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Comment by cslarson | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Historically society has not greatly benefited by coupling governance power to wealth, but sure, it’ll work this time...

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).

So the only problem with a plutocratic system is that in real life the wrong people happen to be richest?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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