The people who won the award the most were the ones that upvoted all the memes and blogspam.

My point of this is not to discourage you, but to warn you that the way you've described your platform, the most "profitable" thing to do is not upvote good content but upvote the content you'll think the most people will upvote. So you'll need to adjust for that.

If you make a platform 100% free and open, it will encourage low quality participants. The network effect often stops paid sites from starting, but the rewards are there if you can somehow otherwise select only for a mature audience.

Maybe it didn't work that way in the past, maybe it won't in the future, but the current environment seems to be very much like how the parent poster described it.

A variation on representative democracy would be to have a recommender system identify demographics, and then to weight each demographic equally. So, for example, the votes from the "blogspam fan" demographic would be normalized to one, to fairly compete for representation with the much smaller "long thinkpiece fan" demographic.

Another solution would be quadratic voting, where you can vote once for free, but the nth vote would cost (n-1)^2 reputation points. That would allow established community members to express their intense dislike of certain content, to balance out the larger population's mild preferences.

It would be pretty cool if there was Reddit, but each subreddit could implement a different voting system. We might see a lot of progress and experimentation.

My understanding from Walsh was that the problem was essentially an economics problem—you want to incentivize good behavior and deincentivize bad behavior—and once you understood this you could use the network to correct itself, essentially saying “if you use your upvotes like the typical user does then the typical user will trust you, if you use your upvotes like the typical spammer does then you’ll instead end up in a clique with typical spammers.”

Some googling reveals that the page is still alive on cornell.edu [1].

[1] http://www.cs.cornell.edu/people/egs/credence/

You've made me uncomfortable, so... thanks, I guess?

I wrote some thoughts in this vein a while ago funnily enough

I think the shorting will help with this, but I think the more critical thing is getting the initial community right to set expectations of what's upvoteworthy. Kind of how y'all started reddit around a programming community.

If I understand the premise, what you’re trying to avoid is a hub effect (the rich getting richer) becuase traditionally users see messages already curated (e.g. with highest upvotes) and the idea is to replace that with an incentive for discovering new content.

Unless you have a way to define new content, wont you run into the same problem but now with $ tokens? E.g. one of the most upvoted news from HN is “Steve Jobs has died”. I imagine even on your system users would assume this would raise to the top and would buy a lot of “shares”, so it becomes more of a game of “predicting what will be further upvoted / echo chambered”. Am I missing something?

Again, exciting project nevertheless.

Coincidentally, this is a problem in real markets that the invisible hand does not solve, either. Economic success is to large degree predicated on being fastest to market, as well.

Online, the outcome is attention inequality instead of revenue or wealth inequality. In real markets, that's when government has to step in and regulate. What equivalent is there for a content aggregator? Moderators? Curators?

I would say this is likely a sign that content aggregation sites have - in democratising content curation - finally come full circle with the curated content of old in the form of magazines and the like. Maybe there is something to be said for leaving the curation to the pros after all, or considering the limitations to the wisdom of crowds.

There's still a threat from meme-worthy content though. Honestly, I think this comes down to the initial community setting expectations that meme-worthy content will be shorted into oblivion, and reinforcing that culture.

Basically, my thought is that I know I can follow something like the reddiquette, or the HN rules. I'm certainly not perfect, but I don't downvote when I disagree, and I don't upvote when I agree, and I try to not make unsubstantive comments. Reddit and HN maybe used to follow this when they were very small, but as sites grow the rules always fall to the wayside.

The fix would be that you as the founder, and the X amount of friends that you know and trust, serve as a baseline for the ranking system. If someone downvotes a post that the trusted group upvotes, their influence on the site goes down as a result. Likewise, if someone upvotes the posts that you vote, their influence goes up.

You can't actually use the E-L-O system for this, as far as I'm aware, because it's not a zero-sum game. But the basic idea is that you take a known group of good actors and give users voting influence based on how similar they are to the good actors, and if you can't follow the rules (by acting similarly), you basically lose all influence on the site.

- when you upvote an item, everyone else who upvoted the item before you earns some amount of your trust

- the more of your trust someone has earned - the more weight their other upvoted items get for you

- each time they upvote, they put some amount of your trust on that item; so if you stop liking their recommendations the amount of your trust they have will go down over time

- when you downvote an item, you take away your trust from people who upvoted it; they've shown that they are not good curators of content for you, so their upvotes will have less weight for you

In this system you end up paying attention to people who have proven to you to be good curators of content. It optimizes for high signal to noise ratio, where what is signal and what is noise if up to you to decide with your upvotes. We don't have to all agree on what is globally "upvoteworthy".

There is no global reputation system (which can be gamed). Instead, there is a peer-to-peer trust system.

If you are interested in a system like that, then I would like to invite you to my hobby project that works exactly this way. Register with a temporary account (no email required) at https://linklonk.com/register and use code 'hn'.

It is early days and we don't have many users yet. To supplement real users LinkLonk supports RSS feeds as sources of information. Each feed behaves much like a user - the more you upvote content from it, the higher ranked its other entries will be for you. I hope you will find it useful and I'm looking to hear your feedback.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

You seed the influence system with known good actors. Users who vote similarly to these good actors get an increased influence weight and so on. You can apply the PageRank algorithm to any graph, and this case the graph is the relation between up votes of other users.

This can work better than Elo rating because you can have disjoint seed actors serving sparsely connected (or completely disjoint) regions of your influence graph.

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20190404134937/http://newsconomy....

[2] http://web.archive.org/web/20190423090552/http://nickmudge.i...

[3] https://dev.to/mudgen

I could imagine one mechanism is that you make bets on how popular content will be, and get rewarded if it is popular (number of clicks, comments, etc.) ie popularity handicapping.

What do you do with the rewards of your bets? Maybe allow you to bump stuff to the main page? Promote content? I couldn't imagine paying for this, however.

Alternatively, you could use the mechanism to identify people who are good at identifying interesting content, and having a leaderboard of people who find cool shit. That might be monetizeable.

Basically at any point the cost in USD/other of creating an upvote is a function of the existing number of upvotes and downvotes. Eg if a piece of content has 3 upvotes, the cost to create another new upvote might be $0.07, but if the content as 100 upvotes, that cost might be $1.40. Equally at any point, you can "sell" your upvote at that same cost ($0.07 @ 3, $1.40 @ 100). The way the maths works out means that finances are conserved, so the investment return for selling comes from the market itselm.

In terms of rewards, I was thinking actual money, just in very small amounts. People love speculating on markets so i think it's feasible.

Sorry if I'm misunderstanding this, but am I'm selling my shares to other users to recoup my investment? Why would other users be interesting in buying my shares of an article that was on the "front page" 3 days ago?

My questions:

1) How do you plan on getting content from reddit/twitter/hackernews? Are there api's for this or do you plan to scrape?

2) Would other social sites have issues with you using their content in your social stock market, and possibly profiting from it?

3) Would it be possible for a social network to cut you off and kill your business? For Example: Reddit realized that they are losing traffic because more people are going to [yourSite].com to view Reddit content so they sue you.

How about checking algorithmically how reliable users are, and weighting their votes that way? The manual redemption of correct-upvotes and acquisition of downvote-shares seems a bit much in my view.

I remember back in the days of kuro5hin there was reputation, you could earn reputation with thoughtful comments and then good reputation would mean more visibility for your posts. Has that proven to be a horrible approach? Are there communities that work this way now?

There's some cryptocurrency communities that use some interesting incentive mechanism in that upvotes have real-world value[0], but the problem is that the content is incredibly cryptocurrency biased rather than anything of general interest

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steemit

- high quality scientific papers, instead of relying on the existing journal gatekeepers. Once again hopefully moving the incentive needle towards quality over volume

- emerging threats or risks that may not be obvious until it’s too late. Eg asbestos, the effect of social media on adolescent development, leaded petrol

- promising pre-investment startups

- Frankly, anything that currently uses crowdsourced rating - restaurants, accomodation, bands, services businesses etc etc