'One sided trade flow'. I think too much talk and incentive structure is about earning/getting dvc. That results in a focus on how/why/where to sell. This undermines the entire point of devcoin, which is to fund open source work, and therefore needs as much if not more focus on support, buying and adding value.
I don't disagree with you, but my impression of the whole devtome thing was to get more people involved, as a basis to better support open source development with the rest of devcoin. I thought the problem was that progress was just too slow / ineffective, and other things (like attracting commissioned work) was the next approach.
I don't know what the metrics of devtome were, but say if only one out of every 1000 people are actually interested in having a long term relationship with the devcoin project, as a supporter/investor, what's the best way to find them?
Sidhujag mentioned in his post that the devcoin project started becoming an umbrella for profitable open source developments. I actually think that's a far better idea than to rely on donations entirely. It reminds me of China Pre and Post capitalist restoration.
Yea I think that was the original intent:
intent a) Donations to open source developers.. people can get paid for work that they wouldn't have otherwise, creates incentive to become an open source developer and thus un-commercialize the software sector
intent b) Support profitable developments that come out of this. So if you have some source code that is yours or you can distribute and others can copy at will, as long as it is still open source then if you create a business out of this, Devcoin will support you. I think what I'd like to see is profitable businesses that Devcoin supports, however that help devcoin in some way such as accepting devcoin or if it is a Devcoin funded project then provide all profits directly to Devcoin... as more projects come along and compete for scarce devcoins for funding, they start to become more valuable and higher profits as a result if they already aren't profitable from the getgo.
Devtome was supposed to start getting small amounts of shares to attract some quality writers that would ge tnothing otherwise, providing an avenue to do what they love, aswell as providing quality reading material, and at the same time drive ad revenue up which I think was supposed to be the source of income for writers. So as revenue rises, more writers come in, more attention to devcoin itself. At some point if there was so much revenue that we put a cap on writing profit then we would use the rest to buy devcoins at market or something like that. However what we ended up morphing into was solely a share based system where the investors buying devcoins are the only ones to basically support or provide income to writers... and there is no notion that I see of ad revenue, or it being a factor at all. If there is no incentive for it to go up, then it won't. If we see some numbers like word count is 2x from last 3 months and ad revenue is 1.5x for last 3 months and we track these metrics then we can get a timeline and extrapolate how much money we need to support a profitable writing site, and then decide we keep with it or should we use that thousand or two thousand shares to maybe fund a different model.