Topic: [DVC]DevCoin - Official Thread - Moderated - page 384. (Read 1058927 times)

Yup hence why I said there has to be more incentive to hold/buy coins rather than write a crapload and dump. By reducing share for writing you are essentially making the coin more precious to those who write because they work harder to get the same coins, so maybe they will start thinking twice before dumping them all.

I think lowering the cap is a better idea than equally funding projects that don't work as hard for the good of Devcoin.

Devtome, at the very least, draws Google traffic and Bitcointalkers. How many new coders do we get a month from the coding projects? And how many new things do they add to Devcoin/Devtome?

This. Mark summarised the issues quite well on the devtome specific thread. Nothing really needs to change with devtome except that a 'devtome share' refers to a subshare of the devtome allocation of the total dvc per month - i.e. devtome itself is assessed as one project of many - which in fact is true - and as a project has a capped allocation of total.

Again, broadly as mark explained, if another comprehensive project requiring coders, servers, development, expertise, time etc is allocated say a max of 12 shares per month, then maybe that should in turn be the max for devtome and all other devcoin projects (those relative sums could also be adjusted to percentages of total for ease of allocation). So a 'share' would be share of those 12 and not of the total (I just used the number 12 because it was in the original example, but I think it might actually be about right as an indication of how skewed devcoin is towards devtome vs all/any other projects).

Those who view this as unfair to new writers seem to be missing the point that 1) if you, as someone interested in devtome aren't buying dvc because of devtome then who is? 2) there's likely to be less selling pressure so perhaps the price would rise.

Mail time, Mail time MAIL TIME!!!!

I agree, most people can take a while to come around. I am just trying to push them into the realization a little faster.

And it IS happening already (Perfect Example is Smeagol's store, I am happy to come back to that) but I just wish there was more of it happening, and more open planning so that people can come up with their own ideas when they hear some good ideas.

It is not really devtome by itself per se that has a problem, it is the whole devcoin thing that is suffering from such insanely high amounts of shares being offered for devtome articles.

It is not sustainable, as there are only at absolute maximum four thousand shares per round, because each block is one share and a round is four thousand blocks.

Fifty people each getting 80 shares would blow it out, no shares left for admins, programmers, or anything else, every coin would be going toward paying for devtome articles.

So I think what we need to do is figure out what fraction of the entire devcoin shebang devtome should max out at.

Also bear in mind that payouts get more and more "unfair" the closer we come to actually having 4000 shares in one round, UNLESS the number of shares divides evenly into 4000.

If we happen to have 4000 or 2000 shares exactly in a round, each share gets one block's or two blocks' yield of coins.

If we have 3999 shares in a round, one share gets two blocks' yield of coins all the others only get one block's yield.

If we have 39 shares in a round, one share gets eleven blocks' yield of coins, all the others get only ten blocks' yield.

See how the "unfairness" gets less as the number of times the shares for the round divide into 4000 gets larger?

So unless we force each round's total number of shares to divide exactly into 4000, which would arguably offer the "fairest" shares, less shares per round is better than more shares per round.

So for example if the max an author makes used to be 80 shares, we can make the shares much more fair by calling that eight shares and scaling everything else proportionately.

For example instead of 80k words yielding 80 shares, it would yield 8, and instead of 10k words yielding ten shares it would yield one.

If everything were scaled that way, the number of actual coins each share actually received each round would not change, except for any "unfairness" caused by the number of shares not dividing exactly into four thousand would be less, so those who had been short some before would be short less as compared to those who happened to be the lucky lines of the receivers file that got used (sent coins) one more time than other lines did. It would simply decrease the actual size in coins of that "unfairness factor".

If authors are to get (up to) 80 shares each, we have to have less than 50 authors, since 80 multiplied by 50 is four thousand. To have fifty authors all writing as much as they can earn for would consume every coin every round. That just is not practical.

All of this is devcoin concerns though not devtome concerns. Devtome can still give authors 80 shares OF WHAT DEVTOME GETS each round, no problem with that. But devcoin needs to have some limit on how many receiver lines in the receiver files devtome itself in total can get...

Then devtome can have scripts of its own to divvy up its devcoins among its authors however it wants to.

EDIT: For example maybe it would make sense to say that devtome as a whole will get a maximum of eighty shares a round, if it manages to get authors to write 80k or more words, less if the total words it manages to get authors to write is less; then have devtome take care of dividing up the coins it gets in a given round among its authors. Even giving such a huge amount (80) of shares to one project (devtome) would still be way out of scale with every other project though.

-MarkM-

And I do think that is happening already.  People are putting up online stores and coming up with other interesting business ideas and taking steps to bring those ideas to reality, and they're using their Devtome earnings to do so.

Even if in the beginning your mentality was to just get paid and not worry about the well being of Devcoins, well, after you get paid for a few rounds, you start to think, gee, it would sure be nice if this cash cow could last forever.  And you notice that what you can get for your DVC on the exchange isn't getting any better.  Then you start to think about what would need to be done to add value to this coin.  Then you start to think about what you might be able to do to help out...

But all that would get circumvented if any of those more coercive forms of motivation were put in place, such as the suggestion to not pay writers unless their wallets were already full (unless they held onto their coins and did nothing with them), or to not pay writers unless they also were great at SEO and brought in the page views (trust me, if I have to spend all my time making sure my Devtome articles get traffic, there goes any time/energy I might devote to doing something unique to help build the Devcoin economy).  More than likely I'd just quit contributing if it got to the point where there were good odds I'd be writing for free, and then why would I care what happens to Devcoin from that point on?

I've been involved for four rounds now.  The more I participate in this, the more I realize what a brilliant concept it is.  It's combining the best of rewarding people for things the general economy as it is now tends to not reward, but at the same time leveraging the value and power of freedom and some aspects of capitalism.  It is truly amazing.  And with every batch of new people coming in, the first thing they want to do is make it just like the general economy.  But that's OK too.  It's part of the process of figuring it out.  And for the most part, except for the gems of ideas that actually move the concept forward, most of it just floats on by...

My mom is on the way here with at least 15 books

Your whole post was awesome, but these things I couldn't have said better myself. But "naturally" means at least some of the people need to develop ideas with at least some of the money they earn from Devtome.

Business is a natural part of any economy.

The rewards for writing vs. rewards for promotion discussion comes up again and again on this thread.  A few things are worth noting:

1.  I believe there is already a system in place which will at least partially reward writers for overall popularity of their work, and will also partially penalize writers whose work is not popular.  I don't remember the details and I'm not sure if it was implemented already for round 27 or if it's still coming soon.  I also know that it's still being tweaked to truly work in a way that's compatible with the overall Devcoin project.  Could someone in the know please provide us with an update?

2.  There is nothing wrong with rewarding based on SEO efforts, page views, ad revenue, etc.  That's how it is on most of the Internet.  I believe that the Devtome has a different ultimate goal and that is why the Devtome compensates differently than what the rest of the Internet does.  Before recommending that the Devtome work like the rest of the Internet, it's worth figuring out what the overall philosophy is, in particular, why it's set up differently.

3.  The Devtome has article admins whose primary job is to read submitted articles and eliminate the truly worthless ones, and I know that they do this.  We all may have disagreements on the standards and we may think some articles which pass should be discarded.  That's bound to happen with anything subjective like writing.  I just want to make sure everyone, especially the new writers, understand that there are standards and there are admins who enforce them.  Related to that, if you see something that you are concerned about (a specific article, for example), it is OK to bring it to the attention of an article admin (or even post your concern on this thread), and your concern will be addressed.  It's happened before.

4.  As a writer, I adhere to the principle that the client or customer is always right.  In this case the Devtome is the client.  I joined as a writer because the parameters as they were advertised work for me.  If those parameters change it may no longer work for me, which is fine.  The Devtome has the right to change those parameters at any time.  So for example, if the Devtome decided they only want to accept content that is sci-fi fantasy, I would have a decision to make.  Either I quit and move on with no hard feelings, or I start writing sci-fi fantasy (something I've never done).  If you don't like the parameters, that is fine too, but it doesn't mean there's anything fundamentally wrong with them.  You can suggest improvements and so forth, but ultimately, all writers will be bound by what the paying client decides.  I mention this because what I believe is that a lot of these complaints boil down to "it doesn't work for me," or "it's not optimal for me," or "it's not fair that it works so well for these other people but not for me."  So you're an amazing Internet marketer and you don't want to compete with all those writers who just write and do nothing to promote their work.  Fine, maybe the Devtome isn't the best fit for you, or you need to deal with it.  But if you're a good or even decent writer but a terrible Internet marketer, then this is a dream come true--a lucky break.  That is what the Devtome has been for me--finally a lucky break.  Yes, I'm making the most of this opportunity.  I don't feel entitled to it and understand it could change in the future, but it's here now and I couldn't be happier.  Also, I've never contributed or gotten paid more than 40 shares in a round and it's still been great.  It's a bit annoying that others have to be so critical of those who are getting a lucky break here.  But then again, I've had my moments of jealousy when it was someone else's lucky break and not mine, so I understand.

5.  Given number 4, if the Devtome is your lucky break, then definitely make the most of the opportunity and give some serious consideration to spending your earnings in a way that will truly improve your life and that of others.  Think long term.  Think investment.  But again, there are no rules about that and you are free to spend your earnings however you like.  On the other hand, you start to think about the benefit of the Devcoin itself when it's become your golden goose, and I'm seeing that happen as people are starting to come up with solid ideas of how to grow the Devcoin from a novel crypto into a viable economy, and take solid steps in that direction.  I suspect most of this isn't even showing up on the thread as not everyone likes to share their ideas immediately.  It's going to take time, and a lot of DVCs will be sold to raise funds in the mean time, the value is probably going to drop more before it goes up again, but I think it will happen if it's allowed to happen naturally.

yes, do that

There are also private label content clubs you can join, I joined some of the free ones years ago when I was researching web-marketing, that provide you regularly with niche moneymaking websites selling things plus a whack of articles relevant to that niche for you to modify to make unique and place on the site. Some such clubs even have pull scripts in the sites that will regularly pull new articles, so that the club can use the niche site they gave you to publish more articles regularly, so that your niche sites become in effect satellite sites of theirs, with of course most likely theirs appearing higher in search results than theirs and the copies that members didn't customise usually probably being at the bottom, relatively, of the results due to modern smart search engines realising they are duplicated-content sites and trying to figure out who has the original of that content or which is the highest pagerank site with the most-active social networking likes community that has that content.

My spam/marketing email account I used to sign up for all that kind of stuff might have years worth of such niche site of the day content in its inbox by now, unless the email provider stopped accepting email once I'd not signed on for a year or few. Even if they did that there must have been a year or few already saved before I stopped logging on to that email account / stopped researching web-marketing.

We could dig up all that stuff, "collate" it, and pour it onto Devtome. Heck maybe I could pour 80k per month of it onto Devtome come to think of it... Oh sorry I mean 240k, since collated only pays 1/3 as many shares so would take 240k to get 80 shares...

Heck I threw out gigabytes of articles back when I quit autogenerating "content sites" to attract search engine spiders. Or maybe not even threw out... maybe it is on some of the ancient hard-disks I have laying around here somewhere. Maybe complete with all the scripts I wrote for auto-generating interlinked networks of sites out of the stuff.

I got to number one spot on the major engines other than Google (which was way too smart to fall for such crap) for major keywords like "Religion" way back when.

Of course back then MSN and Yahoo were so stupid that the most relevant site you could possibly make, in their eyes, was pages and pages of their own search-results output...  

You didn't really actually need articles as their own results attracted them way more than actual content.  

So the gigs of actual articles were kind of just gravy, that only later came to be of much importance/use.

I could make scripts to auto-submit 240k of articles to devtome each month for me: write the scripts once, include a suck-articles-from-inbox to suck in all the new articles the content-clubs send, and it'd be a write once, earn 80 shares a round every round automaton for me. Hmm...

So if you authors want to compete on who can max out their words per round, I guess I could whip up scripts that'd give you some good competition...

-MarkM-

If we are going to do SEO work, then just the privilege of having their articles published on our site would be an incentive for people to provide content, because as it is they already buy huge batches of "private label content" if they can afford it, or write articles like crazy themselves, just to try to create content in which they can somewhere place a link to whatever their actual cash-cow is. If we have a high page rank site, and SEO people who work on attracting hits to its pages, being permitted to have one of their articles, with a link to their site, on our site would be worth money to people as it would increase the page rank of their own site and drive traffic to it.

There are lots of sites that exist purely for the purpose of accepting, for free, quality articles, permitting the authors a tiny "about the author" box at the bottom of the page that includes a link to the author's site. People submit massive numbers of articles, sometimes even by means of mass submitters that submit to hundreds of such sites making synonym substitutions and simple grammar re-arrangements and such to ensure each article is "unique", just to get links to their sites.

The article sites get so many submissions that just vetting them all to pick out ones worth accepting probably would take quite a bit of work, but they don't have to pay the authors, in fact some of them probably get paid by the authors by means of things like selling them submission programs that will modify-and-submit articles to the article-site owner's hundreds or thousands of such article-sites.

Once they get nice page rank they then also go on to make link clubs where people pay by the month to have links on such sites so as to boost their own pageranks.

So if we get into marketing / SEO, paying authors could easily become un-necessary, instead we could have authors flocking to us hoping we will deign to accept their articles.

Some article-sites even let authors include three links directly into the text of the article, so as to have maximum-relevance links. There are clubs you can join where for $29.95 or $39.95 or $49.95 or whatever per month you can get to submit X number of articles per month to the Y number of such article-sites that get articles from the club. So again, the model is that authors pay to get their content onto those sites.

-MarkM-

When you said it rewards marketing over writing I thought you were saying it was an issue, and I think it is.

If someone spends all month writing, and you spend all month on SEO work, then you are probably going to get paid, while the guy that writes all month doesn't.

True, but the better the content is the easier it is to drive traffic.  But we don't just want any old traffic, we want quality, consistent traffic.  Consistent traffic over a period of months is much harder to fake than an single burst (anyone with a VPN can probably do that), so if we measure the traffic over a longer period it rewards 'real' marketing efforts. This can be measured by Google analytics.  How about we modify my original proposal to this:

Round 1:

1.  We rank the articles published in the first round by the number of unique page views.  The bottom 50% don't earn anything.  The top 50% earn at the usual rate.

2.  50% of the DVC (which used to go to the bottom 50%) are now available to reward marketing efforts for the better articles published in round 1.  I propose we do this over a 6 round period.  This 50% can be divided up into 5 batches of 10%.  The first round has already been paid for.  So at the end of round 2, 10% of the DVC from round 1 are sent to the top 25% most popular articles written in round 1 measured by the traffic they recieved in round 2.  The top 50% most popular articles written in round 2 receive their 50%.

3.  End of round 3 - The top 50% most popular articles written in round 3 receive their 50%.  The top 25% of articles written in round 1 according to their traffic in round 3 receive their 10%.  The top 25% of articles written in round 2 according to their traffic in round 3 receive their 10%.  

4.  Repeat

Edit:  This doesn't mean we have to keep promoting our articles for 6 months, as that would be really tedious, but if they are promoted well with good SEO work they'll get rankings in Google, which will send fairly consistent quality traffic.

Yeah. And pictures over writing.

Actually, it rewards good marketing efforts, regardless of the quality of the content

I'm just copying and pasting all this into a thread.

No I never said anything about crypto-currencies, or even alt-coins. This is a thread about Devcoin.