This really doesn’t work at equilibrium though. Why would I pay in advance instead of free-riding? Why would the amount I’m willing to pay reflect the value I get? That only happens if I believe that my contribution is 100% responsible for bringing about the good, but it’s not clear to me how to ever get more than 1/N. The whole thing seems to rely on charity (which I do like, but for stuff that’s charitably supported you don’t need ads anyway).
I’m sure you’ve thought about it more than me, and I agree that it’s not clear this will work at mega-scale as a “literally everything that requires an initial investment runs on this” strategy. However, it also really looks to me like it can work for a lot of things. Some things working in its favor:
Humans have a lot of intuitively operating cooperation machinery. People understand the idea of pitching in. It makes them feel like they did a good deed.
People respond well to social prestige as a reward for pitching in, which these platforms are getting very good at providing, through mechanisms like special badges, public credits, and access to special preview content (technically this is a loss to not to provide to everyone, but it’s tiny compared to the usual model.)
Removing so much waste creates a huge amount of slack for people to defect and still get results of the quality they are accustomed to.
Pay-in-advance models typically make visible the option to price-discriminate upwards, allowing people with huge amounts of money or grantmakers to pay for more warm fuzzies, more prestige, and more choice over what gets funded. This seems to happen often enough to make a substantial difference—you can see examples of whales on Patreon if you look at higher tier rewards that have “N of M remaining” visible.
Your scheme is also interesting and is clearly in some sense a “less hacky” approach than trying to get people to altruistically do things which are economically irrational. (Although—sometimes it’s a lot easier to get humans to do things that seem like the socially acceptable thing to do than to get them to do the economically rational thing to do.) I would like to see that tried, too.
I’m sure you’ve thought about it more than me, and I agree that it’s not clear this will work at mega-scale as a “literally everything that requires an initial investment runs on this” strategy. However, it also really looks to me like it can work for a lot of things. Some things working in its favor:
Humans have a lot of intuitively operating cooperation machinery. People understand the idea of pitching in. It makes them feel like they did a good deed.
People respond well to social prestige as a reward for pitching in, which these platforms are getting very good at providing, through mechanisms like special badges, public credits, and access to special preview content (technically this is a loss to not to provide to everyone, but it’s tiny compared to the usual model.)
Removing so much waste creates a huge amount of slack for people to defect and still get results of the quality they are accustomed to.
Pay-in-advance models typically make visible the option to price-discriminate upwards, allowing people with huge amounts of money or grantmakers to pay for more warm fuzzies, more prestige, and more choice over what gets funded. This seems to happen often enough to make a substantial difference—you can see examples of whales on Patreon if you look at higher tier rewards that have “N of M remaining” visible.
Your scheme is also interesting and is clearly in some sense a “less hacky” approach than trying to get people to altruistically do things which are economically irrational. (Although—sometimes it’s a lot easier to get humans to do things that seem like the socially acceptable thing to do than to get them to do the economically rational thing to do.) I would like to see that tried, too.