Donations and tips would be useful

[snorkel]

As the SNO and client base grows every month and every year, and as we all see such an intense activity on this forum, for the continuous sustenability of it, would be nice to have some donations and tiping system. This forum is one of the greatest and helpful forums I’ve seen so far in a crypto community, but it would not be possible without some great members that have passionately participated in discussions and helped others for free and as a hobby, and they continue to do so. And of course the community admins are great and always here to help, but they make this as a job, not for free. In the spirit of decentralisation and autosustenability of the project and of the forum, at witch many projects aspire, there should be in place a system of rewards of some sort for the most active and beloved members and a way for the other members to show their apreciation. I believe that a way for the community to automantain itself is usefull, and can keep members interested in helping others for longer. And a way for SNOs and clients to donate to the project.
Here are some personal ideeas, but any input would be much appreciated and upvote it if you think it would be a good ideea to be implemented.
I see 3 use cases for tokens that one would want to donate:

• donations to Storj Team for Storj developement, bug reports, etc;
• donations to Storj Team for Forum reward system;
• direct tips for forum members.

One way this could work would be an option for the SNOs to set a percent or a fixed amount from their payout to go to one of the donation options above, and for clients, a way to direct transfer the wanted amount. All the transfers would be centralised and distributed by Storj team, with an automated system, each month, with the payout distribution, for keeping each member’s details private.

Let me give you an exemple of how I see it:
-snorkel, as a SNO, wants to pay 1% of its payout to Storj team for product developement, 2% to the Forum reward system and send 50 tokens to BS, that helped him with a problem. He/she, as a paranoid human being, who dosen’t want to share details about his/her wallet ;), or other personal detalis:

• sets in config.yaml devteam_donations = 1%
• sets in config.yaml community_donations = 2%
• sends on forum_storj_io a hidden tip to BS of 50 tokens.

Storj Payment System (SPS) gets these settings from satellites and from forum, and on payout day, calculates the total payout for snorkel from storagenode operation + tips he received last month, and sends 1% to Storj donation address, 2% to Community donation address, 50 tokens to BS and the remaining amount to snorkel. The tips on the forum can be hidden or not, according to donator option, and they are not direct trasfers, just entries in a db from wich SPS gets the data for next month payment.
Now, what is the Community Donation found or Forum Reward System or whatever? A special found/address, from wich Storj team rewards active and helpful forum members, independently of tips, according to some stats, like the amount of hearts one gains in a month etc.

[mars_9t]

Community is a community not because one is compensated to be in it. This could turn it into another rat race and we would see more spam than usual by folks hoping to be on top of the tip/helpful hill. But maybe this time internet would prove me wrong

@snorkel

• sends on forum_storj_io a hidden tip to BS of 50 tokens.

You mean send from forum account? So you have to have your wallet connected? And other person too? And have all that be applied when payments are made? That’s a lot of extra functionality and a source of possible bugs and confusion.

@snorkel

A special found/address, from wich Storj team rewards active and helpful forum members, independently of tips, according to some stats, like the amount of hearts one gains in a month etc.

This would have to be unannounced. Otherwise one could just track the transaction and gain knowledge who the address belongs to.

@snorkel

wants to pay 1% of its payout to Storj team for product developement

This seems to be the only 100% viable thing to do. Basically a “pay me X% less and use that saving to make product better”.

[nerdatwork]

The easiest way, in my opinion, would be to have the forum user fill in their about me section under https://forum.storj.io/u/<username>/preferences/profile with corresponding donation addresses or just have a crypto domain from unstoppabledomains.

This will avoid all the coding needed on the devs part who are already working on features needed for Storj clients.

[BrightSilence]

@nerdatwork

This will avoid all the coding needed on the devs part who are already working on features needed for Storj clients.

This would be my biggest concern as well. Dev resources are better spent on improving the product. I do like the general idea. But at the same time I’ve never been active here for the purpose of any reward (other than what my nodes earn). Though I have received some donations through other means from generous forum members completely unprompted. I never like to advertise a donation method, as that was never the point of me participating here to begin with and I think they are more meaningful if I don’t advertise a donation method myself.

Besides, active participation here really helps to have your voice heard, both by the community here and by Storj Labs. Which is reward enough for me to be honest. It feels pretty nice to have some small impact on the direction of this awesome project. Detailed conversations with @thepaul regarding the rework of the audit system, discussions around payout changes and exchanging ideas between community tools and official dashboards come to mind.

I wouldn’t mind having some default system in place for this if it’s little effort or an existing discourse plugin could be used for this, but I would never want to proactively list or encourage donation options for myself. Most I’ve ever done was enabling brave rewards for my GitHub account, solely to get some minor income from automatic brave rewards from people visiting my GitHub. And though you could in theory do manual donations there, I’ve never asked for that, nor directed people there as an option. It just doesn’t feel good. Though some people have found that option themselves and used it. It’s just all the nicer to get a spontaneous gesture like that. I’ve never liked the “buy me a coffee” links in signatures and such.

[snorkel]

When I envisioned this, I also had some concerns about this changind the general feeling of the forum. But, I think to a future when the veteran members are not interested in this project anymore or loose interest in spending time on the forum, and remaining members and new ones that are somehow hesitatant, would be more incentivised to participate in discussions and help others with a tiping system in place. Because the project is still a race between the SNOs, just remember that, and one could say that “why should I help others geting nodes better and making me lose races and income?”. The percent of members that are active and helpful is pretty low, among SNOs, that is pretty obvious.
I don’t believe that it will affect the feelings of the current active members, if a tiping system becomes available and they see no rewards. From what I’ve seen, we are blessed with smart and mature members, passionate and pretty altruistic.
Anyway, if it’s good or bad, I just wanted to put it out there, for people to express their opinion, because I couldn’t find any discussions about this topic.
About the donations for dev team, I’ve seen some members to be open to this ideea, some wanting to donate the full payout, and run nodes just as a hobby, so I can’t find anything bad with this option to have it.

[xsys]

Possible way of donation to storj team now - you can send your monthly payout back to where you receive it from. Or you can set up a customer account on eu1/us1/ap1 and set your storage node to keep sending your payout there, while not use the credit for storing your files, just keep it sitting there idle…

[Knowledge]

We appreciate the consideration and thought going into this, especially for the Community members who have volunteered their time to help others.

I am certain that because Storj is a for-profit company, any facilitation of payments through our system would entangle it with tax forms and reporting requirements. I like the idea of users including wallet addresses in their profile if anyone would like to donate to them. That takes the complexity out of it for Storj Labs, and doesn’t clutter the forum with signatures or those pandering for donations for assistance.

We are lucky as a company to have so many helpful and respectful community members. From time to time we do send out some materials to Community members who we feel have stood out for going above and beyond. We do look to the future to expand Community activity and engagement both in the forum and other outlets. But right now, as everyone knows, the company is very focused on sales and development, and resources are focused there. As the company grows, I expect so will the Community, its members, and Storj’s engagement with the Community.

Thanks to all of you for staying engaged and helping each other with the many facets of Storj. I know the future is bright with so many helpful and considerate community members going forward with us as a company.