How Incentives Work

Let’s talk about incentives and how anything thrives and dies by them. Let’s limit it to the anime community and use my life as the point of view. When I was in high school and was watching anime on television, I was limited to talking about them only with other kids around my age. I could only find four others in my village and only because they were already interested in them. What was keeping us together was a common hobby. What divided us was no longer being limited to the village.

After high school, each one of us found other groups of people and stopped being a best buddy with the other four because the incentive was gone. He didn’t have to tolerate our peculiarities anymore, since he had the option to choose amongst hundreds of others. The new incentive in the early 00s was going to anime meetings, which was basically a hundred people from all over Greece meeting in the co-capital once every six months. It was not only about meeting each other in the flesh, but also getting bootlegs of anime. There was a reward for participating.

Said reward stopped being lucrative once most of us got high speed internet and access to torrent sites. We didn’t have to travel in a different city so we can get more anime. We could simply download them from our house and talk about them over Facebook or Skype. A big part of what killed anime forums in the mid 00s and gave rise to social media such as Facebook was how you could talk about something in real time. Plus you were getting likes and pokes and cows for Farmville. They felt far more rewarding than whatever you were posting on a forum and hoped someone would reply.

And even that incentive faded in the late 00s once Youtube began allowing the monetization of its videos. Likes and pokes meant nothing next to getting actual money. This lasted for about 8 years until Youtube begun shutting down channels and the adpocalypse happened. The incentive of making money was gone, so people needed something else to keep going.

Many began using Patreon and Kickstarter so they could keep going or fund their next projects. Others tried to find an alternative to Youtube, with the most famous one being Vidme. Unfortunately, it failed to monetize its videos and people had no incentive to stick around, so it died out.

The newest incentive is crypto currencies. Since your audience cannot be paying for your lifestyle forever, sites like Steemit allow you to get paid by having people liking your videos. Yet even here you already see how many are losing their incentive to produce good content because of vote abuse.

And this brings us to what exactly ruins incentives. It’s not just another thing popping up to replace the previous one. The new thing must be feeling easier, with bigger rewards than what you had before. It’s only then when you start not liking what you are doing so far.
-I wasn’t thinking about how much assholes the five of us were back at the village until we began going to anime meetings. All of a sudden, I noticed those assholes were just there for using my stuff without having to pay for them. I was going to their homes just to play games I couldn’t own. We were tolerating each other for personal gain and it felt depressing, so we stopped meeting each other.
-I wasn’t thinking about how expensive it is to travel around the country for bootlegs, until I discovered torrent sites. It’s only then when I realized I was paying a lot of money for buying illegal bootlegs I could download for free. It felt like exploitation, so I stopped going to meetings.

• I wasn’t thinking about how pointless it was to get likes and Farmville cows on Facebook, until Youtube began monetization. Up until then I thought it was just a free way of staying in touch with your friends. Once money began rolling on Youtube, I thought Facebook was using tricks to keep people playing, so it can make money out of ads as well as pay to win tactics within the games.
  -I wasn’t thinking about the fairness of monetization, until they began taking down my videos for controversial content. Up until then I believed you are rewarded based on how popular is the thing you talk about. After the adpocalypse, everyone had his own Patreon and I began viewing Youtube as a bunch of sell outs who only allow market friendly content for the sake of commercialism instead of allowing people to freely express themselves.
  -I wasn’t thinking about the problems of crowd-funding via Patreon until I noticed how fast it was dropping every time you were not pandering your audience. I lost a third of it when I said I didn’t like Ergo Proxy that much anymore, and another third when I said I didn’t like the ending of Jojo. And then Chibi began crying on screen and was making a hundred times more than I did, just because his audience consists of a hundred thousand insecure feelfags. I couldn’t be myself if I wanted to keep making enough for the channel to keep running. And on top of that, Patreon did that stupid thing of increasing the fees and I lost even more patrons. I had no incentive to keep going. I needed to find something else that wouldn’t be so frustrating.
  -And recently I found Steemit, where people help you get money with free likes on their part. It’s an easy way to increase my income, but I already see how most are disappointed with how easily the reward system is abused. It doesn’t matter how much you try if someone gets a thousand times more with self-voting. And again, this wasn’t an issue while the crypto value was on the rise. It only became an issue when Bitcoin lost a third of its value in a few days and along with it came down the value of steem dollar.

So as you see incentives work based on reward. You are almost blinded while doing something for as long as you get something at the end, and you come to hate it once you are no longer rewarded as much, or you find something easier or more profitable. I mean, why the fuck should I continue writing my second book, when nobody cared about the first? It cost me 1500 bucks for proofreading, while Misty Chronexia sold a thousand copies without giving a shit about proofreading. I get nothing but downvotes from butthurt chibits, while reposting my videos on Steemit makes me money with no effort.

The system is made in such a way where there is no incentive to keep trying when you see effort is not rewarded, quality is not rewarded, being hyped and excited about trash gets rewarded. I am not saying I will give up on writing or making videos, but I want you to understand it’s not easy trying to stay motivated when everything is telling you to give up and go for the least interesting things just because they reward you the most.