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I seem to recall there was some discussion here of
people paying small amounts for small pieces of code
(a la rentacoder). [...]
Does this concept seem interesting to anyone? Worth
discussing?
I've been wanting to do something like this on an IRC front for a
long time, but the issues of Trust have made it hard to figure out
the details.
It's an exchange of goods where neither person trusts the other, both
holding on to what they have while grabbing for the other person's
goods. When it's something physical, you don't let go of what you
have until you're sure that you have a firm grasp on what the other
person is offering.
But if it's information, I see two choices:
1) You let the person offering the bounty review the answer and
discover if it's valid. How then do you prevent that someone from
getting their answer and then saying "No no no, that wasn't what I
wanted at all. I'm keeping my money (and the information that's now
in my head)." ?
2) You force the person offering the bounty to pay up before seeing
the solution. What then do you do if the solution is "Ha ha, you
suck, I've got your money now!" ? (That case is easy to resolve by a
third party, but what if the solution is real code ... how much work
do you want to do diving into each solution and determining if it's a
'perfect' match?)
Hrm...what if the answer is precise specifications, in the form of
unit tests? What if the person offering the bounty is responsible for
providing a clear set of specifications AND unit tests for the
interface, and the System runs the unit tests against the solution to
automatically verify that it's valid.
With the IRC model I have been thinking about, you'd need to bootstrap the
system and get to a point where everyone involved had a nice history of
Trust rankings, based on grades of their solutions, number of solutions,
number of disputes, and so on. (You' d also have those rankings distributed
over a wide variety of information topics.) But that's a general description
of the end result, and glosses over the details of how to get there (and
assumes that such a system makes 95% of the people using it happy).