So, along with other folks in the community questioning things and thinking about design, I've continued to butt up against the complexity of explaining "shares" and what different pledge levels mean.
I don't think we should completely shy away from promoting new unfamiliar ideas, but we need to be able to be understandable. We need at least that if someone else takes the time to understand us well, they will generally be capable of explaining us effectively to others. And we need the interface to be understandable and clear. There are two reasons that I wanted the whole logarithmic matching of extra "shares". 1. To avoid the awkwardness in someone realizing that they count double if they open two separate accounts (better to count them as extra when they pledge extra from the one account, although that *has* to taper so things aren't volatile and susceptible to dramatic manipulation). 2. To encourage people to pledge extra (although that was confusing given that we want people to understand the matching idea and not pledge higher than actually makes sense). I found that the cleanest, clearest way to express pledging is: "I pledge 0.1¢ per patron" or "I pledge 1.4¢ per patron" etc. That brings to mind the image of thinking about all the other patrons and how you are connected to them and we are working together. We obviously show the total number of patrons. Now, if your actual donation is different than your pledge amount * number of patrons, that's confusing. Abstracting it away to "shares" just makes it even more opaque. It was a long process of pushing to keep the logarithm before I've come to accept that it makes sense to drop it. Without the extra matching, we have a simpler system, just a step or two removed from what people are already familiar with. It still will take some getting used to, but it will be *less* complexity in design, in coding, in presentation, etc. Everything will be more comfortable without it. There will be no logarithm to explain. What about the two issues mentioned above? Well, the one about duplicate accounts was speculative. We have other ways to discourage that, such as checking different financial information. Also, setting up an account is a bit too complex to easily duplicate. The worst case scenario of having some duplicate accounts isn't fatal. Maybe it's fine enough for someone to have a couple accounts which is almost like saying you sponsor your kid or neighbor and have an account in their name. As for encouraging larger donations within reason: giving more still gives extra to the project, and it still is part of the network effect here in that it provides additional matching to others. The message is: "pledge more so that you provide even stronger incentive for others to come help (because you give that much more when they join)." At any rate, we can always bring the logarithm back in. We're only prototyping at this point. Bringing it back after launch would be much harder but not impossible. I think, realistically, dropping it will make our launch more successful and improve all our design and make everything easier and simpler with little loss. Obviously, everyone is welcome to weigh in on this and share thoughts and concerns. Cheers, Aaron -- Aaron Wolf Snowdrift.coop <https://snowdrift.coop> _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.snowdrift.coop/mailman/listinfo/discuss
