4 ms·
How do you handle users gaming the system for profit? I was thinking up various ways to introduce money to our communication systems to incentivize certain beh
by Detrus 13y ago
How do you handle users gaming the system for profit?
I was thinking up various ways to introduce money to our communication systems to incentivize certain behaviors. But not from the modern Facetwitter perspective of a site that wastes your life by addicting you. The true measure should be the correctness of the content and money should pay for that.
First a system where you have to pay to post and if you post is confirmed as not spam or abuse, then you get the money back. Otherwise the site takes your money. Should be a negligible amount. Mostly a way to make spam expensive and compensate for moderation, but of course a site can abuse a user this way as well.
If a user posts some profound story/comment and others want to compensate him directly with an easy UI, they can add a monetary amount to their upvote. But there is little guarantee that the amount will be significant or the money will arrive promptly. Users should be able to undo money sent for well sounding but ultimately wrong info. This is to discourage participation driven by points and monetary rewards.
If participation and content creation is driven by money even more than it is now, there will be a few new legitimate sources with useful information but the vast majority will be content farms. To discourage this "points" or "money" should accumulate, BUT should not be paid out for years until the accuracy of this content is confirmed by the passage of time, peer review, etc. If mistakes are found, all readers should be notified of corrections. There should be penalties for releasing misleading or mislabeled information (like tech blog posts that are really advertising but pretend not to be. You should pay to advertise and pay more for advertising what turns out to be crap after peer review.)
A site should take its share for moderating content well and working on rules that incentivize useful content/services and penalize attention seeking of little utility.
It's hard to predict effects of various new incentives. But a site should work on modifying the rules until desired results are reached. Users should not stray from normal behavior to satisfy some quick and dirty addicting point systems. If that means limiting participation to select trained users, releasing information to larger audiences only after it has been discussed by relevant experts (so no shocking attention grabbing studies are released) then so be it.
- hikigo_wanders 12y agoI like this idea a lot, thank you for sharing it. I might try this with http://hikigo.com http://hikigo.com. Like most things it might be hard to get the initial core of users. What I liked about the parent post is: It still wouldn't ever get as big as Reddit. When you find yourself thinking that way, you are probably onto something you actually want.
- omarhegazy 12y agoThat's the thing. If this service is implemented properly, you want users to game the system for profit. It'd have to be so airtight that the only way to "game" the system would be to go out and try to think of something intelligent to contribute. Another commenter discussed the possibility of astroturfing -- The astroturfing would have to be so well concealed that it'd be content users would actually like. So, it's still corporate-supported advertising, but it's smart corporate-supported advertising. Which is still awesome. Reminds me of this : https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/. What you said about a system of experts and trained users determining whether your comment is worth exposing to the public ... eh. It sounds like it'd take a shit-ton of time and debating, especially as the service expands to handle a lot of content. Also, isn't that just modern journalism? As a journalist, you apply to write an article for, or get a job at writing articles for, a well-established high-quality media company like the NY times or the New Yorker. A system of trained experts review your application and approve or deny it accordingly. Then you write articles and they get shown to the public after you've been approved. I'm not saying it's a bad process, I'm saying it already exists. The problem is, it's slow and it takes a shit ton of time to determine who's a great writer and who gets limited participation and who doesn't. And when you allow the process to get faster, you have to give up the expert-authority, and well, you get something like Reddit. This service would have to find a way to keep submissions and distribution extremely fast, like Reddit, but also keep the quality of discourse high, like NY Times. The proposed solution is : money. People who submit stupid cat pictures to Reddit aren't dumb themselves, they've just been exposed to a forum for discourse that allows dumb content. Meaning, if you asked them : "Do you really think that cat picture is going to allow for quality discourse?", they'd definitely say "No." So I'm willing to trust ilovekatpictures1998 on his judgment of discourse, if not his ability to create such discourse. So if we can trust the users to have good judgment, all we have to do is create a system that forces them to use their judgment, which Reddit doesn't do. And telling them to put their money where their mouth is by making them pay is the best way to force them to use their judgment. The only reason it wouldn't get as big as Reddit is, people don't want to put their money where their mouth is. Well, most people. But then again, there are a lot of niches ...