People will not generally abuse the system if they have to pay enough money to get listed up front, so to me this is fine. People don't go to eBay, pay $15 for a featured slot, and then advertise the lastest MLM scam. Why? If you want to make money by spamming, you have to reach millions of people while spending as little as possible. Spending money to get featured isn't cost effective.

The flip side of that is that not charging can lead to even more spam. One of the problems this system has is that it gets a lot of "answerless" questions. If people are really willing to front the money to ask these questions, I have no problem with it. But because they can simply say there was no best answer, a lot of these questions go with money unclaimed. That makes more pointless questions for answerers to have to sift through, and makes for much less an enjoyable experience. If you front the money, at least 1/2 of it should be spent, period. If there was no best answer, the money should either be distributed evenly among those who took time to respond, or maybe it should be put into a fund to do something else, but it should cost the asker something to keep them from cluttering everything up.

eBay doesn't give free listings for precisely this reason. Notice that eBay's flood of silly offerings doesn't come from the expensive featured listings, but from the $.01 listings you can get if you open a store. Featured listings are real listings, with interesting offerings. The poster is willing to pay the extra fee because he has something he knows readers are interested in.

Noone is going to pay an extra $10 for a 1 hour sticky just so they can say, "join my pyramid scheme today!". Yes, they might do it for 10 cents, but that's where pricing is key: it has to be high enough to discourage spam, but low enough to be marketable to users and be a useful feature. Besides, if it is too low you'd have too many users of the feature and it wouldn't be much of a feature anymore anyway.

Until the site has acquired many experts the whole thing may be pointless anyway. If there aren't people out there who can answer my question, it doesn't matter how prominently it is displayed...

It's an interesting idea, but one must be careful about giving the ability to buy your way to a privileged position on Mahalo Answers for your question. It could have a chilling effect on other questioners (even ones who tip), making them less likely to ask anything and in turn slowing down activity overall.

It's a good idea, yet I do not believe it would necessarily improve the answer. It would just make the question more noticeable, and you may even get more answers, yet this does not mean better answers. It might even cause people to tip less knowing that their answer will not be featured. I do not believe this would be good for the community, as people already have a way of seeing which answers are tipped. Some people may not like the "featured question," which would mean that they would always have to look at it. If this existed, it would be good if there was also be a way to delete or bypass this question.

It is an excellent idea but should be used in caution like you both point out. However, I think that "featured" questions can appear on the sidebar and you can also have a "featured" questions widget on blogs and websites, Facebook and MySpace etc.

We are going to charge for the top three slots next month. This is going to be our revenue model and it will be like M$200 a day to pin a story up there.

Important to note these will be up to three additional questions... so the other ones will still be there, just moved down 200 pixels or so.

also, if we hit critical mass in the categories we could sell the top slot there, as well as slots on Mahalo's home page.

In terms of abuse these will be checked and approved by Mahalo.... so nothing to worry about there.