I am hearing some very interesting points about how money could be a poor motivator or even a deterrent (it sounds like some people are saying, because it makes them evaluate the time they are spending on the question and therefore how much their time is worth)?
However in creating this I imagined a poor college kid that was stoked to get a few dollars helping another kid solve his homework.. We will see if that actually happens though..
Caching issue.. Just disabled caching.. Site might get overloaded again now due to HN traffic but im bringing up another large instance as I type this.. (facepalm) should have prepared..
That's a short timeline and a perverse incentive. One of the clever parts of SO bounties is that they're taken from you whether you award them or not, so the incentive is to be a nice person and do so. Here the incentive is to never award and hope you get it back.
I understand you don't want people potentially throwing away money - its a problem where you need a high volume of answerers for the no-refund model to work. Just something to think about.
I would get annoyed when I could not get anyone to answer my questions on sites like Stack Overflow so I created this site, https://qabounty.com/. It is basically your standard QA site but you attach a USD $$ bounty to questions. For example I have a question up at:
The best answer for that question will award that user 3 coins (which can be withdrawn for about $3). I plan on adding my own questions of the day for a while, basically giving money away for a while hoping people use it for their own questions eventually. If you want to make a quick $3 though and check out my idea please go to the site and try to answer the question!
Let me know what you think! I am also looking for a designer as well after I see if people like the idea.. I used Stripe's new withdraw to debit card feature so you don't have to use bank account info to withdraw your "bounty" (money you get for answering questions)... Please give me some feedback on the site/idea!
I'm not quite sure the financial incentives really align for anyone who's time is worth anything (e.g. doesn't live in a third world country). For instance, even at rather modest rate, your $3 buys about 8 minutes of my time, which isn't going to get much of an answer.
That's right. Joel Spolsky (co-founder of StackOverflow) and others said long ago that offering people cash incentives can work against you. Some people will do quality work for free if they receive a non-monetary incentive like recognition. But when you reduce it to dollars, they can easily do the math and decide it's not worth helping you.
The above-linked question about databases is a great example: it basically asks the reader to solve a fairly tricky database design/administration problem for the princely sum of US $3. And this is a question posted by the site's creator?
Almost no one will be your part-time DBA for $3. And anyone who will should be treated with suspicion.
If you want to pay me money to solve your IT problems, great, let's talk about that, but it's going to be more expensive than an ice cream cone.
I put this up too soon.. so I am trying to deal with scaling and some other issues right now but to briefly try to answer those questions/points..
The point is not to get anyone to be your "part time DBA" that was just some example question I came up with, hopefully to spark some kind of debate or just usage of the site. I am basically just giving someone $3 for their 2 cents on a scaling question. I think asking for someones opinion on scaling is a little different then asking them to be your part-time DBA.
About the financial incentives, the creator of the question can set the "Bounty" for whatever price they want. And if it is not worth someone's time to answer the question for that price then they can just ignore it right?
Really I am just trying to create an environment where people can offer "something" for help if they are not getting it elsewhere. It is not meant to be a source of employment but just a nice reward for someone willing to lend their time and knowledge.
I have a hand full of friends still in college who would pay a few dollars someone to walk them through a math proofs problem for example..
I think that what people are trying to say is that if you do something for free, you don't really think about the time going into the answer or what kind of "service" you're providing the original commenter.
But once you incentivize it with money, you start thinking:
1. Hmm, how much am I making per hour here? How does that compare to my normal job?
2. Man, X dollars is kind of low. Do I really want to go find links and write a lot of stuff for just X?
3. I wrote a lot for Y dollars before, but this guy has a more difficult question for only X... guess I'll skip it.
4. This guy's question is something I can answer as a person who does Job Y, but if I'm doing Job Y for him, I want way more than X dollars!
> The point is not to get anyone to be your "part time DBA" that was just some example question I came up with, hopefully to spark some kind of debate or just usage of the site. I am basically just giving someone $3 for their 2 cents on a scaling question. I think asking for someones opinion on scaling is a little different then asking them to be your part-time DBA.
I have ~13 years of experience. I would rather answer someone's question for free on Stackoverflow or on a Reddit subreddit than get paid.
Networking/Repuation > Beer Money.
Please don't let this take the wind out of your sales, it may work, but I'd rather give my knowledge away for free in the right forum vs a couple of bucks.
There are 2 problems with your comment. First, I live in a 3rd world country and my time is worth something, as is my knowledge. That unnecessarily disparaging comment aside, it's quite possible there are plenty of people who have useful knowledge and whose time isn't worth all that much to them. Whether or not there's enough of them, or enough interest from them or potential buyers, are separate questions.
Also note that currently DataChannels do not support reliable transfer and have a small MTU, so sending enormous files does not yet work. With PeerJS you can send smaller files, but larger ones will take an unreasonable amount of time.
There is a hack to get around this (in Chrome) by increasing the SDP channels transfer rate (I think), still doesn't solve the MTU/reliable issue though. I originally found it via ShareFest - https://github.com/Peer5/ShareFest/issues/10 & have it integrated (in library form) here - https://github.com/erbbysam/webRTC-data.io
I haven't tested this yet on Chrome Stable though.
It is currently enabled in nightly (Fx22) and Aurora (fx21). No promises it won't get turned off in Fx21 before ship but that appears to be the current target release.
I always thought it would be cool to do distributed cache in browsers with this technology. It would be like an organic CDN, automatically making the internet faster.
I was surprised Bittorent was working on a plugin for the browsers, instead of using this. Same for their live streaming tech. It would be much better if you didn't need extra software/plugins to install to use it.
After working for Bittorrent (I recently left for job that fit me a little better) on the Live team for almost two years (more so on all the software supporting the actual core protocol itself which Bram himself works on mostly..) it is awesome to see Live finally being released to the public. I cannot wait to see how the public will use it (I am sure anyone with an imagination can think of a thousand ways a P2P Live streaming protocol could be useful and powerful..). It will be interesting to see how usable people find it and if they end up adopting it or sticking with the current RTMP server client style architecture.
One thing I always found interesting while working on Live is that although in some ways it really seems like Live Video streaming is more or less an undeveloped field there is actually already a super successful P2P live video streaming implementation called PPLive that is BIG in China ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PPLive ).
Another interesting thing to check out if this Live Video streaming stuff interests you is that some guys proposed a Live Video streaming protocol VERY similar to Live's sometime recently:
Just compare the BitTorrent Live Protocol and this proposal..
One interesting thing that Brams implementation does is actually speed up and slow down the playback of traffic depending on the latency and whether or not Live figures you need to buffer more or can afford to have less of a delay/buffer. Talk to Bram and you'll quickly figure out he is obsessed with low latency..
This ends up being funny in implementation too, as you will notice when watching a stream that the playback will speed and slowdown while you watch it...
This is detailed in the patent but I did not see anything similar in the ppsp protocol..
> Live Video streaming is more or less an undeveloped field there is actually already a super successful P2P live video streaming implementation called PPLive that is BIG in China
Indeed, so the situation is now for 'future of TV':
- 1+ million of users of proven technology (PPLive)
- patented technology after 5 years of dev work released (Bittorrent)
- Open Source reference implementation of open upcoming IETF Internet standard (PPSP)
> One interesting thing that Brams implementation does is actually speed up and slow down the playback of traffic depending on the latency
> This is detailed in the patent but I did not see anything similar in the ppsp protocol..
Why link the network with the codec? From an architecture viewpoint I would consider this a 'layering violation'.
For many years VLC has support for dynamic playback speed:
http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?t=50581
Why is live streaming not more popular? In my opinion due to lack of quality. If we put the average upload capacity of Internet users at 800 kbps, that is the maximum donation you get. User donations limit the bitrate and quality of the live stream. Video quality at 800 kbps is unacceptable on HD laptop displays and 1080p televisions. As Prof. Keith Ross wrote many years ago: we need upload-view decoupling (http://cis.poly.edu/~ross/papers/VUDSystemMini.pdf). For HD quality live streaming with P2P, users need to donate also bandwidth when not watching. Unfortunately, going beyond T4T is an open scientific problem.
>For HD quality live streaming with P2P, users need to donate also bandwidth when not watching.
How is that compatible with being live? To supply bandwidth for a live stream you would have to be downloading it simultaneously with uploading it, so if that node is not watching the video then it would be more efficient to have the node it's receiving from and sending to just connect directly.
I suppose if some subset of nodes can upload at a rate faster than the bitrate then you can gain some efficiency by consuming all of their available bandwidth, but unless those nodes have several times more upload bandwidth than the stream bitrate, that would tend to be pretty inefficient.
It seems like the better solution is just to increase the upload capacity for the average peer -- either through political pressure on the telcos to expand capacity, or through market pressure by just enforcing T4T and then offering both high and low quality streams but only offering high quality streams to the users with sufficient upload capacity to keep up with them, which would spur those who can to subscribe to a more expensive internet package with greater upload capacity.
>Unfortunately, going beyond T4T is an open scientific problem.
It seems like something bitcoin-like could work pretty well: Make it so that to get a download credit you either do some serious computation that requires a nontrivial amount of computing resources, or you upload to someone who has credits, and then they lose them and you get them. Which is basically T4T with accounting, except that it scales better because you can adapt to shortages and surpluses of credits by adjusting the amount of computing resources necessary to generate new credits.
It also solves the T4T bootstrap problem. Peers that newly join the network, or who had credits but spent them on something nobody else wants and so can't earn any upload credits because there is no one to download what they have, can crunch for credits instead of uploading and get back into the network.
Any reason you can think of why that wouldn't work?
Bitcoin pretty much requires that everyone in the network be aware of all the transactions, to make sure no one can double-spend. I guess the overhead for using a broadcasted transaction for every T4T iteration would be quite large, but maybe that could work. An interesting thought anyway, thanks for bringing this up.
I actually was just trying to provide some context and show that there are already some well developed P2P live video streaming solutions around.
I am not trying to say BitTorrent Live is proven or correct in anyway.
By saying that Live does that funny playback thing and PPSP dosen't I was not trying to say that I think it is correct or that that particular feature belongs in the network protocol at all. Just trying to point out a feature that I thought was interesting and unique to Bram's implementation.
PPSP and LibSwift both look like amazing, well developed and thought through projects made by very talented individuals. It blows me away how the ppsp protocol really takes everything into account (huge fan of the NAT traversal section in that draft..)
However in creating this I imagined a poor college kid that was stoked to get a few dollars helping another kid solve his homework.. We will see if that actually happens though..