything.
Nobody is thinking about presentation because they are paid for writing words!
Now, say, if Devtome was done right, its front page would be nicely organized. It should also be aesthetically pleasing, rather than using default theme.
A visitor which gets to devtome front page should see general categories, features articles etc. Focus on content which is of high quality, is nicely organized etc. Sweep half-baked shit under the rug.
So perhaps it can work if you writers get your shit together and make presentation nice. But "getting your shit together" isn't incentivized, only writing more and more words is. So nobody even bothered to take 5 minutes and think how site can be made more appealing.
This clearly demonstrates how incentives are important. It is rare for things to get done without incentive.
Now compare Devtome to
http://bitcoinmagazine.com/ What's different?
That's why I'm saying that organizational structure is the problem. It shouldn't be a flat hippie community. There should be a person who is responsible for marketing, for growth, for content organization, software development etc. And everybody should be accountable for what he is doing: if he isn't doing it right, he'll get replaced.
Even better, run several projects in parallel and let them compete with each other. Competition increases efficiency, and without competition you get fat and lazy.
Just because a lot of programmers produce a lot of code it does not mean that code will be worth any money.
Of course we are talking only about projects which increase demand for Devcoins. Simply writing code does not work
This is true, but it does not change the fact that it's easier for people to get paid writing for Devcoin because the bounty system isnt automated while Devtome is.
We should not care about what is easier for people. (The easiest thing is to do nothing, of course.) We should only care about revenue if we want to grow the market cap. And higher market cap allows more people to work on things.
You say that "math doesn't work" and you different philosophical opinion. But in reality you're missing cause and effect relationship here.
I think perhaps the problem with Devcoin is that it can only support a finite amount of writers and programmers at a time. That isn't how a market is supposed to work.
Huh, Devcoin isn't a market. Devcoin bounties are supposed to finance things which cannot be financed in traditional way.
But otherwise you can get a whole economy where people get paid in Devcoins which do not come from bounties, but are bought on market. Infinitely many workers can work if they can sell what they do.
When productivity and quality increases the profits aren't supposed to shrink.
Your profits won't shrink if what you do increases market cap.
