Also sadly, it seems that the original goal of paying for open source development is falling to the wayside as well, as the value of shares plummets. I was thinking about trying for the forum bounty (still might when I'm done with finals), but at this point, 12 shares for all that work seems like nothing compared to the hundreds of shares people are getting for writing.
I have totally the same feeling! I've been busy recently and planned to hold some of my developing activities on till mid-June, such as adding bitcointalk feature of the devcoin faucet, and a btc-dvc-accepting gamble site, and probably a new exchange, etc. but when I back, I checked the shares for round 24 and found there's nearly a thousand, good, I thought, we have more new developers... but holy shit, most of them are writers for devtome! Does we devcoin is DEVcoin but not WRITEcoin ? could we have more sane way to promote devtome and not destroy the developer community? I feel despire, 'cause no matter how hard of my work, I just get 2 or 6 or 12 shares, from those develop work, but those writers could easily write 12000 word at 2 or 3 nights and get the same.
I've no aggression to the writers, but just want to make our community to notice this thing, is devtome more important than open source developers? I'd suggest some way, e.g. to limit the shares on devtome not exceed the half of whole shares, or as others said, use read times or vote links, instead of just words to distribute shares. just some random thoughts, not thinking very carefully, and forgive my english for I'm not native speaker.
I just checked and looks like I should be entitled to be in the Bitcoin dev list as I'm actively developping pywallet again for more than 2 months. I'm not sure I'd receive anything from that though with all the writing shares.
That's not a problem though as it's Unthinkingbit's coin and it's normal he chooses the priority. But whatever the priority is (writing/developping/other), I'd just like it to be stated clearly