Problems with crowdmatching + proposing an alternative

Thanks for taking the time to engage! I think your perspective makes perfect sense when one has the value judgment “paying more to a project is a burden.” I also think a lot of people feel that way, and that it’s kind of built in to the proprietary paradigm we all get born into. I mean, I feel that way about a lot of things.

But it’s a cultural norm, not an absolute, and it’s often subverted by people or (for an individual) by particular contexts. Anyone who does any work to improve public goods (park cleanups, tree plantings, attending city council meetings, putting on free concerts, pouring sweat and tears into OpenPGP in relative obscurity, …) is making a different judgment. They want to contribute more to improve what everyone is already getting for free.

Crowdmatching exists to empower the value judgment, “Paying more to projects is a reward.” If it turns out there aren’t enough people who feel that way, crowdmatching will fall flat on its face. And we have to position ourselves carefully to signal that’s the judgment we’re looking for. But I believe in it, which is why I’m still here, volunteering…

Thanks again, and I totally feel you re: taking breaks from emotionally draining conversations. :slight_smile:

Cheers,

-bryan

3 Appreciations

Hi Sandra,

Thanks for taking the time to write so clearly and thoroughly.

I did indeed misunderstand or at least not see the whole picture of your proposal before. I think you still do not see the big picture for crowdmatching. We’re not likely to drop crowdmatching and go with your proposal, but I like a lot about it and want to encourage you on this. The two approaches could co-exist (but not merge).

I can see how you’d want an institution with the mission and overall perspective that we have as the place for your overall good idea, and I think I understand why you have your bias against crowdmatching.

Meta comment: I am learning that in-line replying is not so good in this medium. A live conversation could go much better as a back-and-forth of that style (but it lacks the ability to think through and edit etc). I’d like to think about how to use this forum where we encourage short replies, wait for response, like a slow-motion live conversation…

I started replying-while-reading, but instead, here’s my new thoughts about it all:

Precise threshold overall

Your proposal is a fine enough system for what it is. It does address the snowdrift dilemma in terms of game-theory.

I’d characterize it as basically monthly-recurring-threshold-campaigns. Instead of the high costs of mounting a new, distinct Kickstarter every month, it’s recurring by design. It has mutual assurance from the threshold and sustainability (unlike any other system we know of aside from what we’re doing).

In the end, I think your proposal is actually great and is just a different model. It might work very well for smaller, niche projects that actually have a clear real threshold that isn’t just a guess at what will work with the game. For example, a minor fantasy author with a small but dedicated following who wants to just quit her day job. Both crowdmatching and precise-threshold are good systems that will work for different sets of projects that only partially overlap.

I actually think we should keep in touch and continue this discussion further. There’s a number of ways forward. We could have your system as another model (but that would have to be much later, can’t spread too thin at launch). You could take what you like about Snowdrift.coop and build a new platform for your approach. We could formally partner, integrate, but maintain separate systems…

On the differences between project fit

If you have in mind the prototypical best-fit for precise-threshold (ongoing, niche, knows what a good-enough salary is that would allow to quit a day job, is a make-or-break question for the project going ahead etc), then I can easily see how all the intuitions around that would lead to disliking crowdmatching.

Similarly, thinking of the prototypical best-fit projects for crowdmatching, precise-threshold seems bad. Right away, the first step “projects set a desired monthly income” being more than a general vague estimate but is an all-or-nothing threshold… that in itself already feels bad for the prototypical crowdmatching-best-fit project. And the idea that only optional tips will be encouraged beyond this is even worse.

So, I really think this is a matter of what sorts of projects fit each system. Which is to say, I think it might be best for both models to be available in some form. I’m also very happy about your consistent FLO public goods emphasis.

Someone could provide precise-threshold with too much proprietary crap and other stuff bad for the public interest… unlike crowdmatching, precise-threshold could make sense for even rivalrous goods. Precise-threshold could even work for a CSA farm, for example. Each new patron would reduce both the burden and the rewards for existing members. Subverting supply-and-demand, farmers need a certain salary; that salary is paid by any number of members as long as it gets paid; everyone gets their proportional share of the produce in the end. That’s a weird twist, but it should be obvious how crowdmatching couldn’t fit that case. That highlights some of the major differences.

Projects for precise-threshold

I could see some artists of various sorts, the type who don’t care to expand into broader things being good fit. Say a blogger who just wants to keep writing their essays, or a programmer who works on some quirky things that never need more than the one person, or a musician who has no ambitions beyond recording their music at home and publishing it online.

Those example all need enough reliable salary to feel safe quitting their day job. They appreciate tips. But they just want to do their work, get by well enough, and engage with their audiences.

Crowdmatching, even with a minimum threshold, makes little sense here. They can’t quit their dayjob until they have their threshold, and yes it feels weird and bad to punish (I’ll accept that term in this context!) the patrons by making them pay more just because the author is getting more popular. All your intuitions hold up in this context.

And yes, the single road snowdrift metaphor here applies well.

Projects for crowdmatching

Consider, for example, the real-world case of Task Coach, the initial motivation for crowdmatching. There were two volunteer developers and one volunteer support person (me). One dropped off. A few extra dollars are similar to a tip, it just helps cover costs and keep volunteers form burning out. But bigger budget is needed to get a part-time dedicated programmer or freelance help or even multiple full-time devs.

The project could certainly use a whole team, programmers, support people, marketing, user research, design specialists… So, while an amount that could fund a freelancer to spend 5 days a month would be definitely worthwhile, a funding of multiple full-time people would be even better. Small improvements would be nice, but the potential is much further.

Ideally, Task Coach would be ported to various contexts, web app version, mobile, etc. and eventually be able to out-compete all the proprietary task-management tools…

Precise-threshold here is not awful, but it’s not great. Should the threshold be the minimum get-a-freelancer-some level? The one-full-time level? Or…? As it gets more popular, we don’t want (neither the project nor the patrons) to have the funding level off. We want it to grow, add more to the team, prosper, become the wonderful, reliable tool we dream of…

Maybe this applies even more to something much larger like a major news organization. We want Common Dreams to grow to compete with the NYT. They need multiple journalists, editors, tech people… but just being able to have some extra funding to pay one more freelancer is still a good thing…

Crowdmatching in these cases mean that we do something positive but small in the beginning, and as we see progress and invite more people, we’re all thrilled to donate more to this thing that is on track to being the wonderful institution we dream of but still has a ways to go. Each extra set of pennies I put in are part of getting dramatic improvements over the next months… I’m not being punished, I’m taking an ever smaller portion of the burden as part of a growing community changing the world!

That whole dream of really building a better public goods economy and economic democracy feels hopeless with precise-threshold which is so modest and small scale and is only likely to have much impact in the aggregation of lots of little valuable niche projects.

Combinations / adaptations?

There may still be ways to adjust the numbers in crowdmatching or otherwise make more flexibility to broaden the set of projects that fit well. Similarly, there are surely ways to adapt precise-threshold.

And they could be combined still, even with “shares” or other approaches that might match efforts rather than number of patrons. Etc.

But we should be wary of complexity and muddling. So, I think at this point that having the two systems seem sensible. I really think the amount of non-overlapping projects (where one system is good and the other bad) is large enough that there’s real demand for both approaches.

(Side note: if Liberapay were more really strictly dedicated to public goods instead of sorta whatever-but-we-like-libre-stuff, I’d be that much more inclined to suggest you bring your idea to them. I would like to see your system available, especially in a way that lives up to ethical ideals.)


Some edited in-line replies for reference:

On game theory

Without going into details, you’ve discussed the game theory without adequate emphasis on the effects of iteration. But you’re mostly right about things by my reading overall.

a successful outcome every step of the way

The key point (made before) is that small donations from crowdmatching are positive not negative for a project that is going ahead no matter what. It’s better for the “suckers” who are clearing the road anyway to get some help and encouragement rather than to take on the costs of promoting a threshold campaign that doesn’t succeed and then be marked a “failure”. That mark is only good if the right thing is actually to give up (which it is, in some cases).

Joining in early and no-one else showed up? N.p. you’re not out anything. Joining in late and many others joined in? N.p. many hands made very light work.

Same in crowdmatching, since the amount you’re “out” when you’re early is small and is still something positive and you’re getting matched, so your pledge gets the project more than just your pennies.

where is the money coming from?

(all you say is right here)… the long-term goal is for the money to come from the pot going to proprietary stuff. We want people to stop funding Adobe and fund Inkscape instead. In essence, it’s the existence of robust proprietary stuff that proves we have the resources to make it, it’s just a matter of directing them to FLO public goods instead.

“Sorry, users can only put one image in a post.”

UGH! I plan to go through this thread with @Salt and fix things like this and then delete this meta comment.

Issues with your graphs

Besides not including crowdmatching + min. threshold option, there’s a major oversight: given people simply being aware that the road is now getting cleared enough, all of the graphs should taper off. Once good-enough funding happens, traditional subscribers stop joining, crowdmatching stops getting as many new pledges (especially since people are even more hesitant to accept the now-high pledge value), and plain threshold new pledges drop off too.

In short: accelerating beyond what’s valuable is a problem that is speculative and dubious. Nobody will pledge a $100/mo crowdmatching to a future Inkscape that is already so well funded, it does everything everyone wants. Regardless of any mechanism, it’s easy to just spread the concept that it’s fine to freeride for an already well-funded project.

(side-note: a popular author is more likely to get people just wanting to pledge anyway out of excitement versus something like Inkscape, so again, project-fit is relevant)

So, we predict a natural equilibrium with crowdmatching. It gets expensive, so people start dropping out, which itself reduces the crowdmatching. If too many patrons drop, it will go low enough that others feel fine joining and think it’s important for the project. The prediction with crowdmatching is that it will not overperform because of the natural behavior of patrons, no need for a precise threshold (but, as stated before, we could add a top threshold to crowdmatching if we’re wrong).

To most people, is it more appealing to be able to set your fixed monthly donation a la Patreon, or, to set a window within which your donation can jump around chaotically, a la crowdmatching?

People individually like the former. And it fails to fund public goods.

The point isn’t that people want to give up the control of setting their fixed monthly donation. The point is that patrons retaining that control is an obstacle to flexible negotiations. It’s similar to people wanting to freeride and have successful public goods. We’re saying, “sorry, if you want public goods, you have to accept the discomfort of giving up some control and focusing on working in solidarity with others — but we at least give you a hard budget so you can limit the risks until you feel comfortable raising that limit”.

Crowdmatching is not the natural thing everyone wants, it’s a cooperative negotiation we need to get at least partly over the freerider problem.

And while I think threshold systems in general are weak in these negotiations, I’m sympathetic to your suggestion that hiding the progress in precise-threshold is helpful. I totally see how that feature fits with the refund-past-threshold assurance to make the game-theory work far better than it does with a Kickstarter-style threshold!

But your take on crowdmatching is that your effort needs to match the amount of people making an effort, rather than their effort.

Hence the earlier “shares” formula. Matching efforts (instead of people) does make some sense, but makes everything far more complex (feedback loops even if the matching were designed wrong). So to be clear: my intuitions match yours, and we started with the effort-matching idea.

Over time, in negotiating with everyone involved and difference ideas, we moved to simplify the system (for now at least). You seem clear on our shared appreciation for maximizing the number of patrons as independent value from the total dollars. I won’t belabor that.

One anecdote though:

I was told by someone about a charity campaign that explicitly refused any donations over $25. That was interesting, why would they do that? All sorts of reasons, but it gets at this idea of focusing on inviting more people, knowing that you can’t just hope for a wealthy patron to come solve it, and people can’t feel guilty for not doing more etc. and the campaign was a great success (it was a medical thing, I think, like support for a child with cancer). I encourage you to reflect on that example.

As far as I understand it, crowdmatching has several mechanisms that work against maximizing the quantity of patrons.

like what? You mean like this next quote?

Also, with crowdmatching, you might not be able to afford pledging to a popular project, no matter how much you care about it.

…which is why the limits page offers ideas like sub-projects etc so if too-expensive is our problem, we do have ideas to address this.

With prec-shold, pledging late eases the burden of everyone else

And, again, speculative future but… we can do this with crowdmatching, as I’ve stated. I know that’s not your proposal, but it’s completely compatible. We can run a new engine the other way once a “fully-funded” threshold is hit. It would have the same effect whether we arrive at fully-funded via crowdmatching or not.

Instead, you want the maximum benefit (e.g. successful project) at minimum cost to you.

Yes, but it depends on the numbers of the benefit and the cost. The game plays differently if the benefits are minor and the costs are high versus the other way around. In crowdmatching for public goods, the costs of participating are not high (but are higher than the true minimum of freeriding), but the benefits are high (assuming valuable projects). And your pledge being matched means a greater increase in benefits than in costs.

Crowdmatching feels like patrons are being punished.

Besides my points above how this framing makes sense for some types of projects and not at all for others, there’s cultural context maybe:

If you live in a world of people who care about public goods and tend to be thoughtful etc., it’s easy to feel like crowdmatching is discouraging

Out in the world of people who use Facebook all day, have never used an adblocker, think a just-world fallacy (that rich people deserve their wealth and vice versa) and buy into other corporate capitalist propaganda, they are still pro-social in a way (as healthy non-sociopaths are inherently), but they don’t contribute on Patreon or whatever, and they think the idea of FLO public goods is an absurd fantasy. They still think somehow that Wikipedia is just a bizarre anomaly rather than an example of what’s possible. Those people have their own biases, but they recognize correctly that the economics of FLO stuff are pathetically near-zero compared to everything else, and they see people like you and I as totally Quixotically delusional.

All the fuzzy stuff in between, there’s people who get that maybe FLO public goods aren’t hopeless but they sure seem that way, and they are already pretty damn discouraged. I know that feeling.

It’s a very uncomfortable thing to say, but we are actually self-aware guilty of basically going to the most optimistic, hard-working FLO activists who volunteer and donate now and are telling them: you live in a weird semi-delusional bubble — your optimism may drive some real successes here and there, and we’re hesitant to pop the bubble, but really it’s a lot worse than you even realize, and most of the things you’re supporting are doomed. We would like to convince you to face the facts, and stop optimistically doing the not-actually-adequate Patreon / Liberapay thing. Instead, we need to build a new social contract to figure out how to get all those sympathetic folks who are not us activist / donating insiders and bring them on board. And they may mean something like a strike. We STOP being suckers clearing the road on our own…

And this is a lot like your threshold model except… we don’t go on strike and say “we’re doing no work until our demand for X is met”. Instead, we’re saying “we’re doing a work slow-down and going to invite more of you to help, and we’ll not only get back to where we were but are up for going a lot farther if we get far more of you bystanders to join in”.

My core point is: Maybe this is part of why you feel uncomfortable (we’re, in crowdmatching, potentially discouraging the suckers who are already doing something), and that this is backwards. And yet it’s still the right way to build the movement we need long-term. You’re not the first person who expressed this discomfort (or if I’m guessing wrong, I can tell you others do feel this way), but it comes nearly exclusively from the sort of people who are really active and engaged already and are inclined to invest the sort of serious time that you and I have put into this conversation. The sort of people who insist (but are wrong) that people want to donate all they can (I know that isn’t you though).

From the people who are not donating or volunteering or even hopeful today (and I was once one of those incidentally), crowdmatching can feel like a real fresh hope in a way that threshold systems do not (but now that I understand your proposal better, I do think it’s a real improvement over existing threshold models, at least for some projects).

If the road is blocked I cannot freeride.

It’s not black-and-white. A road can be semi-clear, enough to struggle through slowly.

In funding terms, either there is enough money for someone to put in actual paid hours on the project, or there isn’t.

Yes and no. When this is true, a minimum threshold makes sense. It’s often not true. It may be someone volunteering and losing money on hosting costs, and they will be able to keep going better if we at least cover those costs better. It may be a freelancer who has to take on more or less proprietary clients depending on how much funding their FLO project has. Or it may be a team on a big FLO project who are thinking about whether or not they can fund some extra training or travel to conferences… For many (most?) FLO projects, it’s not all-or-nothing in terms of the value of income.

On tipping, I agree with everything you said, with one caveat: small income from some crowdmatching patrons still has the effect of “these people support me at least”. And anyway, we’re not stopping anyone from also tipping outside of crowdmatching.

In prec-shold the minimum and the maximum is the same level.

[my original thought while reading:] Can you come up with any real-world example where this is a good fit? Nearly all the FLO public goods I can think of do not work this way. Any that even have a minimum that makes sense also could greatly benefit from income beyond that and would not have any desire to cap that. And they’d be extremely hesitant to refuse valuable income that was less than what a true maximum cap would be. And self-donating as the only means to break the levels apart feels like an awkward hack, even if it’s publicly acknowledged.

[addendum after finishing:] I’m still skeptical somewhat (the author could still grow significantly, hire a better editor, illustrator, promoter, maybe expand into film adaptations… etc), but I accept that many niche projects (including many who have come to us and we knew were not a great fit) really would be appropriate for your model.

This is not an appealing pitch to me.

Sorry for the confusion, that wasn’t the pitch itself, it was my description of the pitch. The pitch itself is more like “so, instead of donating on your own, you make a pledge: I’ll donate a tiny bit for each other patron who gives with me!” and consistently, most people feel good about this and intuitively see how it could work well.

It’s all about not wanting to be a sucker.

Let me put it my way (which probably means a tweak to the game in the game theory): If I could be the sucker who completely transforms the world for the better, I’m okay with that. I actually want the result, first and foremost.

It’s not about avoiding being a sucker as the priority or as freeriding as the priority. It’s about avoiding the WORST case scenario: being a sucker with big costs and nothing in the world really changes, no good result even comes of it.

If I donate $5,000 to Inkscape, it won’t go that far, but it will be a HUGE burden for me. I take solace in the idea that working on Snowdrift.coop has been an interesting learning experience etc. etc. but it’s still not worth it if we don’t succeed at making real value in the end.

The worry is that I could shovel a TON of snow and still have more snow fall than I can shovel, so it’s all a total loss. But let’s consider a situation where there are already enough other suckers shoveling that it’s sorta working. It’s a job for 20-50 volunteers working really hard or for 10 full-time, well-funded paid folks, say. There’s fluctuating 18-25 volunteers, so it’s ups and downs but sorta working. Should I join the volunteers? It seems like a huge burden with very uncertain results, and some risk of others burning out etc. I can’t afford to pay a single full-time person on my own. Should I donate to a threshold campaign to add 1 full-time person? Maybe… still seems like a big personal burden for a questionable nothing-really-changes in the big picture…

What I want is a vision of how to get 50 great volunteers and 50 backup ones or get the full 10 paid folks (and, I want the hope that if we get there we push forward to expand the project and really take on the proprietary competition even harder!). But that’s such a fantasy. If anything I do (even clicking “pledge”) is nothing, just marked “failure” short of reaching the dream, then it’s not even worth it. I want to tell others that I’m in on my part of reaching the dream if there truly are enough others to help, and if we get half-way there and at less burden to me than getting all the way there, that’s still positive. And I’m willing even to come volunteer if the understanding is that I’m not going to take sucker-level burden with nothing else changing.

My willingness to contribute isn’t black-and-white / all-or-nothing. And it’s somewhat proportional to how great I see the outcome being.

please don’t mix in crowdmatching with precise-threshold

We won’t. But we’ve had notes forever about “what happens if we reach full funding” and one of them includes the run-in-reverse (refund), i.e. allow new pledges and just divide the total among everyone so that new patrons reduce the burden for others. That’s not something we got from you.The only reason it’s not currently on the limits page (it might have been in the past, not sure) is because we’re doubtful that it really makes sense.

This has usually come up when someone asks, “I give more when more donors join, that seems backwards, I thought I’d be able to give less when others join” and our answer has always been, “well, that would only make sense if the project was fully-funded. We’re focusing on getting to fully-funded in the first place!”. I’ve had nearly that exact exchange a number of times.

Whether we add a minimum “funding is off until it hits X” (likely to be an option) or a “fully-funded, spread the burden” maximum (doubtful, again, hoping to get to where this is even worth considering), it won’t be because you brought up your precise-threshold model or an attempt to combine them per se.

The more people join in as patrons on a crowdmatching project, the heavier everyone’s burden becomes.

I think this is reiteration but: that claim is not true relative to the result! As co-founder David emphasizes, if you’re okay with being 1 of 1,000 patrons putting in $1, then by being willing to put in an extra $0.001 when the next patron joins is comparable to being matched 1,000 times over (and so on)! Your burden goes up a fraction of a cent, but the project gets $2 more funding. Or if we scaled this to other numbers… the point is: in crowdmatching, your burden goes up MUCH slower than your increased BENEFIT from the funding improvements for the project. Your relative burden is being constantly REDUCED, not increased.

It’s like if we were all cleaning up litter in the neighborhood. You agree to pick up an extra piece of litter for each volunteer who joins the litter brigade. This isn’t a bad deal with a heavier burden. This is like “YAY, I just pick up one more piece of litter to getting 500 pieces removed from my neighborhood, thanks to the new volunteer!” That benefit is absolutely worth the miniscule extra burden. This is perfectly fine game-theory.

Please don’t confuse what’s punishing for projects (the biker) with what’s punishing patrons (the donators) if the goal is to get many patrons.

It works the same way the other way. The patrons are happier when the bicyclist goes the extra mile. They like that they give extra $, knowing that the other patrons are also and together (and due to the social signals of the bicyclists effort), they are doing that much more for the cause. Nobody is punished here — because we’re talking about a case where more funding directly means greater results from the project/cause. The punishment framing only applies in cases where there’s no further returns beyond the threshold.

A threshold system is designed to ease your mind. Crowdmatching lacks that.

You mean in terms of risk? Crowdmatching is different, but it’s still true that my risk is low, much lower than plain unilateral donations with no matching or threshold.

gaming the system as one of the strongest arguments against threshold pledge systems when your own proposal is much more sensitive to the same flaw.

Thanks, I’ll fix that. It’s a good point. The actual reason we put that in, however, was not to say that gaming itself was fatal. The point was to illustrate how arbitrary the thresholds often are. If a threshold at Kickstarter was always the actual minimum needed to go ahead, then the gaming would never be rational. It only ever happens because the thresholds are so arbitrary / badly set etc. and so people game when they change their mind and realize they’d be okay with a lower threshold.

This gets at, I think, our core difference of viewpoint. Your focus is on projects with a clear threshold, they need X and no more. Less is no good, more does little good. They need that amount. Our focus is on projects that have no such point clear at all.

Consider the snowdrift game. You’re viewing it as yes or no: is the road cleared? We’re viewing it more as a continuum from more blocked to more clear. Furthermore, we’re focused on the broader question of maintaining the road and keeping it clear iteratively, ongoing maintenance. Finally, FLO public goods aren’t all like the prototypical snowdrift case, though they all have aspects of the dilemma.

Increasing the burden of my fellow individual patrons a la crowdmatching is demotivating to me personally.

Aha! This is a core insight. It’s personal, social, emotional… not part of game-theory math. At first I guessed you just personally didn’t like this way of negotiating cooperation. And in this, you’d be in a minority but not the first I’ve heard. But I now think this is amplified by the framing you have of thinking of the type of project best-fit for threshold approach, so it’s that along with some other personal feelings.

I described above my characterization about cultural context. If you are mostly concerned about reducing the burden on everyday citizens and getting corporations and the wealthy to do their part (I’m sympathetic), crowdmatching is backward. But for me, I’m thinking about how to get people to move their funding to public goods and away from the wealthy corporations…

So, I’m not thinking of crowdmatching as just increasing the burden of others. I think of it as moving other people’s money from Adobe to Inkscape, so to speak. It’s certainly not that simple. But the more we all work together to give Inkscape real major funding, more funding, not mild low-threshold funding, but outcompete-Adobe funding… the more we’re freeing everyone from Adobe and their influence and putting capital in the hands of FLO projects and citizens and not in the hands of the corporations. Our goal isn’t to burden people, it’s to move where they put their resources so that they are actually more freed.

Go with my litter example: all the volunteers picking up litter are the responsible citizens, not the litterers or the profiting producers of all the disposable waste and trash that shouldn’t have existed in the first place. Yeah, I’d rather McDonald’s be responsible for all the litter of their products or to figure out how to stop litterers entirely. But if we successfully clean up the neighborhood, yes on the backs of all of us innocent, burdened residents… then we have a clean neighborhood. We can also try the other things to pursue justice more broadly.

[Kickstarter] I’m not saying this is common behavior at all!…

Well, there’s mounds of evidence that threshold campaigns get almost all their pledges at the beginning and end. The early-adopters join right away, then everything slows down. At the end, maybe people step up to try to help push it over the top (or to buy the thing in a product-type scenario of a met-the-threshold). So, you might be pretty normal here.

“I won’t be putting in my best effort unless others are too. Others must suffer as much as I suffer.”

It’s more like a refusal to suffer a lot for a poor result. We can all enjoy an amazing result if we work together, and my motivation is proportional to how amazing the impact will be. Again: if I have a slightly higher burden but get an amazing Inkscape (and the results of economic shifts to public goods overall), I’m totally winning out. That’s not suffering.

1 Appreciation

4 posts were merged into an existing topic: Feedback on the Preshold protocol

Oh, no, I just realized that I did that thing where you only reply to the contrary points or questions and not really acknowledge good parts. There were many. Here is one of my favorites:

I tried to cut this short and get to the points that matter…

While a legitimate concern, this only works indirectly against maximizing the quantity of patrons. Specifically, it reduces the patrons who really dislike such uncertainty. But those who prioritize absolute certainty in the amount of their donations can just donate already via other donation mechanisms. And we’ve argued that crowdmatching will increase participation among all those who hesitate now, and that’s the point.

To be clear, I think there’s a lot of people who will misjudge their own feelings and state speculatively (and maybe deny that it’s speculation) that they care about certainty. Yet, when they see others comfortable with crowdmatching, those same people may decide to give it a try and find it’s just fine and even feels great to be part of the crowdmatching and encouraging others.

This is classic stuff about product design. Before cars, people would say they just want faster horses with less smelly poop, etc. Before the iPhone, most people wouldn’t have expressed a desire to lose the buttons on their phones.

Most people are pretty awful about actually understanding and reporting their own desires and values. That doesn’t mean anyone should just blindly deny the feedback from people. It’s arrogant to assume we know better than everyone else… except when/if we really do.

Judge people’s actions today and we conclude most folks are interested in wasting their day away on addictive, ad-focused superficial crap…

The point in the end is to lead people to solutions that are actually good for everyone and design a good experience that they will feel comfortable with. It’s a balance between understanding people, meeting them where they are, and pushing forward to a better future. Just giving people what they say they want now is not actually a good approach.

In our work on crowdmatching, we need people to get comfortable some uncertainty and interested in the cooperative end result. You acknowledge this yourself in the preshold design. People would say they want to see a progress bar, and yet you know it’s better not to show it in the case of preshold.

uncertainty that my donations are truly needed (because the chaotic matching)

I see no connection between those two issues. Matching doesn’t have to be that chaotic even, that’s speculation and a pessimistic framing. Regardless, whether the donations are needed is entirely a matter of the project’s needs, communicating them and reporting on them fully. And that is the core issue here, the crux of the biscuit in this whole discussion.

discomfort with perceived mismatch of “matching” concept, general “I don’t get it…?” sensation… fear of gaming…

These seem to be just a question of whether we develop a solid enough presentation or whether people take the time to get it or if people spread FUD. This isn’t a problem with crowdmatching itself. Of course, some ideas are harder to communicate than others, and that’s why we dropped the initial too-complex shares formula. We can minimize these fears through a combination of good design, good presentations and writings, and experience over time.

Project focus of crowdmatching and the fuzziness of FLO “needs”

This is the core issue, and there seem to be ways we may disagree some, you may not understand the other aspects of Snowdrift.coop focus around crowdmatching, and also this is where we can agree that crowdmatching and preshold fit different cases.

First, we propose to not even allow projects to participate unless they have unmet needs. There’s no question about whether your donation is “needed”.

“Am I donating to a project that’s doomed anyway”

No you aren’t. We won’t even accept projects like that. We’re only focusing on projects that already exist, have history, are struggling, and need more help.

“Am I donating to a project that’d be successful anyway”

No you aren’t. We won’t even accept projects that are fully funded and don’t need more funding. And we will implement methods to stop the funding growth, either programmatically or socially the moment any project we have actually reaches a state anyone could describe as “fully funded”.

So, these two main fears simply won’t apply. [I hope you read that assertion charitably, not trying to belittle your concerns, trying to answer them.]

Precise-threshold is about the concept of enough. You can’t get by with less than enough, and you don’t need more than enough.

There are some cases where “enough” is definable and less-than-enough is effectively wasted or worthless. We are not focusing on projects like that. Furthermore, we doubt that applies for most FLO projects.

Most of the projects we have in mind are already operating (and not giving up) but have less than truly enough. Any extra to these projects is not a waste. It’s not a matter of all-or-nothing, quitting a day job or not. It’s a matter of taking on a few more outside clients or spending a few more hours on the FLO project.

Fuzzy logic

You know about fuzzy logic, right? These things are super fuzzy in most cases. Living expenses fluctuate, people can move to more expensive or cheaper arrangements, eat cheaper or nicer food etc etc. This all revolves around the concept of buffer. People shouldn’t quit a day-job etc. unless they can build up enough buffer or have a flexible enough lifestyle to be able to withstand various normal ups and downs. Without a buffer, everyone is just one something (illness, house or car damage, unexpected bill) from catastrophe).

There is no hard line in most cases, there’s a wide fuzzy area. A low-risk threshold would need to be high enough to offer a significant buffer. But often people (like my case) have enough buffer already to be able to take risks and manage with a lower threshold. But having a buffer is not the same thing as actually having higher income overall.

To me, the idea of precise threshold is a lot like the price of a good in the marketplace. We together as patrons need to get to a certain price in order to buy a result from the project. We can tip if we like, sure. You may see that as patron-oriented, but it feels to me more like an artifice, a market transaction, and I’m a customer / consumer instead of a community-member / patron / citizen.

A personal perspective

I teach music lessons for a living. I spend money to work on Snowdrift.coop. Every bit of reduction in my expenses means a bit less stress about maximizing my music teaching load.

If I started getting a modest income for work on Snowdrift.coop, I might stop putting in as much time recruiting new students. If we had a bit more income, I’d feel okay traveling to more valuable conferences. If I got really substantial income I might really reduce my teaching load, but before that happened, I’d hire other people with different expertise where it might be more valuable for Snowdrift.coop… and so on and so on.

In my teaching, I hate setting prices. The work and satisfaction etc. varies student by student as does their wealth and ability to pay. I find bartering often far more satisfying, especially when it moves from strict arrangement to just a more communist (lowercase C) to-each-by-need, from-each-by-ability: I do what I can to give the best education to the student and they in turn help me in (real examples: studying spanish, home improvement, volunteering for Snowdrift.coop…). We don’t measure everything, we just try to be the best we can be helping one another and tend to be friends more than some contractual arrangement.

I want to be a friend and patron of Inkscape, giving some money, promoting, inviting others, reporting bugs… I don’t actually want a strictly contractual arrangement. Ironically, crowdmatching is, for me, a contract designed to skip a lot of the aspects of contractual negotiations. We patrons band together, we’re flexible and put it what we can, we don’t shame freeriders but we invite them to join, and we expect the project to do all it can with our support and deliver wonderful products. We want an ongoing social collaboration around building a cooperative community and society, not a game-theory set of numbers and rules.

The idea of the original shares formula was that it was so flexible, it really let anyone both fit in at their level while negotiating the crowdmatching with everyone else. But that also made it just too damn complex.

What’s enough for Snowdrift.coop?

I honestly have no concept of what’s “enough” here for Snowdrift.coop. All income helps us do better and truly fully-funded is so far off, I can’t even estimate what that would be. If the project grows enough, we might need funded forum moderators even, who knows. Not that we want make-work or just to use up any possible funds, but the really substantial entities that change the world have enormous budgets because there really is that much to do potentially.

What we want is for every extra dollar that could go to Snowdrift.coop to instead go somewhere that is truly more important if that clearly exists. Obviously, there’s systematic questions and it’s complex.

The same situation applies to tons of FLO projects. People skip vacations, live on the cheapest but lower-quality groceries, do their own X… (legal research even) instead of hiring professional help…

The idea that there’s truly a clear “enough” for many (most?) projects is usually a fiction or just wishful thinking. I think that is the primary difference in how we view all these things.

And yes, the Snowdrift game requires specifying a clear “enough” in that you clear the snowdrift and are done. But obviously it’s just an imperfect simpler example. We’re trying to deal with more complex realities.

Enough for who, by what standards?

As RMS puts it, when proprietary programmers complain about not being able to live writing free software, they often mean not being able to be rich by global standards. There are people who consider “enough” to be having their own private house in a nice neighborhood etc. and others who get by living with a bunch of roommates and never taking any costly vacations etc. These things are so complex.

There’s certainly a true “enough” where a person has a healthy life, takes vacations, has true stability (health coverage, healthy food, access to valuable services like personal assistants / coaches, etc.) and anything more really is just indulgent. They’re as secure and healthy as they need to be to maximize the quality of their lives and the effectiveness of their time. So few of us can even imagine getting to that level of “enough”.

This tangent could go on and on. It’s obvious that some projects have a minimum before income will make any difference, and we can support having a minimum to turn on crowdmatch donations (as stated before).

As for a maximum (let alone a min=max single threshold), we’re far more interested in requiring projects to make good use of extra income. If Inkscape had all the programmers, documentation folks, publicity, etc. that it needs, extra income could be given upstream to the folks working on the SVG spec even. We could reach truly “fully funded” some day, but it really is so far off that setting a preshold level for it would be entirely ludicrous. So, the threshold you’re talking about is not even in the same order of magnitude as anything that is actually enough.

But we do care about the donations going where they are needed. So, we’re working to design clear ways to honor the most needed projects. We want policies that all funds be used to really further the projects and not just to make well-off people richer.

Your concrete example

Comics: I’m a reader of the comic “Two Guys and Guy” and they post comics as long as they get $500 on Patreon.

Great, maybe they’re a bad fit for crowdmatching. I hope they have a small group of patrons happy to keep them going. Sure, we’d be happy to see them succeed via Liberapay instead.

But you know, they could potentially join Snowdrift.coop, get enough patrons potentially, and we could offer the tools for the max-cut-off where extras to them go to Inkscape or whatever tools they use, or even the feature where the crowdmatching does go in reverse since they truly have “enough”… but maybe it’s not actually enough, it’s just enough to be stagnant in their non-ideal state…

We want all such comics to be FLO and published with full source materials. That’s extra work. They should also be using exclusively FLO tools. Is that stuff already the case? If not, maybe they need more funding to make those things a reality. We’d also like to see them have a solid website using exclusively FLO software…

Now, maybe that stuff would truly be enough and they’d have no interest in going further and growing into being an animated video series or whatever. That’s fine. Nothing wrong with stopping at a reasonable point. But our reasonable stopping includes all those FLO values I just mentioned.

When we have a future where tons of webcomics are made exclusively with FLO software and published under FLO terms with all source material available… then we’ll have succeeded and will be at the “enough” stage where we grapple with those issues.

I think supporting full time programmers to work on Inkscape is a good fit for precise-threshold.

As I said earlier, pre-thresh is a good system overall, has some benefits over anything out there (it involves inherently ongoing donations, does actually have a mechanism to address the snowdrift dilemma). It could work for these cases, but it’s not better than crowdmatching per se. We are both speculating too much now, but from what I know, even setting an exact budget to hire a full-time developer is itself an artifice in the same way that the threshold is. The salary needed by full-time devs is itself a wide range, especially globally. And why full-time? Why note part time, or some full, some part? What about sending those devs to regular in-person conferences for Inkscape (perhaps specifically funding attendance at Libre Graphics World)… Sure, there’s the tips-over-the-threshold…

Personal feelings

The short of it is: when I pledge in crowdmatching, I feel like I’m announcing to the rest of the world, patrons and potential patrons alike that I’m in and want them to come to. I feel like I’m putting my money where my mouth is and inviting everyone else to join.

In preshold, I don’t feel that way. Aside from wanting to hit the goal, I don’t feel my pledge is an invitation to others that much. And I also don’t feel at all capable of even making a good decision about how much to pledge in that system (not that it’s impossible to develop preshold to have some better guidance there…)

On Patreon

We’ve both been dismissive of Patreon in the past but in many ways I see precise-threshold as “improved Patreon” or “fixed Patreon

I knew from the moment Patreon announced that they’d succeed. They’re doing lots right. I’m mostly critical from the FLO ethical perspective more than the game-theory perspective. They make patronage easy and incentivize it with paywalls for premium stuff — perfectly logical.

Projects vs patrons

appeal to patrons rather than appeal to projects

I don’t see the conflict here. The appeal of being a patron is partly the good warm feeling of donating (being a part of things, a good person etc). Beyond that, what patrons want most is the results they dream of from the projects (and yes, at minimal cost to themselves).

On this and the stuff around it: I relate. I was throwing out the ideas of what became crowdmatching just out into the world hoping someone would just do it, just like you. I didn’t want to make a system. But my friend convinced me to act on it, and I realized nobody else would (just like nobody else made a video for my Brain Parts Song just because I published it under CC-BY-SA, so I had to do it myself, and that’s how it became the most popular video out there among songs that teach neuroanatomy).

1 Appreciation

When I first found crowdmatching I thought:

“Whiskey tango foxtrot is this? This is something I’d never want to participate in as a patron.”

That was my own reaction.

Then when I started thinking of my own alternatives I also fell into the mistake of mixing up carts & horses here and there. Sometimes thinking of what made sense for the project, sometimes what would make sense for the platform community, and sometimes what would make sense for the patrons.

My first idea, and this is not meant as a currently relevant proposal (preshold remains as my proposal), was something I called “equality-drift”.

This is how it worked: Patrons signed up to donate any monthly amount, of their choice, to the platform. They indicate which projects on the platform were worthy of support. They can stack rank these or leave them unsorted. Then, using these lists that patrons have made of worthy projects, all projects across the entire site are sorted to find a condorcet order. (Some smart mathematician needs to step in to create the algo, I skipped that step when thinking up the proposal.) Then all the donated money, from all the patrons, is lumped in together and distributed such that the top-voted projects all get a living wage and the bottom-voted projects get zilch.

I.e. let’s say there happens to be 100 projects. And the coop (the platform community) has determined a current living wage to be $2000 (or whatever! just an example, I dunno!). And the total amount donated a particular month happens to be $8000 that month. 8000/2000 is four, that means the top four projects get $2000 each and the 96 other projects get $0.

The hat I was wearing when I came up with that system was this sort of… “architect of society” hat, this “how do we distribute resources fairly” hat, this sorta syndicalist FLO idealist hat. And I was pleased as punch, I thought: “this is going to have the least possible waste of money and resources”.

But after thinking about it for a couple of days, I found a big drawback. Where would the money come from? “Equality-drift” has one ingredient that makes it a very unappealing pitch to patrons: you might be supporting your “enemy project” and your “pet project” will get zilch. Especially when things get political, but even small little issues like Qt vs GTK…

So when I set out to design another proposal I had one goal in mind:

Optimize what’s an appealing pitch for patrons

And I re-examined the original snowdrift shoveling metaphor and came up with preshold.

Wolftune, we both think that market capitalism is flawed. But whatever system we come up with needs to (at least initially) interface with it. Interface with people – with patrons – spending their own money that they somehow managed to make in the cruel and random world of market capitalism (and/or in its keynesian aspects i.e. public sector, or even UBI if we get patrons from regions that have implemented UBI).

That’s why in preshold it’s all about easing the mind of the patron.

Afraid of underfunding? You’re covered. Afraid of overfunding? You’re covered. Not afraid? Disable that aspect of refunds so your donations will be more unconditional. But that’s your choice as a patron, not the project’s.

Now to some other issues you bring up:

Personal feelings

Yes, good. The personal, emotional reaction here is the heart of the argument. Very important.

But we’ve got a good thing here: our propositions are concrete & falsifiable, which makes this debate unsually resolvable.

  • You, when getting into the patron role, feel that it makes sense to you to pledge to crowdmatching projects. I feel that it’s very unappealing.
  • I, when getting into the patron role, feel that I’d rather donate to a preshold campaign (I mean I am super broke so that’d have to change first).
  • And the third option is something like LiberaPay or some other “Like Patron but FLO and for public goods” system. And honestly it might be enough. It can be “gamed” like Kickstarter but people are on it anyway. It’s a success.

But you and me are just two people. Two somewhat atypical people.

This debate can be settled by gathering data. Either implementing all three systems and see which takes off, or like questioning a lot of people etc etc.

I can’t tell what sort of crowdfunding parameters & platform will appeal to Jane Q Public as a patron. I can’t even figure out the appeal of Pinterest or Facebook. T_T
People like some pretty weird stuff.

Setting prices

Unlike “equality-drift”, in preshold each project is free to set their own monthly target. Just like on Patreon.

This means:

Feel free to “play the game”. Set a price that’s as high as you can get away with but low enough that you’ll get funded. Change it month to month. Depending on your fanbase, you might need to rationalize it to your patrons, or not. And as smichel17 mentions, adding multiple levels might be a good match for preshold and help solve this.

My recommendation is to think: What resource can I actually spend money on? Hire a programmer part time? Cut one day a week from my own day job? Pay for hosting bills? Pay for a third of the hosting bills? And use that to set the threshold.

To me this is also a big part of the appeal of preshold, as a patron. It’s not a nebulous, vague, “pls give us as much money as you can spare”. It’s a vibe of “OK, they have a plan. They’ve thought through what they’re gonna use the money for.”

People don’t know what they want

Widespread use of fossil fueled personal vehicles have been a disaster for climate change and the rise of smartphones was one of the two big nails in the sails of the formerly downhill battle of the FLO community (the other was the rise of proprietary sub-internets like Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, YouTube — and both of the nails shared the property of being more able to mix & match FLO with proprietary in a way that made it hard for FLO to use but made it easy for them to benefit from the work of FLO, unlike the Microsoft/IBM/Oracle/RIAA era, which was scared of FLO and who therefore was easily defeatable). Yeah, yeah, that is an aside to an aside. And I have neither a car or a smartphone which is also why my own feelings isn’t the be-all, end-all of whether or not preshold is gonna be a success. That’s something I have to resign: I can’t know.

Anyway, your point is that people might warm up to crowdmatching after a while. And well: who knows?

But I’ve tried to make the case that not only is crowdmatching initially unappealing to me personally, it makes no sense in other ways: it creates an amplified, super-swingy market with all the worst problems of markets, and it doesn’t seem solve the problems it sets out to solve, both game-theory-wise (getting patrons) and resource-distribution-wise. But again that’s only my take. A multitude of voices is the only way to the truth♥

2 Appreciations

My impressions overall, and to summarize the outcomes of this thread, are:

  1. Preshold and crowdmatching are both good systems, distinct enough that both are worth building.

    • Crowdmatching has the ambitious goal of supporting a FLO-majority ecosystem. This makes it more appealing to morally-aligned people who can imagine that outcome. However, it can be hard to grok if you do not share that vision.

    • Preshold is much closer to existing paradigms. This makes it more intuitive and easier to explain to laypeople, which probably makes it more appealing to that group. However, it probably won’t make ecosystem-scale change.

  2. Preshold is probably a better fit for supporting a few (especially, smaller) FLO projects in a mostly-proprietary ecosystem.

    • That’s the ecosystem we’re currently in.
      If we were starting from scratch, I’d support launching with preshold (and adding crowdmatching later).
@wolftune does not agree

@wolftune feels that while it would be good for preshold to exist for those cases that make sense, the vast majority of FLO projects do not actually fit the all-or-nothing threshold sort of funding needs. Almost all projects benefit from even just some funding and also have lots of use for significant extra funding and so have no actual honest thresholds to specify. He would not think it would have been worth investing in Snowdrift.coop as a Preshold platform for this reason.

  1. We are close enough to launch that I do not think it makes sense to pivot now.

    • Preshold is a good backup to keep in mind if we do not see success in the first ¿year? or so of crowdmatching.

For anyone reading this in the future, if you’d like to give feedback on or improve the preshold system, check out Feedback on the Preshold protocol.

1 Appreciation

Partial agree. Disagreements first:

Crowdmatching has the ambitious goal of supporting a FLO-majority ecosystem.

My disagreement:
Where will the money come from? (Rhetorical, don’t literally answer, has been discussed to death above) Like, everyone here has the same goal: for FLO public goods to get funded.

However, it can be hard to grok

Right. There are two possibilities here:

I either understand it correctly and see serious problems with it.

or,

I have it backwards and that means it’s hard to grok. Which is in itself a serious a problem. If a game theory nerd can’t grok it after like 30 hours of working on it… :confused:

I believe it’s the former of the two (maybe I have a dash of Dunning-Kruger and just think I’m smart) but hey either of the two is bad.

if you do not share that vision

I do want FLO majority. Just to clear up any misunderstandings in that regard.

Also wrt morals:

I’m just not wired to be like “oh they’ll have to bike an extra mile if I donate so I’ll do that!” or “oh everyone else has to donate an extra tenth-of-a-cent if I join so I’ll do that!”. My morals are more like “Hey. Let me ease your burden a little. Many hands make light work. If I donate, everyone else has to donate less.” Not saying I have the correct morals here. Just that they are stuck inside me pretty deep and not easy to change.

And now to the big agreement:

We are close enough to launch that I do not think it makes sense to pivot now.
Preshold is a good backup to keep in mind if we do not see success in the first ¿year? or so of crowdmatching.

This is good. I appreciate it. Thank you for this.

Also preshold is in itself an open source idea so someone else can take it and implement it before us. And if that happens we can just join them♥

2 Appreciations

This appears to be misunderstanding. The causality is reversed. The way bike-a-thons work, it’s after they biked, pledgers (supposedly) say “Wow, they cared so much about this cause they biked so far, and I pledged to donate X per mile, so here’s my larger donation.” The idea is that people (pledgers) appreciate the proof of commitment from the other person (the biker) and that social proof that others care matters.

In practice, bike-a-thons and similar that started with this premise were poorly understood by people who didn’t even bother to think about them. So, we see wrongly-done bike-a-thons where the bikers announce in advance exactly how far they will bike, and the pledgers can effectively set a fixed donation. This almost completely undermines the whole concept.

I’m not saying even the initial bike-a-thon concept makes sense. It would be far better for the activity to itself actually help the cause directly and certainly not to be a fun thing someone wants to do anyway. And there’s lots of other problems. But it’s just an example of the ways that people care about social reinforcement.

To clarify again: that’s not in conflict with my morals, there’s nothing wrong with that idea. But it just doesn’t make any sense even in a moral perspective when talking about a situation that isn’t adequate.

Pick a similar metaphor to the snowdrift: say there’s a flood and a few people are desperately trying to pile up sandbags to protect a neighborhood, but they’re going really slowly and it’s not enough. You can’t come up and say, “oh, let me help, then you can relax and do less”. The neighborhood is about to be ruined, and the few people working are struggling and burning out and losing hope. You need to come along and say, “we can do this! I’m going to help and work hard, and if you all keep going, push your hardest and don’t give up, we’ll save the day!” You can’t even think about saying, “you can relax some” until enough people show up that we’re confident the neighborhood really will be safe. Then, seeing everything going well, you can and should certainly say, “hey, you’ve been working hard, take a break, I’ve got the last few bags, thanks for all you did.”

We’re not in things-are-okay-spread-the-workload. We’re in “long emergency”, slow-scale-crisis facing down a world where a few consolidated, wealthy interests control massive AI-backed infrastructure with bread-and-circuses spectacles to keep the people from rising up with dystopian predictions looking ever more prescient. We need to get everyone we can on board and push each other to do the most just to have a shot at retaining the semblance of a free society. That may seem exaggerated, but I’m trying to clarify the perspective.

The short of it is: you don’t have different morals here, we have the same values. We want to lighten the load for everyone. But to have that be at all possible, we have to get the load to be carried in the first place.

One last attempt to clarify: I go around my neighborhood pulling invasive weeds. I do not feel better about the idea of pulling less weeds because one or two more people start helping. I want the invasive weeds eliminated / kept fully controlled. I want as many others as it will take to get there. And yes, I want enough people helping that I can do less. But to do less before we have the weeds actually under control would feel worse than doing more weeding alongside other new volunteers.

Also, I don’t want to just refuse to pick invasive weeds as I walk by until some arbitrary threshold of commitment from neighbors. Rather, the more others who help, the less hopeless it seems and the more motivated I’ll feel to work even harder myself. And I want to tell all the others who could do more that I’ll be extra motivated they more they’ll help. And that extra motivation doesn’t suddenly kick in at some arbitrary threshold. Every extra bit from others is encouraging to me.

But of course if we actually have all the invasives under control fully, my ideal is that everyone is doing their part, so I don’t have to barely do anything beyond the minimum as part of everyone chipping in. It’s just that this dream only happens when we actually have the situation under control, and we’re nowhere near that now.

My point is that this is all about the scenario, and that we share morals and should agree about what should happen in each scenario.

I didn’t mean it quite in this way. I meant it more like, “if that’s a world you can envision”. I probably should have said “see that vision” instead of share.

Like, there’s plenty of people who think FLO is great but just can’t imagine FLO ever overtaking proprietary software, because proprietary dominance just seems a fact of life.

Also, the “you” was general, not @sandra.snan specifically.

I don’t see a button for auto-including quoted text any more.

The first two of these were wolftunes:

you don’t have different morals here, we have the same values

I mean maybe I misunderstood what smichel17 meant with “morally-aligned”.

But to have that be at all possible, we have to get the load to be carried in the first place. […] I want the invasive weeds eliminated / kept fully controlled

And in preshold the load starts to lighten once the load is fully carried, the flood is fully cleaned up, the community yardwork is fully done. Not before. There’s no need to argue against a strawdoll of preshold.

And this next one was smichel17’s:

just can’t imagine FLO ever overtaking proprietary software

Oh, it’ll have to do that. It’s an uphill battle but humanity needs to take that step. Proprietary is so inefficient, such a waste.

My point is rather that both crowdmatching and preshold depend on money coming in — money coming in from other markets, “normal society”, the scarcity-haunted world. From people with jobs such as sweeper, cook, lawyer, teacher etc etc with paychecks coming in from private or public sector employers. And from corporate donors, a company that needs a certain FLO good to be funded so they contribute.

That restriction applies to both crowdmatching and preshold. Now and in the future. Crowdmatching depends on it just as much as preshold does. In the future maybe labor and resources are distributed very differently from today, and more efficiently, but then crowdmatching would neither work nor be necessary.

Of the many systems discussed (crowdmatching, preshold, my normal threshold a la kickstarter, normal subscription a la patreon, or some sorta calculating tip jar a la flattr, my self-rejected idea “equality-drift”), some of them will be better at appealing to patrons than others and thus better at working with that restriction. We don’t know for sure which one in practice ends up addressing actual human behavior the best. For game theory reasons I designed preshold in a way that I personally found more appealing if I were a patron – and appealing to patrons was the one biggest design goal of preshold , but I’m a weirdo so what I like might not be what others like.

Only testing will tell. And so many other random factors. As you’ve said: who knows what method catches on, goes viral, starts to work, people start to grok it? Maybe in the future, you’ll be proven right and everyone is crowdmatching while I am crow-eating. And maybe in the future preshold is what catches on, or just monthly-threshold with a bigger FLO mindset with fewer paywalls / more symbolic or orthogonal subscriber perks (or no subscriber perks). I believe preshold is the best but I don’t know that.

However. I can’t get behind this argument that “crowdmatching will work if more people are in the FLO mindset, in the ‘they can see how much good their money does because FLO rocks’ mindset, in the more generous, giving mindset, in the I’ll do more if you do more mindset”, because…

I am already in a pro-FLO mindset. I think investing in FLO is good value for money. And I’m in favor of distributing resources and labor in ways not common in traditional capitalist markets. (At my core I believe market capitalism has severe and dangerous flaws and inefficencies and is ill adapted to dealing with externalities (impact on environment and climat change) and to the digital realm.)

So this argument also seems to be based on a strawdoll view of preshold. I can’t get behind that a given person’s buy-in to the vision of a FLO world, or lack their of, is the biggest factor in whether crowdmatching, preshold, both, or neither appeals to that particular person. It’s another one of those things that both systems try to leverage.

The difference is that I’m not in the “I’ll do more if you do more”-mindset. That doesn’t match my reaction to chicken or snowdrift situations. My reaction is instead that I’ll do my best if you do your best. I’ll do enough if you do enough. And if our combined efforts still isn’t enough, we can just call it a day early without having to get our shovels wet so we can turn our attention to some problem that we can fix to improve this neighborhood.:heart:

Hmm, interesting that in crowdmatching everyone pays the same. Whereas I’m more in a “from each according to her ability” space right now. That is a non-strawdoll factor that might make crowdmatching appeal more to some. That it will seem more fair to them.

1 Appreciation

(Ah, you highlight text.)

Yep! Just so we’re clear!

Thanks for continuing the discussion. Though it may seems we basically covered everything, I think it’s good that we’re drilling down to where there’s remaining misunderstanding or differing opinions.

Absolutely, and that’s been clear to me. But it’s what happens before the fully-carried that I care about, basically crowdmatching is only about what happens before we reach that point.

Let’s go with my invasive-plants example (English ivy is killing trees and ruining natural areas here in Oregon, to be specific). In many respects, controlling the invasive plants is a fine, real example of public good. Everyone can benefit non-rivalrously from the benefits of controlling/eliminating the ivy, and there’s no way to exclude anyone from those benefits. In that sense, overall environmental protection is a public good, and we’d consider funding such things with Snowdrift.coop (although, like most things at Snowdrift.coop, one can argue that we really should just have a tax).

How could I use preshold or similar? I’d have to pick some arbitrary small goal like “clear out the ivy from the neighborhood park”. That’s functional enough if I can find a clear delineation for the threshold. But even at just the neighborhood park level, I’d rather we get the park half-cleared than make no progress.

In reality, a small number of volunteers work to keep the park half-cleared as is. I’m one of those volunteers. Do I want to pull less ivy if someone else comes along to help? No, I want the park fully cleared and am motivated to do more if others will come along and make fully-cleared become possible.

Perhaps preshold treats our half-cleared work as a given and then puts a threshold on getting fully-cleared? Truly, this could work. But if I participated in promoting a clean-up day (which could be a monthly recurring thing) with the idea that we’d get a threshold of commitment for the day to go forward and then we failed to reach that threshold, not only would I have wasted the promotional effort, I and everyone else will feel further discouraged. We might even burn out and stop keeping the park half-clear!

And let’s say we succeeded with a preshold system in getting the park clear. Yay! I’m not saying threshold is necessarily bad. But I’d much rather, if possible, to get everyone to feel extra encouraged and move on to clearing all the ivy in the woods behind the park than have people reduce their efforts and think we’re done.

Overall, thresholds have this sort of complex problematic effect when we’re talking about massive issues that still have benefits if they are partially addressed. Either the threshold is arbitrarily low and so doesn’t even take aim at the larger scope or it aims high but risks failure.

Given my ivy example, the impact of reaching 90% control would be absolutely wonderful, and reaching 100% is probably truly impossible. I am not going to work at discouraging people who organize threshold campaigns to clear ivy, and I may even participate. Anything positive is good. But I really want people to learn about the problem, commit to being part of the solution, and invite others to join us — and crowdmatching is just a more explicit version of stating an undeniable fact: I will feel more encouraged and work harder the more others come help.

Snowdrift.coop itself is a perfect example. In reality, us volunteers get frustrated, burn out, etc. especially when progress slows. Each time a new contributor shows up to help us get launched, the rest of the volunteers almost always feel encouraged and start contributing more not less. And if we actually get launched, we all know the workload is going to increase not decrease, and yet that’s the state we’re all hoping for.

And the points that @smichel17 was making about FLO-values is more that people experiencing the benefits and progress will feel more motivated to keep going, in the same way that I reference above. Not that everyone just cares about the values, but that through actual progress, they experience FLO and it’s a positive feedback-loop.

Clarification: again we agree completely, I have written nearly the same words myself in other contexts.

The original formula for crowdmatching did not have everyone the same. I designed it to specifically have crowdmatching effect and the communist (lowercase ‘c’) from-each-by-ability effect. Unfortunately, it just proved to hard in practice to communicate etc.

The everyone-pays-the-same is the launch-something-for-now idea, not the goal or value in itself. It does have some equalizing benefits (a project relying on a few larger donors can greatly bias the project), but as soon as we have a working launched system, we’ll be looking into (with feedback from the community etc) how to provide more options that let people contribute relative to their means. And our low starting point already is related because we care about maximizing participation, including those of lower means.

Yeah, the proposals have been hammered out, and I’ve found some support for preshold and some understanding for it so I’m pretty happy with this conversation. Thanks to all involved.

Still some misunderstandings:

Again, with preshold you don’t pull less ivy as people join unless it’s fully clear. Then and only then, you start pulling less ivy.

I hope this isn’t to imply that I am confused or an invitation to rewander down points that have already been walked upthread. I’ve talking about “enough” to reach some clearly defined subgoal. That happens daily on Patreon, mostly for proprietary projects but also for some FLO projects.

Just to go super-concrete with the ivy example.

Here are two ways preshold can help it.

  1. Our goal is to keep the park clear! That’s where we’ve set our goal, but every bit help so please check the “no underfund”-tipping box! [er, again, preshold’s terminology need’s some marketing polish]

or

  1. Help us hire two full time ivy pullers! That’s where we set our goal right now! If we don’t reach it, you get your money back so relax & pledge!

We seem to still be talking past each other just a bit. What you say here I already understood. The single point I’m trying to make is that (go with my concrete example), having the ivy fully clear (not just from an arbitrarily small area like the playground but actually controlled as an invasive species in this region) is such an ambitious goal that using any threshold model at that scale is truly hopeless, which relates to this point from you:

Right, and I’m acknowledging that preshold is at least functional for that sort of thing. But I’m trying to explain that I see all sorts of problems that come from the nature of creating clearly-defined-subgoals as thresholds.

In other words, if we take a clearly defined subgoal threshold as a given, I have less complaints about preshold. It’s still not perfect, but there’s no perfect solution.

Again, go with my concrete ivy example: we aren’t able to define a threshold that isn’t useful to half-achieve or that isn’t useful to push beyond. Clear the park? A half-cleared park is still good, and clearing the woods surrounding the park is good too.

I have no real complaints about preshold within threshold models. In many ways it’s superior to the one-off-kickstarter approach. Basically all my complaints are about problems with setting an arbitrary threshold. I could go on about why I dislike them. So, for those cases where the threshold isn’t arbitrary but truly is a complete goal and when that is useless if half-done then I fully support preshold. And beyond that, I acknowledge that even though I object to arbitrary sub-goal thresholds, I admit that they can be useful both in planning and in gaining the positive effects of thresholds and feel happy when they do work.

Going back to my ivy example, it’s clearly possible to define these subgoals, for preshold to work, and what I really care about is clearing the ivy, so I do not want to reject this suggestion. But there’s real work in planning and organizing such a threshold-based sub-goal, and it would really stink to do all that work and then fail to reach the threshold.

Yeah, but I don’t want to even start this campaign if it means all my efforts are wasted and marked a “failure” when we don’t reach that goal. It would still be useful to hire one full-time ivy puller or one or two part-time pullers. Again, the threshold ranges from too low to have the mutual-assurance effect to high and risking failure, and going either direction trades off these two negatives, they don’t go away. Mutual assurance and risk are tied together with thresholds, more of both or less of both.

I’ll add one last point: if everyone else involved in Snowdrift.coop decided “preshold has its place, let’s plan to offer that too so projects can decide whether crowdmatching or preshold is the best fit for them” I would support that! What we really care about is our FLO public goods mission, of course.

You can read the rest of my points as aiming to communicate to you why crowdmatching is good and fits some (perhaps most) cases. I mean, you can prefer preshold and have reasons for that, but I want you to understand why crowdmatching fits the morals you have. You mention this idea of lightening-the-burden as more people join etc. and you should acknowledge that because crowdmatching is specifically for before everything is done, it’s not in conflict with your views. I’m not trying to bash preshold, I’m trying to help you understand and better respect crowdmatching.

In which case all of many your points related to “Do I want to pull less ivy if someone else comes along to help?” are very misleading.

Yes. This is good project management. Set goals and do them.

That’s why I gave you two suggestions; you chose the one you didn’t want instead of the one that would fit you better:

If you go that route people can donate and you can discretionarily spend those donations.

But if I were in charge of the park project I would choose:

Then choose one useful thing and then set the threshold there.

Or, set the goal at one full-time ivy puller but encourage patrons to voluntarily choose both tipping boxes – “no underfund” you can still hire someone part time, “no overfund” you can hire more people.

See, this is the misunderstanding we need to hammer out.

The burden-per-person isn’t lightened before there is enough.

This is a really core part of preshold.

I don’t presuppose that there will be enough. I just have a mechanism for what happens if there is enough, and have made that mechanism a carrot to encourage people trying to get to enough. Instead of stretch goals – a lightened burden. Money that can be spent on other projects, or on a more ambitious version of the current project.

Before there is enough, everyone contributes as much as they can or wish. Their contribution is not contingent on the amount of people next to them. Someone (an organization perhaps) can put in $100 and another (an individual perhaps) only $1 without worrying that other contributions are going to raise or lower their own.

Going back to the original snowdrift game theory dilemma:

There are two reasons people hesitate to join in to shovel to the best of their own ability:

  1. They are afraid of being the only one [or among the only few ones] doing all the work
  2. They are hopeful that they can get away without doing any work.

What’s typical for situations where these Two Hesitation Reasons apply?

They are finite. They have finite goals. Road cleared from snow and traversable.

There is no “doing all the work” in an infinite project because there is no all the work, there is only as much work as you possibly can do.

There is no “getting away” in an infinite project because it never ends, there is no “away”.

When faced with an infinite project, you either think “OK, this can ever be done fully but I can still make it a little bit better” or “OK, this is hopeless, fuck this, I’ll just go around.”

This means that for an infinite project, probably the best solution is just your plain old tipping jar. People give what they can give. In other words, my proposal “1” for the ivy campaign.

But different facets of problems can be framed as infinite or finite projects.

Like this filthy house that I live in (hundreds of people) is never getting clean. People just keep re-dirtying it. But sweeping the stairs once, that I can tackle. And I held off on it for a while hoping that someone else would do it, and finally I did it.

Keeping the house clean – infinite project
Sweeping the stairs once – finite project

This means for an infinite project, you can identify finite subgoals, and then work to overcome the Two Hesitation Reasons for that subgoal, via preshold. Both the underfunding-refund and the overfunding-refund help with both hesitation reasons in different ways.

I have a hard time with crowdmatching because it doesn’t address the Two Hesitation Reasons that are core to the entire game theory metaphor of the snowdrift dilemma. Instead, it adds more hesitation reasons: pledging to crowdmatching is scary both because you might end up giving too much and that you might end up giving too little.

And I think that’s why you keep going back to phrasing problems as infinite projects, so that they don’t even have anything to do with the snowdrift dilemma in the first place.

I’m happy that our conversation so far has been driven by mutual curiosity and charity.

But, to others, who know Wolftune better than I do, and who understand preshold: a little help here?
We have a hard time getting through to each other right now.

That would be a very satisfactory solution for me. Good idea.

With the caveat that I think part of what makes many people hesitate when it comes to indiegogo is that projects can decide if it’s threshold or “flexible funding” (i.e. just tipping jar disguised to look like threshold).

Adding in both the preshold and the crowdfunding options, or more if we want to add in other more well-known (and, on this site, criticized for good reason) systems like

  • plain threshold
  • plain tipping jar
  • subscription tied to delivery of FLO goal (as per Patreon when they draw $2 everytime they upload a comic)

might need some care in design to make sure people know what type of project it is. Like perhaps one solution – and to be clear, I’m not insisting on this at all, it’s just an idea that came to me right now – is to set up different sites, different CSS (color, design), different brand names etc to make it really clear that this is crowdmatching.coop, this is preshold.coop etc, all ran under the same umbrella.

I dunno!

(And again the terms in preshold are made for game theory wonks. Need to be rebranded♥)

I did not before this see a reference to preshold offering a “take my money whether we hit the goal or not” option. That certainly offers more flexibility and gives patrons more control.

But as to setting the goal, there are still problems with the nature of setting arbitrary sub-goals, and crowdmatching is in part about being more flexible instead of these hard thresholds.

This is still misunderstanding. The issue is that you aren’t here only promoting the benefits of preshold, you’ve stated problems with crowdmatching. But those problems seem to be based in misunderstanding.

You were objecting to crowdmatching because of the idea of doing more as more people join goes against what seemed intuitive to you. And I’m emphasizing that this do-more aspect of crowdmatching only applies when you haven’t reached the goal. The quote above wasn’t about preshold but about your critique of crowdmatching.

  1. Also, they are worried about what to focus on given their own limited resources (i.e. the problems with fragmentation and lots of failing projects instead of a few successful ones).

Both crowdmatching and preshold work against fragmentation by discouraging people from putting in all they can without coordination from others. Both approaches help coordinate the resources to have a critical mass of support for some projects so that at least some succeed.

This does seem closer to the core distinction here. I agree that I’m focusing on infinite projects when it comes to crowdmatching, but I disagree with much of your characterizations.

An infinite project may never be completely done, checked off, but it still has real results and can do more or less. There’s just as much of a freerider dilemma with infinite projects because freeriders get 100% of whatever results are available from infinite public goods projects. Yes, unilateral contributors also get some value back from their donations, since they give the project more resources, but their return on that investment is less than the infinite return of a freerider and also less than the return they’d get if their donations are matched or if they are part of a mutual-assurance threshold situation.

Finally, infinite or not, cost estimates are often just guesses. Projects in general go notoriously over-budget, but if you start out by asking for a huge buffer to cover that possibility, it looks bad, wasteful, and is more likely to not get supported. Better to work transparently, state goals for budgets etc. but not have some hard threshold. Patrons can decide month-by-month if a project is being effective or not with the funding they have and whether they deserve continued or additional funding.

A plain tipping jar is very ineffective at converting more freeriders into patrons. Matched donations make a real difference, as shown by a long history of matching pledges in one-off campaigns and in things like employer-matched donations to charities. The plain tipping jar without mutual assurance has been clearly shown to be typically pathetic.

Crowdmatching really does addresses point 1: you won’t be the only or among the few doing “all you can”. You will either be among the few doing little more than minor tipping that costs you very little or you will be part of a larger group doing more.

Neither crowdmatching nor preshold fully address point 2. As long as something is public goods, freeriding is possible. In crowdmatching, people could just not pledge and take whatever results others achieve (little or a lot). In preshold, people could not just not pledge and hope that others hit the threshold without them or reasonably conclude that if the preshold goal fails without them, it was likely to fail regardless (their one minor pledge wouldn’t have made the difference).

That latter point is the same as not voting in an election. Your one vote is almost guaranteed to have no impact on the outcome.

So, accepting that fully addressing freeriding is impossible with public goods:

Crowdmatching offers hesitant patrons the opportunity to get matched and a better ROI… since there isn’t a hard threshold, their matched input really will mean some extra resources for the project and thus really mean more return, and it’s the infinite nature of the project that makes this work. They can’t say, “it’ll just get there without me” because with them it will get further, regardless of how far it would get without them.

Preshold offers hesitant patrons some mutual assurance and threatens them with the idea of getting nothing at all when the project fails, so there’s at least some increase in the chance of getting a result by participating, even though that’s weighed against the chance of success while still freeriding.

I think you may be missing the holistic aspects of the platform we’re building around crowdmatching.

There’s NO risk of giving too much because we can and will adapt the platform by the time any project is even in sight of the idea of “too much”. We won’t even accept for crowdmatching projects that actually only need a modest amount and no more — they aren’t even our focus. They do exist, and preshold is a good model for them. But unless/until we add preshold, we won’t* allow such minor, finite projects. We won’t even give patrons the opportunity to be scared about giving too much.

Besides everything else, if a project doesn’t seem to deserve all its getting, patrons can and should drop their pledge. That accountability is part of why sustaining patronage is superior to one-off campaigns.

Giving too little? Besides the fact that you can still donate outside of Snowdrift.coop, this concern is more real. The point is that we’re emphasizing that the way to give more is to recruit more patrons. But this is the biggest tension point for crowdmatching and while it involves some risk, it doesn’t come with the threshold risk of being marked a “failure” because an arbitrary sub-goal threshold wasn’t reached. Crowdmatching is thus a lot safer for projects who have that reasonable fear of running threshold campaigns.

To some extent, we’re asking skeptics like you to let the system get launched, consider participating, give it real world experience and see if the giving-too-little really can’t be addressed by just giving the right set of options to projects and patrons to find the balance that works. Our current pledge options are just a place to start.

Besides options like differing pledge levels or projects setting different base pledge amounts, we can offer projects a sort of threshold where crowdmatching doesn’t kick in until it’s a certain level. There’s a lot of room for adaptation of crowdmatching without losing the core concept. But maybe it won’t even be needed because the basic concept will work fine once we promote it and bring on some projects, which is our immediate focus (aside from necessary steps for a working platform, governance etc).

This is well-put enough but too strong. Tweak the snowdrift dilemma from the one-off to iterative. Then accept it as fuzzy. It’s not all-clear or nothing, it ranges from partly-cleared enough to struggle through to mostly-cleared-for-now etc. and can be stretched to think about the idea of generally maintaining a usable road etc. The core ideas of the dilemma remain throughout stretching the game that way. And all those stretches move the game closer to reality with its real-world infinities and fuzziness.

To say “don’t have anything to do” is simply not right. It’s very much to do with the dilemma, just not in a strict, original simple game form.

I’ll reiterate the general welcome for perspectives from anyone else as obsessive as we are (not because I want that quality but because I assume only such people will read through this massive topic! :wink: )

Thanks @sandra.snan for the in-depth and thoughtful exchange