Strategy to Build Out Liberapay Network Use, Viability for Producers

Assume that I'm a lazy, greedy dude that wants the world to pay his way through it. Kay.

Follower-Proportional Patronage, with patronage amounts being lower for persons with high numbers of followers, as still substantial in the aggregate

• This idea gets complicated when the matter is a project to which fundings go, as the fundings go to people that work on them and the follower counts are less perceiveable, so the amount that one should fund a project is more vague/uncertain under this model than under a just-pay-whatever model.

A just-pay-whatever model makes some sense in that it encourages people to donate donate donate, but it may not drive home the real need for those donations and the role that the audience has in the matter of that a creator needs such supports. (This is getting into an analysis of (though admittedly more of a speculation about) the dynamics surrounding how positioning/framing the matter of donations/patronage affects the end result of how much is donated/patronized and/or whether the creator reaches their funding goals (I state the latter point in light of the former because I think it's important for us to consider that the real objective here is for the creator to reach their funding goals, not for them to just make money money money, as the former alludes to at base).

Rewards Model vs. Just-Pay-Whatever Model

In light of the previous analysis of the Just-Pay-Whatever Model, I feel like the Rewards Model is almost kinda significantly worse in terms of helping creators reach their funding goals, as the needs of the creators take a backseat to the transactional nature of a Rewards model.

If supporting the creators themselves and possibly showing them that you appreciate/support their work, why not keep them and possibly the works they're doing or have done in the forefront, rather than fussing with the getting of new works. (Note that this is regarding works that are essentially on offer — goods that have already been produced and are waiting to be sent out upon persons supporting them at a particular Rewards level as a "gift" — as "new" works.)

In light of this, I feel that Liberapay runs on a model that is much closer to a Social Supports model, in that the supporting of an individual by a community is paramount. As for the matter of showing appreciation for works, I'm not sure what to call that, and I'm not sure that the Social Supports model accords well with the Appreciation model (maybe it does! maybe it doesn't).

Issue for Supports Model

Relies upon notion of IfWeBuiltItTheyWillCome, as creation must precede supports, according to this view.

Possible critique/silverlining

Projects with collaborators may be able to bring in people and divert some funds to them (publicly), raising that person's profile and funneling some funding to them to help them start.

The public allocation of funds is not currently a dramatic feature of Liberapay, but it might be something important. To at least feature on a user's profile which projects they're associated with could help them, though I imagine that the display of this should be opt-in (hidden by default) to prevent exposing personal information and affiliations that one does not wish to have disclosed.