Pay money to SO for quick support

Question

Foreword: I've read the other questions about the Make Money Fast(TM) (like Offering actual money as a bounty?).

The basic idea is to offer money to the site for quick support on a probably complex question. Say I want to be spoon fed on a problem like "How can I compile Eclipse at home?" and I offer $20. Or I have a production problem that costs me $1000/h and my Xyz specialist is sick in hospital.

The money would just buy you a place at the top of all the question pages for a limited time, and it would go directly to SO (so no use to game the system to milk it for money).

Some ideas for details:

• Half the money must be paid in advance to open the question (so you can't back out even if you don't get an answer) plus you can set a time limit. If you don't get an answer within the time limit, the money is lost (well, SO is $10 richer).

• When I accept an answer, the rest of the money must be paid. Which probably means that I have to pay all the money in advance and SO refunds 50% or all the money must be paid and SO gives a voucher for 50% of it for another question. That would also discourage people to pay half the price by simply not accepting an answer.

• I was also thinking about giving twice the reputation for such questions but that's probably not a good idea. The pressure to answer these questions should be to support SO even more. Maybe add a merit badge?

• Another idea was to need a certain reputation for this (like the bounty system). But a lot of people who need such assistance don't have the time to build rep. So maybe such questions need moderator approval or maybe the approval of someone with >10K rep.

What am I missing? :-)

[EDIT] I'm aware that SO has no problem to raise money right now. But venture capital has to be paid back eventually and so far, no one has come up with many good ideas to help making money to pay for the traffic we cause.

I've been thinking about this for a long time (like most people here) and this idea seemed to me to be a first step into a direction that isn't altogether wrong. Apart from that, I only see one solution: Ask for donations like the WikiMedia foundation does. Unlike them, SO doesn't even have a product to sell.

Answer 1

I think it's a bad idea. If things like getting your answer up start costing money, active users (who are giving away their time for free to answer questions) will start demanding their share. It would seriously pollute the atmosphere on SO. Also, active users might (rightly) start feeling a bit like cattle offered to the highest bidder. I don't like it, and wouldn't want to be active in that kind of system. I think monetization for the SE network has to work in other ways.

By the way, IIRC, SO has been making a profit for a long time already just through ad sales and tags.

Answer 2

Personally I think that the bounty is enough. There are (at the moment of this writing) only 132 open bounties in SO. This makes for a subset that can easily be scanned and answered. The bounty expresses the want for an answer, but also the will of the asker to participate in the site, as he had to accumulate enough rep to start a bounty.

Having "paid for questions" stick to the top of the list for a certain amount of time would eventually lead to a start page with very slow changes. The top few pages probably would be quite static. Would a question with more bucks stick longer? Even worse, this would make the first pages even more static.

If I were interested in the day to day questions, I would have to scroll by the first few pages. This would lead to a situation in which "non paid for questions" will not get answered any more or much less, as they do not appear to the casual user any longer.

Now, if we would have another page just featuring buck loaded questions, that would be equivalent to bounties.

Maybe - for the very urgent questions - one could think about being able to start a bounty without waiting the 2 days. Maybe there would be a need to limit the number of such bounties (one at the time per user)?

And if you got a good answer, nobody at SO will send your money back.

Answer 3

You're missing the answers of your linked question. And the difference of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.

Answer 4

My own approach is that if time matters for the user that asked a question the time factor of answering, affects the reputation in accordance with votes.

So money might not be needed...

Answer 5

First of all, I don't think that SO needs money. They have pretty good traffic, they can generate tons of money from ads, job posts, etc. IMO, SO won't be introducing any such feature. On the other hand, is there a demand for paid services? I'd say yes, but you have to test the idea.