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I still think you can use economics to model pretty much any human interaction. The problem is, you can't just slap a token over everything and call it a day –

I still think you can use economics to model pretty much any human interaction. The problem is, you can't just slap a token over everything and call it a day – the incentives that drive people are way more intricate than that. On that note, I think many systems will function better without blockchain. Trust was driving the internet (and any other distributed human networks) for the long time – long before Ethereum came in. Hugs are worth more than handshakes.

graypegg 3y ago
You can also model any problem as a hydraulic circuit if you want. There are other incentives like fun, passion, and anger that will break any economic model. If HN had some internal-economy model where you were cycling around karma as if it was currency, paying upvotes into new posts to get a return back for your “early upvoting” if they do well, giving you more capital to spread to other new posters… I know exactly how the dynamics of this site would change for the worse. People just post here (free work!) because it’s interesting. How irrational! There’s some merit to the idea that you need aligned incentives. I’ll give you that. Just doesn’t always need to be directly boiled down into units of exchange.
- vram22 3y ago
  >There are other incentives like fun, passion, and anger that will break any economic model. Yes, because those incentives can't be reduced to numbers, which is the only thing the economists, bean counters and ambulance chasers, among other professions, can even understand, let alone employ, in their models. Reductionism at work.
hattmall 3y ago
Post count was a big driver for a while.
syntheweave 3y ago
There's a kind of musical chairs or hot potato game being played with online trust. Nobody wants to pay to post; nobody wants to pay for moderation; nobody wants to moderate uncompensated for a long period; and nobody wants to stay somewhere that's unmoderated(even if the moderation is a bare minimum no-spambots rule.) The reason why the internet was functioning on trust was because it had economic arrangements powering it in a more invisible sense: the market demand was for more access to content, not higher quality of content. But we're really facing down the final conclusion of that with AI-generated spam. It can be encoded as hours of 8k video with the photorealistic likenesses of multiple celebrities, your spouse, parents and children all speaking to you: it will still be spam. Either the content has some kind of market price or carrying cost on it or we are willing to be elaborately lied to forever. This isn't even a new issue to economics - the transition from free to regulated markets tends to be precipitated on the demand side by a desire for quality(safe food, air, water etc.) even if the regulation itself is ineffectual. Blockchains are expensive in terms of data quantity, but they do get at certain parts of the issue; someone who elects to post content through one is signalling way above the noise floor, and it's only biased in that it self-selects to people who own some of that token(which does not necessarily lead to a one-to-rule-them-all billionaire's dystopia - precisely the opposite, it's relatively easy in a technical sense to spin up a small and short-lived chain and hand out some free tokens if you only need a little bit of security for a limited period of time, but that's not a framing we've normalized).

graypegg 3y ago

You can also model any problem as a hydraulic circuit if you want. There are other incentives like fun, passion, and anger that will break any economic model. If HN had some internal-economy model where you were cycling around karma as if it was currency, paying upvotes into new posts to get a return back for your “early upvoting” if they do well, giving you more capital to spread to other new posters… I know exactly how the dynamics of this site would change for the worse. People just post here (free work!) because it’s interesting. How irrational! There’s some merit to the idea that you need aligned incentives. I’ll give you that. Just doesn’t always need to be directly boiled down into units of exchange.

vram22 3y ago
>There are other incentives like fun, passion, and anger that will break any economic model. Yes, because those incentives can't be reduced to numbers, which is the only thing the economists, bean counters and ambulance chasers, among other professions, can even understand, let alone employ, in their models. Reductionism at work.

hattmall 3y ago

Post count was a big driver for a while.

syntheweave 3y ago

There's a kind of musical chairs or hot potato game being played with online trust. Nobody wants to pay to post; nobody wants to pay for moderation; nobody wants to moderate uncompensated for a long period; and nobody wants to stay somewhere that's unmoderated(even if the moderation is a bare minimum no-spambots rule.) The reason why the internet was functioning on trust was because it had economic arrangements powering it in a more invisible sense: the market demand was for more access to content, not higher quality of content. But we're really facing down the final conclusion of that with AI-generated spam. It can be encoded as hours of 8k video with the photorealistic likenesses of multiple celebrities, your spouse, parents and children all speaking to you: it will still be spam. Either the content has some kind of market price or carrying cost on it or we are willing to be elaborately lied to forever. This isn't even a new issue to economics - the transition from free to regulated markets tends to be precipitated on the demand side by a desire for quality(safe food, air, water etc.) even if the regulation itself is ineffectual. Blockchains are expensive in terms of data quantity, but they do get at certain parts of the issue; someone who elects to post content through one is signalling way above the noise floor, and it's only biased in that it self-selects to people who own some of that token(which does not necessarily lead to a one-to-rule-them-all billionaire's dystopia - precisely the opposite, it's relatively easy in a technical sense to spin up a small and short-lived chain and hand out some free tokens if you only need a little bit of security for a limited period of time, but that's not a framing we've normalized).