The current system at Resonate is you buy credits.
5€/5,57$ = 4.0880 credits (!?!)
1 credit = 1.223091976516634050880626223092 € / 1.3625244618395303326810176125245 $
This makes no sense.
It’s something that’s bothered me for a while that our “credit” system, from a user perspectives, seems to have one purpose only : obfuscate the fact that they’re actually just spending regular money by “converting” this money into pretend-money so that they don’t see exactly where they’re at when they’re spending on the platform.
The only reason I can think of that we came up with this (again, from the viewpoint of “how does it make the experience better for the user?”) is that we think it will be a more stress free experience to not see actual-money credits go lower as time goes on, and so we thought it’d be “cooler” to have these fake-money credits go lower instead.
I’d argue that, first, this is infantilizing, and second, it does the opposite. People are STILL spending money on the platform, they’re still aware of it, but now they’ve lost ease of access to check exactly how much they’ve spent and how much they have left, which can be nerve-wrecking especially when there isn’t a clear conversion rate between credits and currency.
I also think that, while the credit thing creates a sort of “wall” between the direct support to the artists and the listener, removing that artifical metric would help people have a sense of :
1/ How much they’ve given to artists they like. For exemple you had 10€ this morning, you fell in love with an album you’ve listened to it a few times and now you have 8.2€ in your credits balance, instead of being like “ugh, I’ve lost 1.8 mystical resonate credits” you just know you’ve given 1.8€ to this artist/release. I personally think that’s more aligned with what people are looking for when joining Resonate.
2/ What a good service Resonate is for Discovery. You had 10€ at the begining of the week, you’ve listened to a thousand song all week but none of them really caught your ear, it was just nice background music for work. You look at your balance and you see you’ve only spent 2€. You can get confident that, while you still supported artists, if it keeps going like that you’ll end up the month having spent less than your 10€ balance which makes you realize how much of a bargain the platform is for Discovery.
All these patterns are greatly obfuscated by the pretend-money that we currently use.
They also make advertising the platform a nightmare, because everything has to be converted to “credits” to be calculated and explained to people which makes absolutely no sense and makes explaining S2O all the more difficult.
I understand that we use credits on the backend to calculate remuneration for artists, but I think it should stay in the back end because it doesn’t bring anything to user, it’s infantilizing, and it’s detrimental to the way they can control both their money and grasp the reality of their experience on the platform.
One last thing, the “buying credits” stuff is often used in Free To Play videogames, or on gamified website, but there’s a catch. First, I’m not sure we want to be assimilated to these kinds of business ventures but I do see the point of “gamifying” some of the user experience sometimes. However in our case, there’s absolutely nothing to do with the credits beyond buying them with real money. The only point of fake money is you’ve got an “in game” economy where people can resell / make profit / play to earn some of the “in-game-currency/credit” etc.
None of that applies to us (and that’s great).
If a worker of the coop wants to earn credits through working/helping the platform, I don’t see any point in giving him “credits” in a weird metric rather than just giving him “5€/$ of credits on Resonate”. This will at least make it clear to him how his work has been valued in money rather than telling him we’re giving him “4.0880 Resonate Credits”.
So my proposal is people should just buy “5€/5$” of credits, and then their balance indicates they have 5€/5$ in the credits and that’s all.
