I just came across this great post on ProBargainHunter about Modoshi and Dealspl.us. Yan talks about the time needed for community building and the commission vs. the flat fee approach to getting users to submit and scrub deals on the site. There are some great ideas in this post that are especially topical given that we are striving to combine savings and community here at Judy’s Book. Pure community approaches are challenging and the key to incentive systems is to be aware of unintended consequences. People are quick to optimize against whatever model you put in place and if you’re not careful about measuring and adapting your system, you’ll quickly find yourself paying for contributions that don’t create any value. I realize this is sort of a ‘duh’ statement, but you’d be amazed how hard it is to implement.