I've been making these points since I learned of devcoin. If someone assesses dvc -> btc -> $ payout at greater/equal what they think their work is worth they'll sell. If that worth is 'low' then the price will be in line, whatever anyone else's self-assessed worth may be. DVC like any other means of compensation should be paid in line with work done, value.
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Optimisation - market price acts as a good guide. Max per round pay was recently cut from 85 to 50 (I think mostly b/c the rating methodology now bounds from 0.5 to 1.5 rather than an absolute new appraisal). Selling is obviously everyone's prerogative but writers in particular need to be honest with themselves. How many people buy or have bought dvc to support devtome specifically? It's the writers who should be building and supporting devtome, so any subsidy should be from a devtome pot.
This could be done by giving devtome a fixed % of total generation. Then subsidy and any resolutions are forced upon those to who it should be directed. Another way (simplified) is to just cut the max-per-round until a level reached where no writers submit, then raise it a bit. I'd be fascinated to know how many submit b/c they want to share with the world vs how many know it's overpaid and act likewise. There's overlap there but just making a point.
My opinion is that devtome shouldn't pay at all, aside from perhaps a token sum for the effort to format & deal with syntax etc - compensation tied 100% to prospective revenue or simply for recognition and creation's sake. I think there'd be completely different quality, collaboration and marketing. Next best would be if developers get 1 share per round, writers should get the same. It cuts payments but as total shares would be lower not that much if at all for most. I'd be interested to hear why writing is worth more than programming, or software development, or graphic design etc. If it's just a marketing tool then (1) is it working? (2) why are those paying for it everybody except those benefiting?
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Leadership - agreed. Regardless of aspirations to total decentralisation that's just not workable. Bitcoin is basically managed by major holders and miners. Devcoin opens that to everyone with a decent contribution, effectively a mining-for-creation network. Achieving that requires a system, decisions and leadership - but ones that are always accountable because at the end of the day we could all just sell and log off.
I don't know if there are other goals. There's an inevitable conflict of interest in change. Writers don't generally want to change the status quo because it's a gravy train, others want change because without it everything's undermined and there won't even be a gravy train. I understand that current winners want to ride this for as long as possible (and I also understand that it's the 'system' so just availing oneself of the system isn't personally blameworthy) but as someone who ultimately pays for it (like every other dvc buyer, owner, earner, trader) it hugely bothers me. I would say exactly the same thing if the situation was with regards to programmers or artists or whatever, rather than writers.
People need to be honest with themselves. I'd like to contact some OS projects and people about devcoin. But I know one of the first things they're going to ask is how we account for and justify relative payouts - and I don't have a good answer. I appreciate that decisions taken are gradual and considered, but as I've said before if something isn't working then it should be changed. Massively changed.
These are all good points.
I'm thinking that if the purpose for large devtome subsidy was to try and increase awareness of devcoins, then it has to have had a positive effect (indirectly) on the adwords revenue...but is that the case? What about the number of writers? According to the writer stats, the current price increase hasn't brought with it a huge surge of writers...it's been growing at a rate of around 5-10 new writers per round since round 22. I can probably whip up a graph to show this if anyone wants to see it, but the numbers are there (
http://dvccountdown.blisteringdevelopers.com/devtome just search with blank username). That's actually a bit surprising, and tells me the increase in share value doesn't necessarily correspond with more writers to bring its price back down.
The idea that just hit me (and has been mulling in the back of my mind for a while), was the fact that general open source developers are being paid 1 share per round if they maintain approx 10 hours of work a week. At the moment, devtome pays per hour with no cap. If you can output 168 hours of writing a week, even with a cap per round, you still get 168 hours worth of pay over time. An OS developer doing the same only gets paid for the first 10 hours. That's not a leak, that's a hole in the boat. Is the content worth it? I can't find advertising revenue data, all I can find is this link
https://github.com/Unthinkingbit/charity/blob/master/devtome_advertising_revenue.csv and it doesn't make much sense to me (plus it's two months old), so it's hard to say. I don't think we should value writers any less than developers (everyone will say their's is the hardest
), but to be fair, the same should apply in reverse. If a writer is willing to commit 10 hours a week of content to devtome, then perhaps they should go on a devtome share list? There can still be bounties and what not for specific work the project needs doing, just like there are with developing, and it would be a much fairer system. This way, to be a devtome contributor would be purely about being rewarded for generally creating freely available work at your own pace. Writers - is that a bad thing? What are your opinions on this? This may directly work against the purpose of the high devtome payouts, but the question is - was it working?
The simple fact is whether developing or writing, people are putting up their time and creative output for the whole world to enjoy for free. I do feel they should be rewarded equally. Bounties will always be there for those who want try to earn more, if they have the time, but fluffing out sentences just to increase word counts shouldn't even be an option (Not all, but I've seen more than a few articles do this).
First Isn't the goal of Devcoin to build its value based on peoples' work ? Devcoin is about paying anyone who put time in it.
That depends on whether you talk to a developer or a writer. The official devcoin line is: "Devcoin is an ethically inspired project based on the BitCoin crypto-currency and created to help fund open source projects created by writers and software developers." The goal is to support open source projects. One way to increase the value of a devcoin for speculation purposes is to build valuable work, but that's not necessarily the goal of the project. Pay is not in question, the rate of pay, is.
Also devtome is on of the best way to attract more people to Devcoin (work required/efficieny).
Based on what metric? How does someone reading about the most popular jazz albums in the 1960s in Minnesota increase awareness of devcoins? The writer might now know about it, but what about the reader? It's not immediately obvious that devcoins even exist from looking at a random article in devtome.
