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When you remove money from a marketplace, strange things happen
Has anyone here tried building or studying non-monetary marketplaces?
We’ve been exploring what happens when you strip price out of an exchange system entirely, when value is defined by attention or effort instead of currency. The results have been surprisingly unpredictable.
How do you measure fairness when there’s no price signal? Some people give more than they get, others act more generously because there’s no transaction history to optimize against. It feels like reputation, not ROI, becomes the governing logic.
We started with a simple idea where people could exchange exposure, participation or experiences instead of money. A café might offer free meals in return for content, a gym might trade sessions for Google reviews, all voluntary, no fixed value.
When you remove money, people negotiate differently. They’re less defensive, but also less predictable. Interactions feel more genuine.
Has anyone else noticed similar behavioral shifts when incentives stop being financial?
- toomuchtodo 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5,000_Years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5,000_Years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barter
- vibenex 1y agoYES!!! more books to destabilize my reading queue. have you read these and what are your hot takes from them?
- vibenex 1y agoAlso what's your view on this Reddit thread? Came around the fact that David Graeber was an American anthropologist, left-wing, anarchist social and political activist, criticized for maintaining a political bias. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/1czj78p/debt_the_first_5000_years_david_graeber_what_did/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/1czj78p/debt_...
- toomuchtodo 1y ago"Reality has a well known liberal bias." Researchers Find That Higher Intelligence Is Correlated With Left-Wing Beliefs - https://futurism.com/neoscope/left-wing-beliefs-intelligence https://futurism.com/neoscope/left-wing-beliefs-intelligence - April 13th, 2024 Predicting political beliefs with polygenic scores for cognitive performance and educational attainment - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289624000254 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602... | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2024.101831 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2024.101831 - Intelligence, Volume 104, May–June 2024, 101831
- vibenex 1y agoIs left wing and liberal the same?
- ggm 1y agoYou didn't remove money. You only removed the appearance of an exchange of value. The gym wanted the revenue downstream from the review. The Cafe wanted the revenue downstream from the review. All you did is remove payment from a customer, but now the value proposition shifts from a sale from party A to customer B to a service of value to party A provided by customer B, but the actual value is .. what? What evidence? What recourse? Is it worth more or less than the food or the gym session? If all that happens is floods of insta princesses consume chai latte at the cafes expense for shit reviews, you poisoned the well. And a real world cost in milk and spice was consumed. This is not a money free situation, you just ignored some externalities to your model.
- vibenex 1y agoThat's the point! Money is just a symbolic intermediary for value. "Content is the new Currency" The traded asset is narrative. A party gives something tangible and in return gets visibility, context and social proof. You're right in asking the evidence of value in such transactions and we're exploring just that. In our case, the exchange stays simple, social media content in return for experiences or services. A business describes what they want to offer and people apply if they're interested. The business then chooses whom to invite. No matching algorithm or enforced pairing, entirely self-selected. The café still spends milk and spice, but now the transaction feedback loop runs through social proofing, not accounting. If visibility offsets material cost, is it measurable? Or just disguise it under a different incentive structure?
- ggm 1y ago> "Money is just a symbolic intermediary for value." I suggest you say this often at the counter, when asked to pay for services you are seeking without payment of money, in all its diverse forms.
- vibenex 1y ago:D, nobody's escaping the counter without paying. Interesting thing is we're asking the same question, only I'm exploring if value can exist without money while you're arguing that without money there's no value. > "You only removed the appearance of an exchange of value." We're discovering where the value is. And are we conditioned to think that money is the only signal of value?