On 10/19/2015 08:20 AM, Stephen Michel wrote: > In short, I don't believe we actually need any change to the mechanism; > we just need to lower the minimum and encourage donation at > above-minimum levels. > > We should do this by keeping in mind that *the average user will tend to > stick with the defaults.* Therefore, if we set the recommended pledge > level above the minimum, so long as that pledge level is reasonable (ie, > easily within the user's budget), they will stick with that donation > level. I propose the following. Note: numbers are rather arbitrary, I > just wanted to give a concrete example/idea. > > let n refer to the number of users. > > - Lower the minimum contribution to $1 per 5000 users.
There's no basis for you to speculate that this lower minimum makes any sense. These types of changes are only sensible once we can operate and see how the numbers play out. Our current baseline is as good an appropriate guess and easier to calculate and explain. I think you need to read https://snowdrift.coop/p/snowdrift/w/en/limits > - For small n (< 100), the recommended contribution is $1 per 1000 users. > - For n <= 100, the recommended contribution is the average of other > users' contribution. We don't want to recommend people counteracting the network effect. That would mean a message to others that says "if you join, others will adjust their pledge downward and actually *not* match you really". > - This is presented to the user as "match other users 1:1" > - The user has an option to match at a different rate, but it's not > highlighted visually. > - If a user does opt to change their rate, the following message is > displayed: > - "This will [increase/decrease] the recommended donation[!/.]" > > Hopefully this allows for all of the following: > - A social incentive to donate more (increase the recommended donation). > - A way to donate less with a reasonable social "penalty." > - if there's no "penalty," people may try to calculate the "best deal" > of matching, ie, always donate the minimum. > - if there's too much "penalty," it may dissuade people who actually > can't afford it from donating. > - An elegant way to handle higher and lower contribution levels (ie, > adds little complexity). > - An intuitive way to present higher and lower donation levels to users. > > Thoughts? All these goals are captured in our initial formula: https://snowdrift.coop/p/snowdrift/w/en/formula It has all the right properties to encourage larger pledges, discourage reducing your pledge, *allow* reducing your pledge… and we even originally started with a minimum that was a tenth the size of the current proposed minimum. So your thinking is exactly where we started with all this. The problem is that all this just leads to too much complexity, too much to explain, too many qualifications over the plain pledge concept, and so we really need to focus on launching without all this for now. The explanation of it all is just too cumbersome. The principles would be ideal to have, but we can't make it work practically. > > ~Stephen > > > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > Discuss@lists.snowdrift.coop > https://lists.snowdrift.coop/mailman/listinfo/discuss > -- Aaron Wolf Snowdrift.coop <https://snowdrift.coop> _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.snowdrift.coop https://lists.snowdrift.coop/mailman/listinfo/discuss
