I never thought it was you.  We have no way of knowing.  But it's a point worth making that if you had sold off 60 million DVCs or any amount for that matter for the purpose of starting a viable business that ultimately improves the value of Devcoin, then I would say it was a good move.  In that case getting angry about the inevitable drop in DVC price that would have resulted would be taking a very shortsighted view.

Until there actually is a viable DVC economy, where goods and services can be obtained for DVC, it's going to take selling off DVC in order to build the components of such an economy.  So... in that sense when it comes to the price of DVC on the exchange, things have to get worse before they can get better.

Welcome shakezula and smeagol!

I'm just saying you might as well cash in by publishing too, and it can be about how you would change the Devtome earnings, but you won't get paid until you actually invoice it on the Devtome

As for the 80 shares per writer, my rather unscientific observations have been that a writer usually gets 80 shares in a round once, maybe twice, and then they're done.  It is very difficult to consistently write that much original content in one month, so once you run out of already written stuff, you're not going to be able to keep that up.  The NaNoWriMo people aim to write 50,000 words of a novel during the month of November and that is a very intense time for them.  I bet they don't write much in December!  More realistically, a writer can write 20 to 30 shares worth per round--that's about how much I'm averaging.  It's plenty intense but still allows for the day job and other duties to be met, and it actually pays out rather well, even with other writers putting in 80 shares from time to time.  If the Devtome people decided to cap earnings at 40 shares starting in round 29, the vast majority of the writers wouldn't even notice.

It's truly pointless to get into arguments about whose writing is worth more because it all really depends on who's buying.  I do not understand technical computer books so Windows for Dummies would definitely be more valuable to me, just to use an example.  

In the case of our contributions to the Devtome, the Devtome is buying.  In this case, their worth is what the Devtome is paying for them.  End of story.

MarkM, this opportunity is open to you too.  You write very well, though I can tell you are passionate about coding.  So why not write up a few articles each month--you could even use material from your posts here.  Then you would be benefiting from the system as it's set up and you could use your writing income to help you do what you really love which is coding.  A lot of people do that--work at something they maybe don't like as much but are good at so they can invest in their passion.  There's nothing stopping you from taking the Devtome writer opportunity and running with it.

So the bounties are to support open sourced projects where it might be harder to make it profitable from it being proprietary.  That makes sense.

Because they are unconditional, the Devtome earnings could be used to start regular businesses that take payment in Devcoins.  There's no bounty tied to it, so therefore no strings on what kind of business you can start and how you run it and whether or not you share your secrets.  But of course you can't force writers to turn their earnings in that direction.  I've just noticed that some are, and I think the motivation is that it would do the Devcoin some good and it also has the potential to make them a profit.  The earnings provide a ready source of seed capital if you write enough.

Is writing for the Devtome a great opportunity?  Absolutely.  That's why I jumped on it.  Am I benefiting from it?  Yes.  It's not "gaming the system" to take advantage of a great opportunity, and I'm glad Weisoq pointed that out.

I don't understand the resentment against paying authors as it was explained when we signed up.  Why are we being called mercenaries just because we won't do it for free?  While I'm happy to write on my own blogs when I feel so inclined, I'm not going to take the time to publish it on another site without some benefit to me.  Why?  Because I have a family to support and bills to pay.  Only the independently wealthy can work for free without sacrificing something.  As for saying that it's not working if you republish content from your own blog, that's not so simple.  My writing for the Devtome actually caused me to start a blog, and it's being able to get paid by the Devtome which gives me the motivation to keep it up and republish the content on the Devtome.  So... which came first?  The licensing agreement allows me to both publish the content on the Devtome and use it on my own sites, so I do.  These days usually I publish to my blog and to the Devtome within the same ten minutes.  It's fresh content published in two places (and in many cases the *other* place carries a link to the Devtome).

If the Devtome changes in a major way because it's determined that it's not beneficial to the project and vision of Devcoin to continue as it is, that is totally fine by me.  The Devtome is the paying client and as such has the right to make whatever decision seems right to it.  So I would say if the current set up is not working, then by all means, let the Devtome decision makers come up with a better set up.  But in the mean time, the authors who are making the very rational choice of jumping on what's to us an amazing opportunity, are getting insulted, called fat cats and mercenaries, and all we've done was see an opportunity and run with it.  I'm not personally offended or anything; it's just weird taking this kind of heat for this, when it's not like it's up to us to change it or anything.  If I'm not being paid generation shares for writing someone else will be, so why shouldn't it be me?

Edit:  MarkM and others who work hard coding, some of you have written quite a lot on this thread in the past day or so.  Why not repurpose your thoughts into an article?  You probably could mostly copy/paste and put in some transition paragraphs and you'd have a pretty decent article that's worth at least one share.  You've already written the bulk of it for free.  Why not take that extra little step to get something out of it?  Then that could supplement your coding income.  That's what I'd do if I were in your shoes.

My understanding about bounties is that they are for specific projects that the Devcoin project people want done, and that's great.  And I know that if you have a project idea you can ask for a bounty and your request is considered.  In fact, sometimes bounties just fall into your lap because you did come up with a cool idea or little project and it was noticed...

However... that's not stopping people who have generated shares coming into their wallets from starting to think of things they can do on their own with funds that have already been earned.  In fact, you'll probably end up with more variety as people come up with stuff the bounty givers didn't themselves think about writing up a bounty for.

Oh wait, we're just the fat cats on the top of the heap keeping the little guys down   Stomp, stomp, stomp

All the business ideas that Fin and others have mentioned... to start them, people will probably have to sell some DVC to raise the funds if they are not using their own resources.  That's going to be true until those needed services such as web development/design, e-commerce setup (for those who aren't inclined to DIY) can be paid for using Devcoins.  Hopefully people will start offering such services for DVC, but for them to get started, they probably would have to sell a few to buy services they need that are not yet offered for DVC.  And they would probably have to sell some to pay themselves because no one's time is truly free.

I don't think there's any way around the need to sell some of the Devtome earnings at this time.  I also think it's disingenuous for people to accuse those who sell as merely dumping for selfish gain (and anyway, it's not like that's forbidden).  Sales on the exchange are anonymous.  You don't know why someone sold or what they're going to do with the proceeds unless they share about it here.

As for us writers being the fat cats...  That's awesome!  I've never ever been accused of being a fat cat at the top of the heap before, so I'm going to enjoy this moment  

But at this time pretty much anyone can be a writer, so it's not like it's some elite group or anything.  If you want to be a fat cat at the top of the heap, then just sign up as a writer and start writing.  And most importantly, keep writing.  The system favors writing?  Well, then write.

MarkM raises a good point about the absolute limit of 4000 per round and he suggests some ways around it which I'm sure the decision makers can consider.  Another possibility is that partial shares could be awarded.  So at some point when the number of writers (or the number of receiver lines) hits a certain number, everyone can start getting half-shares or fifth-shares and it would still work the same way.  You'd have a larger number to divide into like 8,000 or 20,000.  I personally am not worried about the unfairness from uneven divisibility because receiver lines are randomized.  If I write every round, some of the time I'll get "gypped" and some of the time I'll get extra, and over time it will all even out.  And even if it doesn't, I still have myself an awesome deal.

There's also merit to the idea of having groups of shares allocated to different parts of the Devcoin project, the Devtome being one of them.  I'm not necessarily advocating for it, but I wouldn't be against it if it seemed right for the overall direction of the project.

As I mentioned before I think there is a natural incentive to the authors to start thinking about what we can do to add value to Devcoin, if for no other reason than to keep this nice little cash cow flowing for us.  But this does take time, and you can't rush it by trying to add punitive "incentives" to get authors to hoard their DVCs.

And I do think that is happening already.  People are putting up online stores and coming up with other interesting business ideas and taking steps to bring those ideas to reality, and they're using their Devtome earnings to do so.

Even if in the beginning your mentality was to just get paid and not worry about the well being of Devcoins, well, after you get paid for a few rounds, you start to think, gee, it would sure be nice if this cash cow could last forever.  And you notice that what you can get for your DVC on the exchange isn't getting any better.  Then you start to think about what would need to be done to add value to this coin.  Then you start to think about what you might be able to do to help out...

But all that would get circumvented if any of those more coercive forms of motivation were put in place, such as the suggestion to not pay writers unless their wallets were already full (unless they held onto their coins and did nothing with them), or to not pay writers unless they also were great at SEO and brought in the page views (trust me, if I have to spend all my time making sure my Devtome articles get traffic, there goes any time/energy I might devote to doing something unique to help build the Devcoin economy).  More than likely I'd just quit contributing if it got to the point where there were good odds I'd be writing for free, and then why would I care what happens to Devcoin from that point on?

I've been involved for four rounds now.  The more I participate in this, the more I realize what a brilliant concept it is.  It's combining the best of rewarding people for things the general economy as it is now tends to not reward, but at the same time leveraging the value and power of freedom and some aspects of capitalism.  It is truly amazing.  And with every batch of new people coming in, the first thing they want to do is make it just like the general economy.  But that's OK too.  It's part of the process of figuring it out.  And for the most part, except for the gems of ideas that actually move the concept forward, most of it just floats on by...

The rewards for writing vs. rewards for promotion discussion comes up again and again on this thread.  A few things are worth noting:

1.  I believe there is already a system in place which will at least partially reward writers for overall popularity of their work, and will also partially penalize writers whose work is not popular.  I don't remember the details and I'm not sure if it was implemented already for round 27 or if it's still coming soon.  I also know that it's still being tweaked to truly work in a way that's compatible with the overall Devcoin project.  Could someone in the know please provide us with an update?

2.  There is nothing wrong with rewarding based on SEO efforts, page views, ad revenue, etc.  That's how it is on most of the Internet.  I believe that the Devtome has a different ultimate goal and that is why the Devtome compensates differently than what the rest of the Internet does.  Before recommending that the Devtome work like the rest of the Internet, it's worth figuring out what the overall philosophy is, in particular, why it's set up differently.

3.  The Devtome has article admins whose primary job is to read submitted articles and eliminate the truly worthless ones, and I know that they do this.  We all may have disagreements on the standards and we may think some articles which pass should be discarded.  That's bound to happen with anything subjective like writing.  I just want to make sure everyone, especially the new writers, understand that there are standards and there are admins who enforce them.  Related to that, if you see something that you are concerned about (a specific article, for example), it is OK to bring it to the attention of an article admin (or even post your concern on this thread), and your concern will be addressed.  It's happened before.

4.  As a writer, I adhere to the principle that the client or customer is always right.  In this case the Devtome is the client.  I joined as a writer because the parameters as they were advertised work for me.  If those parameters change it may no longer work for me, which is fine.  The Devtome has the right to change those parameters at any time.  So for example, if the Devtome decided they only want to accept content that is sci-fi fantasy, I would have a decision to make.  Either I quit and move on with no hard feelings, or I start writing sci-fi fantasy (something I've never done).  If you don't like the parameters, that is fine too, but it doesn't mean there's anything fundamentally wrong with them.  You can suggest improvements and so forth, but ultimately, all writers will be bound by what the paying client decides.  I mention this because what I believe is that a lot of these complaints boil down to "it doesn't work for me," or "it's not optimal for me," or "it's not fair that it works so well for these other people but not for me."  So you're an amazing Internet marketer and you don't want to compete with all those writers who just write and do nothing to promote their work.  Fine, maybe the Devtome isn't the best fit for you, or you need to deal with it.  But if you're a good or even decent writer but a terrible Internet marketer, then this is a dream come true--a lucky break.  That is what the Devtome has been for me--finally a lucky break.  Yes, I'm making the most of this opportunity.  I don't feel entitled to it and understand it could change in the future, but it's here now and I couldn't be happier.  Also, I've never contributed or gotten paid more than 40 shares in a round and it's still been great.  It's a bit annoying that others have to be so critical of those who are getting a lucky break here.  But then again, I've had my moments of jealousy when it was someone else's lucky break and not mine, so I understand.

5.  Given number 4, if the Devtome is your lucky break, then definitely make the most of the opportunity and give some serious consideration to spending your earnings in a way that will truly improve your life and that of others.  Think long term.  Think investment.  But again, there are no rules about that and you are free to spend your earnings however you like.  On the other hand, you start to think about the benefit of the Devcoin itself when it's become your golden goose, and I'm seeing that happen as people are starting to come up with solid ideas of how to grow the Devcoin from a novel crypto into a viable economy, and take solid steps in that direction.  I suspect most of this isn't even showing up on the thread as not everyone likes to share their ideas immediately.  It's going to take time, and a lot of DVCs will be sold to raise funds in the mean time, the value is probably going to drop more before it goes up again, but I think it will happen if it's allowed to happen naturally.

Actually, it rewards good marketing efforts, regardless of the quality of the content

No need for a poll.  Each donator would allocate which projects their funds went to.

You know, I think that idea has a lot of potential, actually.  I would expand it by having the ability to allocate your donation in a specific way, to a specific project.  Then everyone who is doing something to improve or promote the Devcoin project can essentially bid for our donation DVCs.  People who want to solicit those donations could go through a screening process, but then after that it's up to them to convince the rest of us writers that their project is worthy.

So... we would get to choose the donation percentage (it would get kicked off with each generation share), and we get to choose where it goes.

I'm not sure if this is redundant to the bounties or not (it doesn't necessarily have to be), but it would definitely spread out the ownership into the rest of the projects.  I'd definitely have to understand a project to be able to support it, so it would give incentive for people who are working on these very high level technical things to take the time to explain them in plain English to us non-technical people.

I'd almost be in favor of there being an automatic 1% mandatory donation.  Almost.  The reason I say "almost" is because I'm well aware I'm missing information.  And of course when it comes right down to it, I lean on the capitalist side (as opposed to forced sharing of wealth).  But I do think this would be worth pondering, even considering, and possibly modifying to work with the system.  Thoughts?

Yup, Khan Academy is a great site

Oh and not trying to pick on any particular person, though was hoping to break up a fight (or at least send it somewhere else).  But using the edit feature here is very helpful to others when you have a lot to say but don't think of it all at once.  A good policy for everyone to follow IMHO.  I use it a lot myself LOL.

Edit:  I have a couple things to add, and had better follow my own advice and not double post LOL.


It seems to me that any time there's a bump in the road with Devcoin or the Devtome, there's always someone making radical recommendations such as this one that would represent a major departure in the original way the Devcoin project (including how it's brought into circulation) was set up.  It makes me glad that UnthinkingBit (inventor--is that the right word?--of Devcoin) has a very cool head, carefully considers decisions he makes, especially ones which represent a significant change, and doesn't seem to be phased by much.  I think the principle of don't make a major decision during a crisis or don't turn your ship around in a storm is applicable here, even if the suggestion turns out to be a good one.  Also, in the long run, keeping things consistent is probably going to be the most important determining factor in the success of the project.  You certainly don't want to make people feel like there's no way to know what to expect from getting involved.

On another note, here's my advice for how to be successful as a Devtome writer.  I've done fairly well in all the rounds I've contributed to so far, and wish the best to all the new writers this round, many of whom I have signed up

http://devtome.com/doku.php?id=your_devtome_writing_success

Can you two please wrap it up?  Suddenly in the past few days the DVC thread takes longer to read.  Can we stay on topic please.  Thanks

Edit:  BTW, someone had to correct me on double posting at one point, because I didn't know either.  The bottom line is that when you've just posted something, but then think of something else to say, you hit the edit button on your post, add the word "Edit," then share your additional thought, just like I did.  Then people who read the thread once or twice a day only have less to wade through.

What if the reason the wallet is empty is because the author decided to invest the funds in some venture which might help the Devcoin cause?

Edit: Sorry--probably should have quoted.  I'm referring to the post where it's proposed that writers only get paid the amount they have in their wallets.

I agree the above post is very informative.  One question:  How can I link directly to my forum signature?

Edit:  I included the link to my forum profile.  Did I do the right thing?

Edit:  Another question:  I thought links could be to pages which link to any article, or does it have to be the specific "Earn Devcoins by writing" page?

Vlad, that's why you really need to write a bit every round--because every time you don't you wish you had.

If time is the issue, maybe schedule 15 minutes a day or an hour a week to write.  As long as you're consistent that time can be productive.

I know what happened during round 24 and it was my first one too, and yes it was frustrating to write so much for so little.  Part of the reason the shares got diluted is because some people wrote a whole bunch of junk content and unfortunately got paid for it.  Since then, however, a few good people joined the Devtome admin team and they take the time to review articles and filter out the trash.  Since round 25 they have done a phenomenal job, and the total share count per round has been substantially less, so each share has been worth more.  I mention this to let you know that this won't be an issue anymore.

Now, it's still possible that we'll gain a whole bunch of high quality writers all of a sudden and they all produce 80,000 words of high quality content.  Eventually that will probably happen.  However, there is no way to predict that from round to round.  I think in your case trying so hard to predict what each share will be worth by the end of the round and then determining if it's worth your while based on that prediction is what's causing you to in the end submit nothing and then get frustrated from realizing you should have.  I honestly think you'll be better off setting a reasonable goal of what you plan to submit this round--maybe it's ten shares, maybe it's twenty, it can be anything as long as it's doable--then meeting that goal, and in the end you'll be earning some amount of generated DVC.  It may or may not be as much as you'd hoped (more than likely it will be less, I've found no matter how well I do I always hoped to do better LOL), but it won't be zero, and that's the upside.

Round 28 just got started.  What are you going to publish today?  What are you going to publish this week?  Just do it.  You'll be glad you did

It was not on any website I visited and I don't believe it was appropriate for this forum.  Thanks for understanding.

That was WAY too much information!