

Coderwall (YC W12) launches Assembly - whatupdave
http://venturebeat.com/2013/11/01/assembly-will-crowdsource-development-of-your-awesome-startup-idea-then-pay-you-cash/

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morgante
Interesting idea, but I see 3 major problems:

1) Voting on each others work introduces perverse incentives when money is
involved. It also potentially undermines the very spirit of community which
Assembly is trying to capitalize on. Instead of having to judge each other a
couple times a year (in a traditional peer review), we're constantly judging
each other and thinking about how we'll be judged.

2) I think the 5% reward unfairly justifies the notion that ideas are worth
something. They're worth maybe 1% (at most) of most startup success. Success
comes from persistence, execution, and luck. Reaffirming the notion that "idea
people" are worth much doesn't help anyone.

3) Big, boring, important tasks will likely never get accomplished due to the
incentive structure. Every community member can only give _one_ point to a
contribution.
([https://assemblymade.com/help/profits#profits-2](https://assemblymade.com/help/profits#profits-2))
So that massive implementation you made that laid the groundwork for the
entire backend will only get 1 point from each other developer. (And the
number of people in the particular "community" qualified enough to understand
this kind of work isn't large enough for crowds to work well.) So instead
people are incentivized to do lots of quick & simple front-endy tasks.

All together, the politics of this really worry me.

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whatupdave
Great points, here's some of our thinking around this:

1) The voting is not a judgement of people's contributions, it's more the
community's valuation of a particular piece of work. The votes help prioritise
the importance of a task or feature which can then be claimed by anyone who
completes the work.

2) It's a tricky thing, what is the idea worth? 1%, 2%, 10%? 5% felt about
right to us but we'll definitely be reviewing this over time.

3) We're going to actively keep WIPs small where we can to help avoid this
problem. We also have a core team that helps guide the community towards a
shared vision. They can promote certain tasks so they attract more upvotes
which in turn makes them more enticing for people to complete.

Thanks for the feedback, we're expecting to do a lot of iterating and working
with the community to keep evolving the process.

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nwenzel
Love the idea. Has a "save the world" aspect to it as well. If all the great
ideas that currently go un-launched get pushed into existence sooner, we'll
all be better off.

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samvj
Love this idea! Great job Dave and team.

