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Comment by reactordev | Hacker News Reader

I believe you may have something with Anti-dollar. Joking aside, there’s almost always a company on the other side of the coin. Boycotting or otherwise public outcry’s and cancel culture would look a whole lot different if it were a value-based voting platform where competing interests vie for the value. Add reporting for government agencies on what’s “hot” and it sends a clear picture on what the national sentiment is.

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I know this is a joke, too, but I worry that you aren't seeing the joke if you think there is something here. This is a setup to take in dollars from everyone and arbitrage the sentiment difference across the userbase, effectively meaning they don't have to pay anything and just take the dollars home. That's the joke. And anyone who actually would put in dollars are who the joke would be being played upon were it real.

Yeah but imagine if there was something like this for real, only the dollars weren't greedily kept, but spent in some way that people on both sides support. Like, maybe pro-choice and anti-abortion supporters would both support the excess money going to support new mothers or adoption programs.

Then imagine the incentives for campaigners to skip the two-sided prediction market and just spend their money on advertising directly to voters and lobbying politicians.

Or the implications of implementing the only way to make this actually work by taking the pesky voters out of the decision process altogether and just letting the money decide the outcome...

> letting the money decide the outcome

some people call that data driven decision making and they like it

others call it “skynet” and they fear it

or they'd just shift the debate to why you shouldn't give money to the opposing party's cause: "they say the money is for ___, but really they do ____ with it".

There is a similar game that distributes more of the money to causes where people vote with their dollars and antidollars and the winning side gets 1-epsilon of it because the operator of the game requires vigorish.

It's like poker with no cards. Ideally the winner puts in just a dollar more than the loser and they nearly double their donation. If the winner can't get enough information to do that and has to spend too much for the pot they end up making a huge unmatched contribution.

The game makes sense to play if you're sure you will win but you don't want to start it if you think you won't.

I believe I know this game. Strange how wording it this way makes way more sense.

I know but I was referring to just the concept of dollar vs anti-dollar. Not the payout or anything but just the idea that companies get X dollars where X is the sum of users who voted for them. Let the people decide.

The reality is humans will find a way to make this corrupt.

But that doesn't let the people decide. That lets the people with spare dollars decide.

Sure, fair point, replace dollar with vote point…

That's a business model, not a joke.

A business model includes a transaction where one side gets value in exchange for returning value to the other side. When it is a one-sided transaction like this, where one side gives money and the other just pockets it... that is more often referred to as a "scam"

No, both parties get value. Suppose a user would receive 1 utility for donating $1 to some cause in a traditional fashion (e.g., giving the charity money directly). Using this platform and with an OmniMatch of 25%, the user will effectively donate $1.25 for the cost of $1 and accordingly get 0.25 extra utility. The user gets surplus utility no matter what. The platform, on the other hand, needs to be careful in what markets it creates and how it sets OmniMatch, in order to make money.

One side gives money, and a fraction of that money goes to the intended cause, is referred to as "fundraising". One of the more dubious aspects of donating to a charity is that some of their resources are spent persuading other people to donate to them, in what looks like a strongly zero sum game for the sector as a whole. I think there's a credible chance the system outlined here would end up at a higher effective efficiency than the current state of the art of charity fundraising.

The joke is that there is something there. For example in a presidential election, I'm indifferent between my preferred candidate having $1 more and the opposing candidate having $1 less. If it were possible to honestly negotiate with my counterpart who supports the other candidate, we could either save our money or agree to both donate to a mutually agreeable charity, and everyone would be better off.

The US certainly spends a lot on elections, and one might debate whether that's too much or not. But what is certain is that campaign money contributes to the GDP. It funds a lot of salaries.

I'd rather that money go to people instead of a faceless cryptofund. I think that's the joke.

But what is certain is that campaign money contributes to the GDP. It funds a lot of salaries.

This is the broken window fallacy. If you have two groups with diametrically opposed goals, giving them each more money to spend "increases GDP" in a local sense, but the result is that a bunch of people spend a lot of effort for a net result of zero, when it could have gone toward something useful.

I'd rather that money go to people instead of a faceless cryptofund. I think that's the joke.

Yeah, the crypto piece is just for additional silliness. For a real version of this you'd need, like, a spreadsheet with two columns.

If all proceeds went to charity, it could work as a snarky way to raise money for some other charity that’s boring but uncontroversial. It reminds me of the publicity stunts that Cards Against Humanity would do.

In all seriousness, this is an excellent idea.

> Add reporting for government agencies

Way ahead of you—we're licensing Praxis Vector™ technology to Palantir. Thiel didn't buy a board seat for nothing.

This is what lawyers are for. Instead of two companies actually competing, each spends a bunch of dollars on lawyers to fight in court. The one who spends the most dollars on lawyers wins.

Just to be clear, there is a lot of sarcasm here. But I think there is a bit of truth too.

cancel culture is a meaningless phrase , it's just culture.

"Cancel culture" may have been meaningless in the past, but now with the new Antidollars™, it literally exists.

    #include <original-post>

Life moves fast.

Culture 2.0 invokes meaningful change and collaboration on a scale never seen before. Protocols are faster, more robust, efficient by up to 35% versus previous generations. It’s the fastest we’ve ever produced and we didn’t stop there. We went deep to heart of the product to enhance even the most subtle of inefficiencies, rearchitecting the core from the ground up…

I suppose it's more that a culture that encourages actions that result in someone deemed unworthy experiencing negativity.

Read as: don't say anything, ever*, anywhere that isn't droll corp-speak, because somebody, somewhere will have an issue with it and try to take you to task. If that somebody has a lot of followers, you could be out of a job/home/country/freedom.

*trawling through post history et al to find narratives they don't agree with, too

yes, and they used to behead kings.

it's culture. culture shuns what it rejects and lifts up.

Shame is even ritualistic in some cultures.

it's definitely just a phrase used by the short end of the stick.

I'm sure there's a nuanced view of a culture that doesn't dive deep enough and mistakes some virtue and accidentally avoids something of value.

but ultimately, it's a term that's just respinniing what cultures do. they select memes and their purveyors and reject the to advance.

evolution works both as species and as culture. we, the advanced scientific community have dropped the idea that evolution moves towards some greater good and just acknowledge evolution is adaptation to environment.

lastly, culture is what people both adapt to and mold by their actions. with social media that's now basically an infinite fractal.

They used to behead kings. And very often what followed was beheading the people who behead kings. And then we'd behead those that would behead the people that beheaded the king.

A culture doesn't progress just because it changes. It is not uncommon for complex systems to undergo changes that make them self-destructive. You talk about evolution, but the reproductively dominant cell in a complex organism is the cancer cell.

It is entirely plausible that western culture would become non-viable because of "cancel(/r) culture". And that cultures of the future would look in it the same way we look at organisms with poor tumor suppression mechanisms. And that too shall be evolution.

> I suppose it's more that a culture that encourages actions that result in someone deemed unworthy experiencing negativity.

This sounds like most cultures in history. The majority of them have some sort of social shunning for people who act like a jerk (read: acts in ways society and culture have decided are jerkish)

> Read as: don't say anything, ever, anywhere that isn't droll corp-speak, because somebody, somewhere will have an issue with it and try to take you to task. If that somebody has a lot of followers, you could be out of a job/home/country/freedom.

this sounds like an exaggerated victim complex. Try it with "kittens are cute" and not something jerk-ish, and let's see if someone pops out of the woodwork to destroy your job/home/country/freedom.

"In my opinion, i don't believe that narrative is complete or correct" is enough to instigate a nasty backlash.

"kittens are cute" is droll corp-speak.

> "In my opinion, i don't believe that narrative is complete or correct" is enough to instigate a nasty backlash.

I don't think that is indeed enough to instigate a "nasty backlash" (read: people in society shunning you for jerk behavior) if the "narrative" is that kittens are cute, but certainly it'd be reasonable for society to shun someone who seems hateful. It certainly seems on its face to be a trollish statement (designed to inflame rather than understand), given that it omits any details.

> "kittens are cute" is droll corp-speak

Is it? According to who? I certainly don't think so. My corporation hasn't said that at any point. Are you sure you aren't using the term to mentally dismiss anything which disagrees with your theory?

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