That's not a bad idea. This concept might be better described as a Profit Share or Revenue-Sharing with Referral Programs. In a v4v system there is non-monetary exchanges involved, such as creating clips of a podcast, which earns the contributor and the podcaster sats. Some extreme V4V advocates want this process to be an automatic transaction. The non-monetary aspect lies in creating the clip.
In the mega client realm, integrating new features allows contributors to influence the ever-evolving project. Skill exchange comes into play, replacing financial contributions with pull requests to support the project. Mentoring less capable contributors is advantageous, as they may provide future support. If their training benefits them beyond this project, they could become valuable monetary contributors. Automating the split in such scenarios is challenging, but the V4V concept of non-monetary contributions is already in practice today.
Currently, what seems to be failing is relying on "one-time donations." Crowdfunding or virtual-event-based approaches might be more successful, with time-bound goals. It may not necessarily need to be a return of monetary value; access to certain vanity domains or badges could be an alternative. Time-sensitive announcements could improve donation outcomes.
Recurring donations would be ideal, but LNBC has limitations in this regard from my limited understanding.
In the past, I confused the difference between Pay-What-You-Want (PWYW) and Name Your Own Price (NYOP).
PWYW is similar to "one-time donations" or simply relying on customer goodwill.
On the other hand, Name Your Own Price could involve offering a range with a minimum or a suggested starting point. Combining NYOP with crowdfunding goals can give contributors perspective on the operational costs might be a good option.
For the extreme version of V4V, image hosting is an intriguing. There could be a flow from a paid client to the image services, and this process could be automated based on individual uploads and serves. The idea is to have varying compensation based on the number of serves. This flow could potentially address some issues with recurring payments, as only one party needs to handle that aspect. Clients could also offer instead of a monthly subscription, individual micro transactions for each post. The micro-transaction system and nodes processing the transactions would also receive value for their contributions to this mutual exchange of value, along with the relay, client, and content. In a system like this, it doesn’t pay to lurk.