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Nornagest comments on Open thread, Jan. 26 - Feb. 1, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Snowdrift.coop is essentially trying to solve the same problem in a different way. Instead of changing the product price as more units are sold, they ask folks to finance its fixed component directly, using a game-theoretic mechanism that increases total contributions superlinearly as more people choose to contribute. (This boosts the effectiveness of any single user's contributions through a "matching" effect). However, there is no distinction between "earlier" vs. "later" contributors; they're all treated the same. The underlying goal is to generalize the successful assurance-contract mechanism to goods and services that do not have a well-defined 'threshold' of feasibility, especially services that must be funded continuously over time.
It's an interesting idea but I'm not sure it has the psychology behind crowdfunding right. It seems to be constructed to minimize the risk donors carry in the event of a failed campaign, and to maximize the perceived leverage of small donations; but it does that at the expense of bragging rights and fine-grained control, which might make a lot of donors leery. I think you could probably tweak it to solve those problems, though.
It also does nothing at all to solve the accountability issues of traditional crowdfunding, but that's a hard problem. I wouldn't even mention it if they hadn't brought it up in the introduction.
(Also, that's some ugly-ass web design. I get that they're trying to go for the XKCD aesthetic, but it's... really not working.)
Yes, crowdfunding is mostly based on trust, not accountability. But a service that's funded continuously over time (the Snowdrift.coop model) ought to be inherently more accountable than a single campaign/project.
Yeah, it's more accountable than Kickstarter funding, but not more accountable than Patreon funding.
I think it's been constructed to maximize democracy -- the crowdthink determines the flow of money. I can't tell if the author considers the inevitable snowballing to be a feature or a misfeature (or even realizes it will happen).