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I’m not a crypto fan but spitballing here: what if it were tokenized? Not necessarily in a distributed blockchain sort of way, after all this is Twitter which is centralized, but rather in terms of setting economic incentives for making good moderation judgements, eg when you make a judgment you stake something of value (money, tokens, reputation, whatever) and set up some mechanism such that making “bad” moderation judgments is an expensive choice. Seems like this is a scenario where there is low levels of trust and therefore can use the thinking of a similarly low-trust domain (crypto).

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Enabling authenticated identity online (personas) is an objectively good thing. Authenticity is a precondition for most of modern life; small things like payments, driver's licenses, voting, education, employment, surgery.

Alas, the $8/mo blue check is not that. Payment method is the only verification. No further effort is made. (Please correct me as Musk's answers change.)

Instead, the blue check is nothing more than flare.

Twitter's pivot towards freemium, gacha, and ultimately Freemium Speeches™ (pay-to-say) could work.

There are precedents. Vanity press and academic journals, for instance.

And I can envision a substack, medium, or twitter that enables a marketplace for value added services. Fact checking, copyediting, visual design, and so forth. An Upwork for content producers.

Alas, I doubt that's Musk's vision for Twitter.

For that, I recommend historian Jill Lepore's podcast The Evening Rocket. https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/elon-musk-the-evening-rocket

Spoiler: With the purchase of Twitter.com, Musk is likely rejuvenating his original goal for X.com.

The question I am wondering is twitter doing any due diligence for the 60/year you're paying to verify you are who you say you are. (Other than charging your credit card) I am guessing probably not.

The problem for him going forward is that he’s burned all trust. Maybe his alt-right bootlicking is theater to get a volatile crowd on board, but it alienates the rest of society, not to mention putting him on the wrong side of Popehat’s rule of goats.

The basic use case for crypto is imposing costs, and a protocol that uses it decides where you or your parties impose those costs. A cryptographic moderation protocol question would be, on what aspect of publishing a statement would you like to impose a cost?

To do that, we would need to break out publishing a statement into a collection of dimensions, like origin, destination, distance/reach, length, entropy/novelty, and likely some dozen or so others, then express our evaluations of them in terms of those criteria. The HN method of 'effect' is pretty good, and an origin's track record of engagement could give a new statement momentum, etc. Not to solution it - but in terms of what you would use tokenization for, it would be to impose costs on criteria expressed in these underlying message dimensions.

Hey I can't resist showing what I am working on: https://datum.alwaysdata.net .

The goal is not that far from what birdwatch wants to do, but it's restricted to adding data context to online discourse.

I am frequently pondering those kind of thoughts regarding, low trust and crypto. And I would love to discuss it with you, or other people, if you are interested.

Basically the design dilemna is you want to anchor the moderating behavior to some hard identity or value, without ruining the collaborative spirit task.

Isn’t that how most political ads/disinformation campaigns already work? Many absolute truths in politics are self-evident, but if you need to get some lies out there… buy some ads.

yes, having skin in the game (staking for example) prevents bots, trolls and creates more responsibility. With added benefit of zero-Knowledge, security, and decentralization.

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