How to Build a Better Social Network
every.to
every.to
I contend that it would be too tempting for the service not to reward some users who get it right more often with more points to spend as probably happens in all social networks (bellweather users). That would speed up the gold being found and up engagement.
The operators also don't want to make their "talent" work hardest of all the platforms for least amount of gain. Low quality hype is their bread and butter, a status symbol even.
The proposed style of system only really becomes necessary when you have an over abundance of content and here it is claimed to produce the exact level of abundance needed such that some lurker can peruse it all in the time it takes to spend all their points. It will result in a low content social network with very low possible engagement time (read: habit forming time). Maybe it could work for an already saturated social network looking to decrease churn but never as solution to the chicken and the egg problem where variable reward over time is the hook engine.
The article doesn't go into how they would limit users from creating new accounts, (i.e. sybil resistance) which would be very important if you give out points like this.
> Every 10 minutes, the system slightly reallocates points.
The article author does not make any comparisons of their calculation to a reddit/hackernews style calculation, which already does has this kind of effect. See this article [0] or my Javascript implementation [1]
I made a reddit clone [2] that kind of follows this principal: Anyone can make a board which has its own ERC20 token. Upvoting/downvoting costs 1 token. Upvotes tokens are sent to the message author. Downvotes are burned. Moderators have the ability to mint new tokens. I figured these tokens could become valuable if there were lots of discussions in a board since it would induce a demand to moderate the board.
I also made a different site [3] that changes the decentralized moderation system so that instead of democratic upvotes, the message owner gets absolute discretion over the sorting of the replies they receive. I've put much more work into this one so it works much better.
[0] https://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating...
[1] https://github.com/numtel/piece-chat/blob/main/src/component...
[2] https://glasshalf.chat/ (Optimism) or https://nonphysical.systems/ (Polygon Mumbai)