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.
In terms of economic activity neither is more important. Those writers will have to spend their Devcoins or Bitcoins on something which improves the economy for everyone including developers. The problems with Devcoin are with the math behind it. There is infinitely many Devcoins but finite shares and a decreasing share value over time. It's broken by math and anyone can see it. If you're writing and over time the worth keeps doing down faster this would be fine if it was very slow and there were thousands or millions of articles on Devtome but right now there are maybe hundreds to a few thousand articles on Devtome but the pay is decreasing way too fast.
Basically you need both millions of articles on Devtome (writing is very important because eventually this kind of writing will fund journalism and world class literature which is just as important as programming).
But it should not be at the expense of photographers, musicians, programmers, etc. Everyone should be able to make plenty of shares and plenty of Bitcoins worth for their time or the system is broken by design. The reason it's broken by the design is the people who design it claim when too many people write that people will stop writing, as if they thought only people from the same middle class western background as them would write, and the same with programmers, eventually you'll have to compete with Chinese and Indian programmers and you'll not be able to compete.
The flaw with Devcoin is because there is infinitely many it's so inflationary that you cannot save your Devcoins from work you did months ago so that you can be competitive with workers 10 months from now, but instead 10 months from now you'll have to work even harder for even less coins? That is basically all that is wrong with the fiat currencies and it's adopted into Devcoin.
Devcoin is going to have to be replaced by something better, there is no alternative that I can see.
It's time for a hard fork of Devcoin.