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/r/EthTrader tried this with Donuts a while ago and it led to a community split to /r/EthFinance from all of the drama. Adding a monetary reward for comments an

by Sargos 6y ago

/r/EthTrader tried this with Donuts a while ago and it led to a community split to /r/EthFinance from all of the drama. Adding a monetary reward for comments and posts really skews the incentives of the community members who choose to participate. When you tie things like this to governance (your coins affect your vote weight on the polls) it really creates a perverse incentive for commercial products to come in and create astroturfing content to farm coins. I think this is a neat experiment and it will be fun to watch what happens but I'm skeptical that this moves the subreddits in a positive direction.

cslarson 6y ago
It is worth seeing if these negatives outcomes actually occur and of so they are not counterable in some way. If these risks can be mitigated then what is left is perhaps quite a useful tool - a metric for community contribution that can be used to make sybil-resistant governance decisions and monetary reward within a local economy.
- SiempreViernes 6y ago
  Historically society has not greatly benefited by coupling governance power to wealth, but sure, it’ll work this time...
  - cslarson 6y ago
    Yes, this is why governance in this system should be tied to your original earned points so it cannot, at least directly, be bought. The scheme that this system currently employs, for instance, is weight = min(earned_points, current_transferable_points).
    - SiempreViernes 6y ago
      So the only problem with a plutocratic system is that in real life the wrong people happen to be richest?
  - reidjs 6y ago
    It’s not really clear if having a lot of these virtual tokens count the same as “wealth” though. Are there “wealthy” World of Warcraft players because WoW gold can turn into USD or are they just “rich?” I think it’s worth experimenting with at the very least.
  - CryptoPunk 6y ago
    This is not governance of a state. It's governance of a private entity. Having token holders control the subreddit is no different than having shareholders govern a company. Assigning shares to owners, and having decisions made through shareholder vote, has proven to be the best way to govern large companies.
- intended 6y ago
  100% Guarantee that anything with any monetary value will skew user behavior in non benevolent ways. If the coin has no monetary value - then it could work, but then what’s the point?
  - cslarson 6y ago
    I personally think it would definitely be useful to use the metric even without monetary value - imagine Reddit communities where the contributors have real, direct influence over rules, moderation style, mod team.
    - intended 6y ago
      Why would that work? The job of moderation is soul sucking and involves rule creation and rule enforcement. You end up dealing with rule breakers regularly as opposed to only occasionally, skewing your perspective. There is little overlap with content creation.
  - ohyeshedid 6y ago
    Damn near, if not entirely, everything has monetary value to someone. Someone is going to want the premium features without putting in the work; they can buy coins from the people that do put in the work to buy the premium features.
  - CryptoPunk 6y ago
    The introduction of karma/upvotes had a similar impact on forums, and eventually led to forums improving in quality. You could see karma/upvotes as a sort of proto-money, with a limited range of monetary qualities. This just takes the same effect, and magnifies it, by fully monetizing those points, so I anticipate it will lead to better content and curation, just as karma/upvotes did when introduced.
dehrmann 6y ago
> Adding a monetary reward for comments and posts really skews the incentives of the community members who choose to participate People like to complain about FOX New's conservative bias (and to a lesser extent MSNBC's liberal bias), but they miss the fact that their real bias is towards viewership, and they've become news entertainment products, not sources of journalism.
- michaelbuckbee 6y ago
  That's an interesting way to describe it - that's really how I consider YouTube as well. The wacky conspiracy videos all do really well because they're interesting (in a what the hell is going on with this guy kind of way if nothing else) and entertaining while reality has a style more like CSPAN.
  - three_seagrass 6y ago
    The conspiratorial and alt-political videos are an extension of reality TV online. Unfortunately if you expose yourself to too much of them you end up co-opting some of their views. NYT did a really good job covering this recently with their podcast Rabbit Hole: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/podcasts/rabbit-hole-prologue.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/podcasts/rabbit-hole-prol...
    - goostavos 6y ago
      "co-opting some of their views" for sure happened to me. I don't think it's bad thing, though. I'm curiously drawn towards anyone whom has people shouting "don't give them a platform!" or has suggestions that their ideas are so powerful that they may somehow corrupt minds weaker than, presumably, their own superior ones. So I semi-regularly listen to these "alt" people. Alex Jones, McInnes, molyneux, and so on. The co-opting was largely realizing that in-between some of the crazy (there's a fair amount to filter out in Jones' case), there are these kernels of truth, often backed by government documents or reports. The co-opting ideas, I guess, was a general realization that the common narrative doesn't necessarily reflect the entire reality. Even things which are presented as cut and dry, are often a frustrating messy grey once you dig into them. It's also given me a general skepticism of commonly held opinions about people in general. These "literal cult leader", "literal nazis", etc... have turned out to be less monsters and more humans with nuanced opinions which don't necessarily translate to 5min clips.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
petrocrat 6y ago
Are there any schemes where it costs some tiny amount of eth/gas/whateverCoin to post content? Theoretically that should decrease spam and increase high effort posts, but I could see it also reducing open source style contribution and increasing advertising masquerading as content. This is a hard problem to solve.
andreygrehov 6y ago
I think it _could_ work out well if posting a comment had a tiny cost. This would incentivize users to be mindful about what they write in their comments. I think this would be really fun to watch. The only thing is that there is a "chicken or egg" problem now, which would have to be solved with some sort of a donation from the Reddit itself.
christopherbalz 6y ago
BAT rewards have been live on seemingly all reddit comments for a year or so now.
tmpz22 6y ago
Reddit: Mostly feature complete Developers: Let's fix it with blockchain!
nullandvoid 6y ago
Ever use d2jsp back in the day? Massive community / forum with a currency tied to each user ( and a black market to go with ), atleast back then it worked Perhaps with the reddit demographic it may be a little different, however I have always wondered what a similar system would be like on reddit
madeofpalk 6y ago
> Adding a monetary reward for comments and posts really skews the incentives of the community members who choose to participate. This is something Joel Spolskey and/or Jeff Atwood brought up many years ago when making Stack Overflow.
munificent 6y ago
Yes, I believe it's well understood in the social sciences that when you give people an extrinsic reward for some activity, it drastically reduces any intrinsic rewards they were getting for it. Some weird quirk of human psychology. You can get people to do things out of the goodness of their heart, or you can pay them to do things, but it's really hard to do both at the same time.
doopy1 6y ago
"create astroturfing content to farm coins." - this is reddit already

by Sargos 6y ago

cslarson 6y ago

It is worth seeing if these negatives outcomes actually occur and of so they are not counterable in some way. If these risks can be mitigated then what is left is perhaps quite a useful tool - a metric for community contribution that can be used to make sybil-resistant governance decisions and monetary reward within a local economy.

SiempreViernes 6y ago
Historically society has not greatly benefited by coupling governance power to wealth, but sure, it’ll work this time...
- cslarson 6y ago
  Yes, this is why governance in this system should be tied to your original earned points so it cannot, at least directly, be bought. The scheme that this system currently employs, for instance, is weight = min(earned_points, current_transferable_points).
  - SiempreViernes 6y ago
    So the only problem with a plutocratic system is that in real life the wrong people happen to be richest?
- reidjs 6y ago
  It’s not really clear if having a lot of these virtual tokens count the same as “wealth” though. Are there “wealthy” World of Warcraft players because WoW gold can turn into USD or are they just “rich?” I think it’s worth experimenting with at the very least.
- CryptoPunk 6y ago
  This is not governance of a state. It's governance of a private entity. Having token holders control the subreddit is no different than having shareholders govern a company. Assigning shares to owners, and having decisions made through shareholder vote, has proven to be the best way to govern large companies.
intended 6y ago
100% Guarantee that anything with any monetary value will skew user behavior in non benevolent ways. If the coin has no monetary value - then it could work, but then what’s the point?
- cslarson 6y ago
  I personally think it would definitely be useful to use the metric even without monetary value - imagine Reddit communities where the contributors have real, direct influence over rules, moderation style, mod team.
  - intended 6y ago
    Why would that work? The job of moderation is soul sucking and involves rule creation and rule enforcement. You end up dealing with rule breakers regularly as opposed to only occasionally, skewing your perspective. There is little overlap with content creation.
- ohyeshedid 6y ago
  Damn near, if not entirely, everything has monetary value to someone. Someone is going to want the premium features without putting in the work; they can buy coins from the people that do put in the work to buy the premium features.
- CryptoPunk 6y ago
  The introduction of karma/upvotes had a similar impact on forums, and eventually led to forums improving in quality. You could see karma/upvotes as a sort of proto-money, with a limited range of monetary qualities. This just takes the same effect, and magnifies it, by fully monetizing those points, so I anticipate it will lead to better content and curation, just as karma/upvotes did when introduced.

dehrmann 6y ago

> Adding a monetary reward for comments and posts really skews the incentives of the community members who choose to participate People like to complain about FOX New's conservative bias (and to a lesser extent MSNBC's liberal bias), but they miss the fact that their real bias is towards viewership, and they've become news entertainment products, not sources of journalism.

michaelbuckbee 6y ago
That's an interesting way to describe it - that's really how I consider YouTube as well. The wacky conspiracy videos all do really well because they're interesting (in a what the hell is going on with this guy kind of way if nothing else) and entertaining while reality has a style more like CSPAN.
- three_seagrass 6y ago
  The conspiratorial and alt-political videos are an extension of reality TV online. Unfortunately if you expose yourself to too much of them you end up co-opting some of their views. NYT did a really good job covering this recently with their podcast Rabbit Hole: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/podcasts/rabbit-hole-prologue.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/podcasts/rabbit-hole-prol...
  - goostavos 6y ago
    "co-opting some of their views" for sure happened to me. I don't think it's bad thing, though. I'm curiously drawn towards anyone whom has people shouting "don't give them a platform!" or has suggestions that their ideas are so powerful that they may somehow corrupt minds weaker than, presumably, their own superior ones. So I semi-regularly listen to these "alt" people. Alex Jones, McInnes, molyneux, and so on. The co-opting was largely realizing that in-between some of the crazy (there's a fair amount to filter out in Jones' case), there are these kernels of truth, often backed by government documents or reports. The co-opting ideas, I guess, was a general realization that the common narrative doesn't necessarily reflect the entire reality. Even things which are presented as cut and dry, are often a frustrating messy grey once you dig into them. It's also given me a general skepticism of commonly held opinions about people in general. These "literal cult leader", "literal nazis", etc... have turned out to be less monsters and more humans with nuanced opinions which don't necessarily translate to 5min clips.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

petrocrat 6y ago

Are there any schemes where it costs some tiny amount of eth/gas/whateverCoin to post content? Theoretically that should decrease spam and increase high effort posts, but I could see it also reducing open source style contribution and increasing advertising masquerading as content. This is a hard problem to solve.

andreygrehov 6y ago

I think it _could_ work out well if posting a comment had a tiny cost. This would incentivize users to be mindful about what they write in their comments. I think this would be really fun to watch. The only thing is that there is a "chicken or egg" problem now, which would have to be solved with some sort of a donation from the Reddit itself.

christopherbalz 6y ago

BAT rewards have been live on seemingly all reddit comments for a year or so now.

tmpz22 6y ago

Reddit: Mostly feature complete Developers: Let's fix it with blockchain!

nullandvoid 6y ago

Ever use d2jsp back in the day? Massive community / forum with a currency tied to each user ( and a black market to go with ), atleast back then it worked Perhaps with the reddit demographic it may be a little different, however I have always wondered what a similar system would be like on reddit

madeofpalk 6y ago

> Adding a monetary reward for comments and posts really skews the incentives of the community members who choose to participate. This is something Joel Spolskey and/or Jeff Atwood brought up many years ago when making Stack Overflow.

munificent 6y ago

Yes, I believe it's well understood in the social sciences that when you give people an extrinsic reward for some activity, it drastically reduces any intrinsic rewards they were getting for it. Some weird quirk of human psychology. You can get people to do things out of the goodness of their heart, or you can pay them to do things, but it's really hard to do both at the same time.

doopy1 6y ago

"create astroturfing content to farm coins." - this is reddit already