Mechanism re-proposal: Preshold

[sandra.snan]

@wolftune

This sounds to me like feeling a mild sense of disgust / revulsion / discomfort and then seeking intellectual justification for the feeling.

A strong sense but yeah.

“What the thinker thinks, the prover will prove” basically.

@wolftune

What’s most insightful to me is that your intuition exists and is surely not unique to you.

Right, since the goal is to create a platform that is appealing for patrons.

@wolftune

I want to express that I’m willing to pay my taxes as long as others are paying theirs…

Expressing that is possible through pledging. The whole “I’ll give a few symbolic cents just to get the ball rolling and then increase that to my real donation later” is crowdmatching. Which is fine if it weren’t for the the quadratic curve going in the “wrong” direction.

@wolftune

Sandra, how about presenting this as a formal mechanism?

I will.

@wolftune

And it doesn’t have hard thresholds with all the things I complain about with those.

That was my starting-point for many-hands. Pretending for a moment that I buy into the flexible-funding, any-nickel-helps mindset and, from there, being able to still express trepidation about crowdmatching’s curve-direction.

[sandra.snan]

From IRC:

I feel worse giving $10 as part of $200 total than I do giving $20 as part of $15,000 — particularly if I understand that the $15,000 only exists because others like me made this mutual agreement. I’m not concerned just about my $10 or $20, I’m concerned about shouldering too much share of the burden.

With plain normal coffee donation (not that I advocate it, just that its hat-on-the-street basicness is such a baseline that any new proposal needs to beat), you might donate $15, which is a larger share of $200 than of $15000.

It’s 7.5% compared to 0.1%.

With crowdmatching, you instead donate $10 at $200 and $20 at $15000.

That’s 5% compared to 0.13%.

Your part of the burden increased under crowdmatching. Your share of the burden goes up (compared to the flat line baseline of plain normal coffee donating systems).

I want the results of the $15,000/mo well-funded project, and $20 for that seems very minor burden compared to $1

But the uselessness of the $1 donation to an impopular project is only exacerbated by crowdmatching, not alleviated by it (until and unless the project becomes more popular, in which case any witholding-based algorithm (such as crowdmatching) becomes moot anyway).

[sandra.snan]

As I noted on IRC, many-hands is awful for the snowdrift scenario where a blocked road is useless to all, where people don’t wanna pay for vapor. Threshold systems are a good and tested solution to exactly the original snowdrift scenario.

Y’all should change name & image from that if that’s not what you want to apply to.

The baseline of plain boring donating is a flat line. You shovel your shovelfuls or you donate your $15. Crowdmatching has an ascending line, many-hands has a descending line. The descending line does make it hard to be an early-shoveler (which is exactly why I like threshold systems), but, it also means that small, under-thresholded project get a lot of help, which is exactly what you keep requesting whenever I bring up thresholds.

[wolftune]

@sandra.snan

you might donate $15, which is a larger share of $200 than of $15000.

One might, but I usually don’t. I don’t give that sort of donation to anywhere near the number of projects I’d happily pledge to in crowdmatching. If we are only looking at the set of people who already give $15 donations readily to all sorts of projects, we don’t need crowdmatching.

@sandra.snan

(until and unless the project becomes more popular, in which case any witholding-based algorithm (such as crowdmatching) becomes moot anyway)

This is the key point. We don’t need crowdmatching! We just don’t. Everyone could unilaterally donate and we could get the FLO reality we dream of. There’s no fundamental reason that can’t happen. People could just recognize that the Snowdrift dilemma exists, each independently decide not to play that game but to just do the “right” thing anyway. Our hypothesis is specifically that, in practice, we need crowdmatching (or similar, something motivating enough on a collective-action basis) in order to get much more popular participation that we just aren’t seeing with the status quo.

@sandra.snan

The baseline of plain boring donating is a flat line. You shovel your shovelfuls or you donate your $15.

Our claim is that people mostly don’t do this and the snowdrifts mostly don’t get cleared and when they do it’s painfully slow and incomplete. That’s the baseline.

Your points about many-hands are correct in my view. That’s why I see it as an interesting counter proposal as a thought-experiment more than a snowdrift-dilemma solution. I’m still curious to think it through more.

[sandra.snan]

@wolftune

If we are only looking at the set of people who already give $15 donations readily to all sorts of projects, we don’t need crowdmatching.

A very common reply throughout this discussion, both three years ago and now, both with mray on IRC yesterday and here in this thread, is this Scotsman’s Goldilocks Goalposting of “the perfect crowdmatching project!” Not too supported, and simultaneously not too undeserving. It needs to have history, reputation, and no income.

In other words, there’s an expectation that the disincentivization to undershoot and overshoot (that Preshold’s mechanics attempt to do) instead be done manually&magically.

In such a magical worthiness filter, plain donation would make more sense than the “oh, you’ll only get a few cents for now and then if it does grow all the patrons will be on the hook for more”.

@wolftune

I don’t give that sort of donation to anywhere near the number of projects I’d happily pledge to in crowdmatching.

That was in comparison to being on the hook for a crowdmatched $1–$20 dollar pledge.

I get misconstrued sometimes as advocating for plain-boring “here is my paypal send money please” donation systems. No, we’re all aware that the Snowdrift dilemma is a huge factor (one of several) in causing hesitation there. I bring it up not to advocate for it but as a baseline to compare other proposals to.

Salt, you reacted with sceptical to the whole Snowdrift dilemma name thing. But I’m gonna double down on that:

This is what’s been one of the most frustrating and backwards parts of this thing.

The Snowdrift dilemma as classically presented is a perfect match for threshold pledge systems. The counter-argument on here whenever thresholsd pledge systems are brought up is that “but we are for projects that are unlike the Snowdrift / clear the road situation”. If so, the project could be well served by explicit clarification of what’s an appropriate project to fund, and how much funds it should receive. Applying scaling factors whether in the ascending (crowdmatchting) or descending (many-hands) directions is perhaps not needed or appropriate once you’ve figured out that weeding filter, or, the appropriate factor polarity (if any) would emerge with greater clarity after hashing out such a filter.

[Salt]

@sandra.snan

Salt, you reacted with sceptical to the whole Snowdrift dilemma name thing.

Let me try to clarify that reaction by drawing a scenario that I often dream of regarding crowdmatching a new project, rather than the “Goldilocks” partners we hope to launch with.

Let’s say a group of friends start a band. At first, they only play out of their garage, working full-time jobs to support the side hobby. When they discover Snowdrift.coop, they tell all of their friends to back them there. A handful do, maybe 50-100, which leads to a meaningless contribution per month.

However, as they play local shows and gather a following, that number slowly climbs to maybe 1,000. It grows because people like the band, they like that their music is all released for fFree, and they like the idea of being part of a group that supports the dream of the band being able to play full-time. Now that the group hits this size, each patron is giving $1 per month, an amount that feels small, but is covering a lot of the band-specific expenses.

After a few more years, some patrons may have left, but many more joined, and now they have a decent following of 6,000 people. This is raising $36,000 per month, which allows most of the band members to work part-time or, for the more frugal ones, to devote all of their time to the music. Patrons are still only paying $6 per month, and they all feel great for having been part of the community that grew this band organically.

Now, to introduce a threshold, perhaps the band says that they need to reach 10,000 patrons to go on an international tour. One day the crowd gets there, and the band fulfills that promise. Since they reached the goal, new patrons are able to join at $10 per month, but it is just to join the community, not to enable further crowdmatching.

Long-term patrons are given a choice, depending on the direction we go with the mechanism. One proposal is to have a checkbox saying they’d like to continue matching as the crowd continues to grow. Another would have the project set the next goal/threshold, and these patrons could opt-in to crowdmatching towards that.

Going the other direction, once at the threshold a “share the burden” function could trigger. At this point, each additional patron (at that level, if we go with multiple thresholds of a certain variety) would mean that every patron gives less and less. This both makes the level of donations more sustainable and eases the ask per patron.

Of course these are only a few of the proposals out there, but this hopefully gives a decent picture. As always, thank you so much for engaging so deeply and passionately here!

And I will admit, after writing that all out, I am even more convinced that we should pursue the organizational split that has been discussed over the last month or two. We are currently trying to build and launch crowdmatch.snowdrift.coop. However, this discussion, and a number of others, are around resolving the snowdrift dilemma. And, as you surmise, crowdmatching is likely NOT the best mechanism for overcoming the initial snowdrift, but it can function to keep the roads clear in the long-term.

[smichel17]

the perfect crowdmatching project

I wonder if some of the difference in perspective comes from our initial focus on FLO software.

I think many FLO software projects are such “Goldilocks” projects. In the Snowdrift metaphor, they’re situations where the software maintainers are already shoveling a narrow, uneven path, enough for some motivated folks to cross but that’s about it.

I can think of many examples of widely used/appreciated FLO software, but many fewer examples of FLO art or music which is similarly popular.

[CANAWEN]

@sandra.snan

A separate issue is the whole quadraticity of crowdmatching. It doesn’t necessarily sit well with me that the more popular projects get proportionately more funding per donor compared to the more under-the-radar projects.

Normally this would be an issue, but with FLO projects I see it as a feature. Ultimately, we don’t want multiple projects that all do the exact same thing. There’s no need for 3 or 4 different photoshop like programs, it’s better to have one really good one. Also, the great thing about FLO and Open-Source, is that if someone wants to fork the project to make a better version, and then add the features they want, if it’s enough of an improvement that new project will become the new ‘standard’. For example: What happened with ublock, ublock Origin, and NanoBlock.

@sandra.snan

That’s why I put such an emphasis on trying to create a system where they, if they decide they want a particular FLO project to exist, only should have to pay as little as humanly possible for that project to exist.

The thing about FLO projects is that working class people, if they are that hard come by, shouldn’t be paying ANY money into the project, much like Wikipedia. The people who are supporting these projects should ideally be middle class individuals who have disposable income. Which, at this point, should be trying to get the maximum utility for each dollar donated, economically speaking.
That’s why I’m so interested in snowdrift.coop, and FLO projects in general. By donating to a well run long lasting FLO project, each dollar donated has almost unlimited utility into the future as an infinite number of people can benefit from the FLO program, whatever it is. But the best thing I love about FLO and open-source is that it is entirely consensual, unlike taxes, and socialism in general. The problem with “from each according to ability” is that the word ‘from’ is describing a non-consensual transaction.

To return to what I was saying about maximising the utility of my donation, crowd matching does this very well. Each dollar I pledge, has the chance of motivating even more people to pledge, which should lead to sustainable support of projects I enjoy. I mean, sure, I could donate $1000 a month or something to a single project, and that should be enough to fund a single programmer supporting a single project, but at that point the relationship is more like employer/employee, and if something happens to either one of us, the project fails. At that point, whatever the total of the donations happens to be is somewhat wasted, unless someone forks it and continues the work.

Finally, my biggest criticism of pre-shold is the uncertainty and instability it would create on the creator side of things. First, you’re asking them to budget their project, next they need to choose a threshold to set, next, they need to recruit/market enough people to get over the threshold, and finally, they’ll probably have to create a few fake sock-puppet accounts using friends and family if they are close enough to the threshold. Then they have to do that every month, or every 2 weeks, or whatever. Every single hour spent trying to achieve preshold is an hour that could be spent working on the project or recreationally.

If you’ve read my whole spiel, thank you. I think your support for preshold, and my support for snowdrift, come from our different ideologies around money and labour. Regardless, I’ve enjoyed reading your thoughts, its a different perspective and I always appreciate seeing things from a different view.

Also, just a friendly reminder that snowdrift is entirely FLO itself. There’s nothing stopping anyone, including yourself, from forking it and making preshold a thing.

[sandra.snan]

@CANAWEN

Finally, my biggest criticism of pre-shold is the uncertainty and instability it would create on the creator side of things

Sure. I think a normal vanilla threshold system (a la Kickstarter / Patreon), or even your average normal “donate/coffee/put some money in my hat please” system, has some strong advantages compared to preshold. It’s less that I advocate for preshold and only preshold compared to those more basic vanilla systems. At every turn, preshold is optimized for the benefit and motivation of patrons (with the idea that that’s ultimately what’s going to bring in most money to projects). Preshold as a game-theoretical construct is also the best answer to the “Snowdrift Dilemma”, on paper. Now, the “Snowdrift Dilemma” isn’t the be-all, end-all of why people donate or not donate, which is why Preshold isn’t the be-all, end-all of protocols. Simplicity and straightforwardness, while preshold beats crowdmatching there, it doesn’t quite beat out the more vanilla and established crowdfunding methods.

Crowdmatching is instable and uncertain for everyone, both for donors and for projects.

@CANAWEN

Each dollar I pledge, has the chance of motivating even more people to pledge

If this ends up being correct then crowdmatching will win, and all my speculation of how bad crowdmatching is will end up having been wrong. Which I wouldn’t complain about since that would be a net win for FLO, which is our goal.

@CANAWEN

There’s no need for 3 or 4 different photoshop like programs, it’s better to have one really good one.

I disagree with this. I use all four of Krita, MyPaint, The GIMP (#changethename) and Inkscape every day, and sometimes Blender also. They are slowly picking up each other’s features but that road has a long way left to go.