Makes sense. I thought about doing it the other way round but I thought it would probably stay in the red since peeps then go somewhere else and the early adopters do not necessarily post a lot.

If you have peeps who are actually invested, it’s different. Say, if you post quality content once a day, it costs nothing, otherwise you have to pay. Or you become an active mod, etc. The actual quality is hard to check but the regularity is automatically provable. Then you take probes once a month and be done with it.

I do this on a minecraft server and it works good. People have ranks based on playtime that reset every month (regularity), donator ranks and staff ranks. You need to be careful with staff ranks since some sit on them but financially I‘m at least cost neutral. I just reduced the hours I put in so that I don’t burn out while not making any income.

Its not perfectly applicable but I hope you can see the underlying principle I‘m following.