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Image of How valME works

You post stuff. People upvote it. You make money. It's very simple. It's reddit, but with cats that make you money. We call it monetary applause. Where did we get the idea? Here.

How many social networks and blogs do you post to daily? reddit? G+? Facebook? Twitter? Forums? We're betting you post quite a bit. Articles. Videos. Comments. Memes. Songs. Playlists. Images. Artwork. News. Links. And do you earn any money from it? Exactly.

At valME, you do. valME is about helping you earn money doing the same activities you already do for fun. It's about upvotes that are worth money. It's karma, but improved. Super karma.

Yes, there are transaction costs. But they are so minuscule you won't even notice. If you post an article (2 cents) and you get two upvotes, you just broke even. It's all profit after that. If you post a comment (1 cent) and you get only one upvote, ditto. Now extrapolate: post a great video of your band and get 1,002 upvotes? You just made $10. Post a great piece of art you just painted and get 1,502 upvotes? You just made $15. You get the idea. And if people really like your content, they can even tip you more. Bonus.

Run a forum? How much money do you make from advertising? Move your forum here. We have much of the same functionality (and then some) as your forum software. And we'll give you a cut of the transaction costs. (We're still working out the final numbers but, the more active your users, the more you'll make. We know you'll be happy.)

What else can you do here besides make money from great content? Customize your community with some of our unique moderation features (some that even reddit doesn't have) like:

  • Create your own karma types, choosing which ones to display, and customizing the icons for up and down voting
  • Display your own quotes at the top of your community pages
  • Customize your .css and community images
  • Run honor contests to reward your community for award-winning posts and comments (or even moderators for keeping your community spam-free)
  • View community analytics
  • Restrict your community to allow only links to specific domains
  • Assign permissions to users for posting and viewing content
  • Offer flair to your community members, or let them choose their own
  • Join communities together or split them apart
  • Customize the algorithm that determines which content makes it to your front page
  • Run projects that encourage users to action

One of the primary purposes at valME is to allow you to reward others directly for bringing you value. Or, said another way, we want to help you profit when you bring value to others. Of course, you can read what another user posts, gain value from it, and not give him or her anything in return. But, if the urge strikes you, we give you the opportunity to upvote that user's content. By upvoting, you transfer one karma to the author. And, if the urge presents itself, you can even tip that user additional karma for the value you received.

Granted, you're only receiving a penny when someone upvotes your content. But those pennies can add up (and, potentially, bring you more than you were earning from click-through advertising on your blog). Think of all the posts you've seen on other social networking sites, and the thousands of upvotes some have received. If upvotes were pennies, those users would directly get the benefits of their efforts. What happens instead? They get to feel good, while the social networking sites get all the money from the advertisers. Wouldn't it be better if the users, themselves, got that money? After all, it was their content that brought you value.

Imagine you're a programmer. For us coding geeks, sites like Stack Overflow are a lifeline to getting work done. In fact, we're reasonably convinced that when Stack Overflow goes down, all programming around the world just stops. (Well, at least that's the excuse we use.) Yet, when we read an answer from someone who has fixed that (Javascript) problem we've spent hours debugging, we want to kiss that person's feet with the appropriate Wayne's World salute. It's times like those when a thank you and a (worthless) upvote just don't seem enough. That person saved us from hours of wasted effort and aggravation. That geek deserves more.

Think of it this way: all sorts of people work round-the-clock at charities like the American Cancer Society to find a cure and provide support to those who are sick (and their families). Many give them money; yet you can't buy anything from the ACS. Then why do people give them money? Quite obviously, because donors value what the ACS is doing. Donors want to support those activities and motivate others to do so. valME provides those same opportunities - to support the activities of those you value.

Earnings are paid out in bitcoins, but you can easily convert them to an alternate currency. It costs you nothing to register and try it. Free community. Free karma. Earn money for doing exactly what you already do. What are you waiting for?


Written by permalink    plaintext

Recently, I posted an open letter to Steve Huffman, reddit's new CEO, with an offer to exchange values. The tl/dr for why you should consider valME.io:

Benefits to users/content creators

  • OPs earn money for their content (karma is redeemed for Bitcoin).
  • Posts and comments have full long-form HTML support.
  • All content banned by mods is transparent (including reason) and remains visible in the graveyard community (both posts and comments).
  • All voting is transparent. We don't use vote fuzzing because we handle spam and vote brigades much differently.
  • You can create multiple levels of sub-communities with content that rolls up, making it much easier to start competing communities where your content is seen by non-subscribers.
  • Abandoned communities can be restarted by anyone.
  • No shadowbans.
  • There is a cost to downvote and flag which curtails trolls and downvote brigades.
  • Although there's a cost, users who help mods flag posts and comments earn karma rewards/bounties and can get their costs reimbursed.

Benefits to mods

  • valME.io values both free expression and free association and won't play the slippery slope game of selective or arbitrary ban discrimination. Communities will never be banned. Content and users will only be removed when against our ToS (i.e., illegal, threatening, violates an individual's privacy, interferes with website operations).
  • While mods can have different levels with different permissions, all communities have a single owner who has final decision-making authority and accountability.
  • Mods can customize the karma types applicable to their communities and can have multiple karma types per post/comment (which allows you to understand things like which user is contributing the most "intelligent" content from the "funniest" content, which communities have the most "agreeable" or "helpful" content, etc.).
  • Mods can create contests with karma rewards to encourage community building and which are based on custom-definable algorithms (e.g., number of posts, comments, upvotes, etc. within/across communities; minimum participation requirements; multiple award levels).
  • In addition to customizable HTML and css (which can make the community look completely different from the base template), community owners can have their own custom domain names with SSL. (A mod could use css customizations to remove all voting or just downvotes, but doing so would make some benefits useless.)
  • While valME.io doesn't earn any money from advertising to avoid conflicts of interest, sponsor account mods can earn 100% of the revenue from their own advertising (via Javascript).
  • Mods can ban users or domains for customizable timeframes or can limit the number of posts/comments allowed.
  • Mods can customize the algorithm used to get to their front pages (e.g., quantity of votes by karma type, quantity of views, user age, quantity of comments, post age, number of flags with which a user is shamed) or they can use reddit's standard algorithm. (valME's general front page selection criteria uses its own customized algorithm.)
  • Piwik Analytics is integrated, making detailed statistics available to mods. Mods can use this information (from users who don't block tracking) to do things like reward websites that help market content.
Written by permalink    plaintext

This is a good summary and a much quicker read than the open letter. wink You also could have mentioned:

  • you have tags!
  • you do activity feeds and RSS better because you show all activity and content
  • you can get email notifications
  • you can do pop-up pictures
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We’re not entirely sure it’s appropriate to call this the Frequently Asked Questions area as, candidly, we don’t keep track of how often these questions get asked. Consider this community as a place where we post answers to what we anticipate your questions will be. But, if our crystal ball is malfunctioning, feel free to post your question in /GettingStarted/Help. If we turn your question into an FAQ, we’ll credit you back the karma to post it. It’s the least we can do. We also welcome suggestions at /GettingStarted/SuggestionBox.

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