I give charity when I see sufficient need
I reward effort when I see sufficient effort
I sacrifice for return when I see sufficient desirability
Paid relays are insufficient need disguised as insufficient effort disguised as insufficient desirability
That's because you don't have a concrete use case and some potential paying customers for them, so you don't understand why we should want to cultivate a pool of specialized relay administrators and developers because it raises the value and attractiveness of our entire tech stack.
My relays don't need help attracting administrators and developers, they just need to be made.
Bitcoin didn't need help attracting administrators and developers, it just needed to be made.
If your ecosystem relies on a separate carrot and stick instead of simply attracting administrators and developers, that's not value.
Bitcoin is literally money. Working on it pays you automatically.
Then take reddit as another example. No other company wanted to give a dev like Aaron Swartz access to the same kind of resources again. Digg died to reddit when it was bigger in the beginning, so if an external carrot and stick was the deciding factor instead of underlying value, Digg would still be the big thing and reddit would be kept down by the big carrot and stick afforded to Digg by constant profit. But that's not how that conflict played out, the side with underlying value won (and it was centralized and unstable and now we must try to send it the way of Digg)
