Reader-Funded Economics

See moves README for orientation. This is the sixth design move.

Revenue from participants, not from advertisers or data buyers. Multiple models can coexist:

• Subscription per community.
• Voluntary contribution.
• Micro-payment for premium features.

• Cooperative ownership where the platform is owned by its users.

• Why: The bourgeois public sphere was funded congruently with its function (bourgeois-public-sphere); a deliberative platform must be too.
• Cost: Subscriptions exclude the unwilling-to-pay. Cooperative governance is slow and contested. Free-platform competitors will always have more reach.

The economic question is the hardest unsolved problem in the sketch — see tensions.