Hey, I'm JS but I figured it would be a good idea to share my experience on Deviantart with commission based models for creative writing.
I have specific experience in a medium where writing based on commissions and not a user's individual ideas and drive come into play, and I felt it relevant to voice that here. To clarify, we ARE NOT a commission based system, and I don't want to see us go down that path, but donation links anywhere but author pages themselves opens up the door for us to go down that path, which is why I want to share. I would rather not see donation links at all but the passage of this vote has effectively negated avoiding that, and I'm afraid the site may be worse for it.
Deviantart is a huge platform, with tens of thousands of artists, and functions based on a views system, rather than what we have here which is based on qualitative votes. As a result, your DA presence is advertising for whatever commission work you can leverage to the frequent viewers of the platform. The more works you have, the higher your view counts tend to be, and the larger number of watchers you tend to accumulate. Notice, this is a stark difference from what we have here, where it is the quality of your works that get you noticed, and not your sheer ability to pump out articles in as rapid a period of time regardless of overall quality. The net result of this system invokes neglecting of quality in favor of mass produced commission articles.
You're going to ask me why my point above is relevant. Here is why. Something I don't think people have considered yet for this site is: How is this going to affect upvotes? People that donate to those that have links are, in some manner, buying favor from the donation requester. That is a problem, a very very big problem, and one we don't have a system or capability of dealing with at all. The person donated to may feel obligated in some form or another to upvote other users works, regardless of quality. The counterargument to this will be "this won't effect the integrity of the writers" but it most certainly will, if it happens in politics, and it does all the time, it will happen here. We are all human, and money muddies the waters.
I'm worried, very worried, that people are either neglecting, or ignoring the impact that introducing regular monetary exchange into the site will have. Outside of explicit statement, its almost impossible as is to determine malicious upvoting, and this would almost certainly invoke waves of malicious upvoting, because author A donated to author B. I don't think people quite grasp just how big a cultural shift this will be. Its about far more than writers getting to make money, its about how this will impact a unique collaborative community, and the only impact I can really see is a fast track downhill and I don't want to see that at all.
