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Bounty Experiment Post-Mortem by struguri
It would appear the poor wording of the previous journal left a sour taste in the mouths of a lot of artists. The worst tastes among them were the feelings that we were asking for artistic bribes as a means of advancing the development of the site, the implication of which was that simply working on the site itself was not enough for the developers to continue doing what they want to do. This was not the intended purpose of the bounty experiment, and for having that communicated, I'm quite sorry. The bounty experiment was not intended as some sort of "free art" scam, but rather, a communal effort to encourage direction.
The purpose of the bounty experiment was multi-faceted:
- Allow artists to feel involved in the direction of the site.
- Allow developers to draw greater motivation from issues deemed high-priority by the community as a whole, which can have priorities independent of what the developers feel should be prioritized.
- Create an incentive system by which what the community desires will naturally take priority from the inter-connectivity of the two groups.
This was not some sort of scheme to have the developers work on things that need to be done-- far from it, in fact. The developers are currently working away at the issues related to the site regardless of there being no incentive system currently in place. Understand, however, that the developers have a very different viewpoint of the code, and as a result, they see different priorities than what users see. The bounty experiment was intended to not only make it more clear what the high-priority issues of the day were in the eyes of the users, but additionally, to incentivize the developers to do what the users want.
Again, I'd like to apologize to the artists who felt like this was some sort of grand scheme to pull "free art" from them. I personally saw this as an exchange of creative time (i.e., artistic creativity in exchange for prioritized logical creativity), and apparently I didn't communicate that properly.
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That's very flattering. I'll share this with everyone. :)
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haha I'm really glad ;w; i'm kinda jaded from the usual "we've read your concerns, and we've decided to say fuck you to your concerns" approach to PR I've experienced, so this is really a breath of fresh air.
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It's an unfortunate underlying theme in a lot of community cultures, that feeling of arrogance that you know better than the collective community because you have amassed power. I'm gonna be a total dingus here, but frankly, it's really hard to pass this up: you can't spell "Weasyl" without "we." And that's ultimately what we try to enforce at the end of the day. If we didn't take the concerns of our users seriously-- even when we feel it's a misconception-- then we really wouldn't be much of a community, would we? :)
It really makes me happy that even when we fuck up (even though the royal we isn't really applicable here-- I fucked up), people are willing to say "yeah, you fucked up, and here's how you fucked up, but you know you fucked up, so don't fuck up again, okay?" So thanks for your support. :)
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I... sort of expected that.
Glad you guys are listening to complaints and taking them seriously; even if you did something the community disliked, listening and correcting yourselves really quickly is awesome. Making me feel better about relocating here!-
Thank you for participating nonetheless! We may try and bring it back in a different form. A lot of artists seem mixed on the idea-- on the positive side, seeing it as a great way to incentivize development; while on the negative side, potentially reinforcing a lot of the concepts of entitlements so many artists feel justifiably incensed by.
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In the future, you might want to avoid asking artists to commit a finite, unrenewable, and ultimately precious resource (their time) towards any sort of art exchange program that doesn’t directly and visibly benefit said artists.
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Having issues that the collective artists of the community want prioritized doesn't directly and visibly benefit the artists? That was the whole goal, really. In exchange for their time and effort-- if they so wished to offer it-- an issue of their desire would gather higher priority by visibility of what the artists desire. How does this not benefit the artists?
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Oh, it does benefit them in essence, but how do they know when the issue will end up fixed — and how do they know if having the issue fixed will ultimately impact their overall experience with Weasyl? Changes like codefixes can look invisible to people who don’t follow every little issue, artists included. Asking artists to give their time to a system that might not have any tangible benefit for the artist themselves seems a bit suspicious.
At the very least, you would’ve done better to think about how this would look for Weasyl, especially after all the accusations of artist favoritism/nepotism lobbed towards FA since...well, the past few years, really. Maybe I'm just a little cranky and shortsighted tonight, so I might be viewing this whole situation in a poor light/from the wrong perspective, but this whole thing reeks of trying to scam art from the community.
It ain’t a good look for Weasyl.
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Oh sure, this essentially speaks to the poor wording of the original journal. From reading your comments, though, it looks like because there was no demonstration of accountability in the journal-- for example, when the bounty contract was expected to be executed-- a lot of these assumptions were made as to what the intent behind it was. It's very understandable, and frankly, I feel quite bad for not only not having the foresight to realize how the experiment was construed, but additionally not addressing these potential assumptions more clear and coherently.
In general, though, I think many of us are cranky and irritated at the fuck-you-got-mine stereotypes that furries cull, like your mentioning of nepotism in the ranks of furry administrations. That's certainly at the heart of this situation. While I certainly didn't want to make artists feel like they were being offered yet another scam, the history of artists having to deal with absolutely psychotic nonsense like that should certainly be taken further into account. I got too impatient and didn't think clearly, and as a result, upset people.
So yeah, not only is it a bad look, but it's a bad feeling, too. I'm doing my best to clean my mess up. :)
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I do appreciate that you’ve taken the time to address the situation, admit you fucked up, apologize for fucking up, and say you’ll take steps to make sure to this sort of situation doesn’t happen in the future. You delivered a good apology, and I commend (and thank) you for doing that.
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Hey I totally got the service-for-service setup but I get why there was the other viewpoint.
You're doing great on trying to fix this and rework it! Is this something that went up on the forums for discussion at all? I'm curious!
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I do too! And that's why I feel so bad.
That was part of the problem. I got way too excited and frankly only discussed this with the directors before going to the floor with the idea. Perhaps it is something that should be taken to the forums, then! That would make this seem a lot less official of a declaration and feel a lot more communal.
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It would be a good topic for discussion!
You're good people (8
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Man, even if things were misconstrued, I thought you all handled this really well. I know Weasyl's still kind of a baby, but the fact you guys are willing to share your learning process with the community speaks volumes about your transparency. Mad respect for how you guys handle PR.