Human nature and the impact of money on user behaviors

One of the funny things about our generation is the limitless optimism we have.  We expect things will always turn out better and we have high expectations - this can probably explain why we can’t be satisfied with a "good" job or just "settle" for anything.  If we were to take an informal poll of the state of our friends, you would see a dramatic plummet in current earning power but with high potential for future earning power and happiness.  There’s med school, bschool, grad school, startups, blah blah - basically, not many people working anymore.  Anyways, the point I want to talk about is optimism in the context of user behavior on the Internet. 

Over the past couple years there has huge spike in the amount of user-generated content, ranging from the success of Wikipedia, to the skyrocketing of Digg as one of the most popular news sites, to all kinds of social networking/bookmarking/review sites.  The most interesting thing about all of these is probably the fact that their organic growth came from users with passion and interest in the site and topic and not from the company hosting the site directing the content.  So with wikipedia you have people editing any kind of topic for the free encyclopedia and Digg you have users submitting news sites and "digg"-ing them up for interest, popularity and relevance.  If users like, and especially if they love, something, they will do it and in amazing numbers.  Which is why YouTube and MySpace are at the top of the web traffic rankings - all user activity there.  These sites are optimistic on users - they believe in the general goodness of their users to contribute valuable content that other users will enjoy, and it has worked.

So across all the sites we have the constant of passionate users who pay nothing and get paid nothing.  There have been lots of editorials on what happens when you introduce money as an incentive.  Basically, you get a different behavior.  Even the well-intentioned users might even change their behavior as they turn it into an opportunity to try to earn the most.  In the worst scenario, you then have people trying to game the system to maximize earning potential.  Not only that, you can potentially corrupt the sharing nature and karma of the site.  This can be detrimental to the quality of any ecosystem, web communities included.  An interesting example is the case of Netscape.com which tried to launch a Digg clone and then offered the top Digg users (the ones that submit the most stories) $1000/month to switch to Netscape (Digg’s response).  To my knowledge, this has been a huge flop and a huge PR disaster for Netscape.  The big contributors are passionate about Digg and socially relevant news stories — they aren’t in it for the money. There are many other sites that are trying to drive membership, content, and activity by rewarding users with money, gift certificates, and other physical and monetary prizes (I won’t name names here).  I dunno, something about it sort of feels dirty to me.

In my opinion, it comes down to the simple question: Who would you trust more - someone who does something for the love of it, or someone who does it for money?

I think the answer there is also the answer to whether or not monetary incentives should be involved in ecosystems that rely on the quality and output of passionate users.  Sure, you might reduce the contributing population to just those that are truly passionate, but it you’ll also be reducing all the noise that they might be producing. 

So what’s my point?  I guess that I think more sites should stay optimistic and build something that users will truly be interested in contributing to instead of paying/bribing/rewarding them to do things.  I think this would create a better web for all of us.  After all, don’t we all just want to help each other?

- JC

(Note: Yes, I realize we have much advertising on the site, but we have to try to make a living somehow ;))

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