Sure thing, thanks for taking an interest. And yeah, that sounds about right. Although my dream is to gradually push this into the hands of some kind of meritocratic collective ownership, where the "workers" own the "means of production", which in this case would be the students/activists being able to fork the data, app code, and devops for free at any time.

RE ponzi scheme... hmmm... so when a Patron makes a $10 contribution, they can then choose which user receives half of their contribution. I wonder how to prevent the perception from turning Ponzi with this model...

Meritocratic -> You could look at postings/content as "points" and then keep a running tally and let people use their "points" for things. Medium does this AFAIK (although apparently they turn them into dollars for their pro authors).

HN just uses karma points for moderation/access so its not quite as handy but I think people respect people with lots of Karma. Like I know there's one person with over 300k karma points here, he's a pretty cool dude and I think his points reflect that.

Love this. Thank you.

My "cobbled together" implementation is as follows: every user begins with a fixed number of "bolts"; they can unlock more bolts through various "virtuous deeds" (TBD), or they can earn bolts through their comments/posts; their general "bolt throughput" is a proxy to how much "karma" they've earned and given to others.

Though this was cobbled together without any real understanding of behavioral economics and with a whole bunch of untested assumptions, so as it evolves, I'll have to study the tried-and-tested models of Medium, Reddit, HN, and think about what works, what doesn't, what Karma users need/want, and then innovate upon that assessment if needed. I have some thoughts on that but I'm still battling some stability dragons over here...

Thanks again for poking around and helping out.