Your criticisms do not hit far from the mark. Bitcoin people certainly have this problem of talking about the thing rather than using it.
A forum about democracy that uses many different kinds of voting (eg ranked choice, cumulative, limited) might turn up some interesting ways to apply voting to things outside the forum.
Why hate on the people who love the euro? Maybe euro.news would be a great forum!
No problem! I was actually going to link to it in my post, but MelonLand is closed on Mondays, so it’ll have to wait 
I actually think this is an interesting concept with some merit so long as the currency wasn’t real world money. You’re right; it does sound like a horrible place just based off the concept, but that’s mostly because most people (perhaps rightly) think of money as a corrupting force. In most modern societies, money means power. And absolute power corrupts absolutely. But if it were replaced with a social currency? I could see it working.
For example, let’s use donuts as a stand-in. A new member of the forum get to make say… three posts with no cost, but after that needs donuts to make more. You receive donuts from upvotes that come directly from another user’s balance. That, to me, doesn’t sound nearly as dangerous or susceptible to bias or abuse. It removes some of the “pay-to-win” aspect of it. This version comes with its own issues, obviously, but I think those issues are perhaps easier to resolve than the ones inherent to the original.
Either way, I think it’s an interesting idea and one we can learn a lot from. I’d like to watch it evolve over the long-term and see if our predictions on culture would pan out the way we think.
That would make more sense to me. I regard cryptocurrency as inherently untrustworthy. I did my own research, and as far as I can tell Bitcoin and friends are nothing but privately issued fiat currency. At least US dollars are backed by the “full faith and credit of the United States government”. Bitcoin’s backed by nothing but dudes in hoodies saying, “Trust me, bro.”
The more trivial the cost, the more that would run counter to what you describe as “skin in the game.” @memo and @xixxii are right to point out that a posting fee doesn’t necessarily deter scammers, sock puppets, and spam. A lower price also doesn’t deal with the problem that bigger spenders get rewarded with more influence, which is socially undesirable to those of us with no particular faith in such people.
Even setting the money factor aside, I have a dim view of upvote-based features for reasons I’ve described previously in my post about Bubbles.
Re: Bitcoin… That would explain some things. Cryptocurrency libertarians do have a noted tendency to try and solve social problems by turning everything into a market.
For a little insight into my outlook on that whole scene I recommend reading The Disastrous Voyage of Satoshi.
fwiw what you just described would be vulnerable to a sybil attack where people could create new accounts and like their original account’s comments.
I will point you to the existence of Something Awful, where it costs money to create an account and often to access certain parts. And if you get banned, you can theoretically buy another account and come back. I can’t say this barrier to entry has ever ‘improved’ the experience on the forum.
I can tell you right now, I wouldn’t be using a service like that. Most people wouldn’t. The people that would are the people with money that believe their money is proof of their validity and they will pay to ensure their voice is the loudest in the room. It completely drowns the voice of anyone without means and will only devolve into echo chambers to elevate the most affluent of the community.
As spoken by others, I will also impress upon you that money has never stopped the formation of bots. Bot farms already make large amounts of money and they will gladly pay a pittance if it give them visibility and viability. They’re already doing that on X.
The more trivial the cost, the more that would run counter to what you describe as “skin in the game”
I wonder if this is the case. There are some number of bots and spammers who don’t will fall away just by the fact that there is a pay-to-post gate (regardless of the cost). Then the pay to post fee just needs to be enough to reduce their margin to the point where spamming doesn’t pencil. I expect this isn’t as high as we think.
On the platform I am describing, different subs/categories are priced differently. The ~privacy category is comparatively expensive ($0.60) while the ~lol category is cheaper. Replying to a post is generally much cheaper than starting a new topic. So we tend to see more bots in the replies than making actual posts/topics.
The forum has also experienced a few waves of big spenders coming in and trying to influence things. Because their spending usually ends up getting dispersed among the most active users, it didn’t end up being as disruptive as you might think. In February, we had a couple people who really wanted to talk about politics and the various wars going on, while most of the forum is only interested in technical/software development discussion. The result was that the politics people ended up paying the rest of us in order to take up some of the most visible space. It lasted for a week or so and I think I made $100. I didn’t mind putting up with it. (we also have a mute button).
I’ve been using the forum since 2021, and I don’t think it has felt like people try to drown out others with their money. Bot farms are difficult to deal with. The above proposal is an attempt to set up incentives so that bots find it more difficult to make money. One thing I’ve noticed is that when users are tricked by bots and upvote them, it does press their accelerator. So one clear weakness of this system is if there are users who don’t discern the difference between slop and human posts (or who actually like the bots).
Also, the people (or bots) who spend a lot to get seen, end up paying the people who they are trying to gain visibility over. If someone spends $10 to put their post at the top of the home page, active users split most of the $10 among themselves at the end of the day.
There is also a decay where the value of money spent on visibility is halved ever 4 hours. This leads to a fairly rapid reduction in visibility.
I’ve been on the internet a long time and I’ve seen the way paid incentives have ruined and influenced services like Etsy, X, and YouTube (The services I list are the services I have used, there are more examples out there of services I do not use so I cannot speak on them). It drowns out the voices of the marginalized, because they often do not have the money to compete. As many of us here have said, we wouldn’t use such a service.
Currently, the only saving grace for your forum is that it is not nearly the scale of the other services I am referring to.
This is your first time on our forum, I recommend you take a look around and you will see that we do not exactly have a ‘bot problem’ and we have complex and varying conversation here, without need for money to influence the conversation. I don’t think anything would be improved by switching to any amount of ‘pay-per-post’ system. Nor would I ever wish to use it in any community I construct.
While money distorts many things, it also plays a significant role in many of the systems humans have created (flawed, sure, but there is also some good there). If money can help us allocate resources in the food system, perhaps it could also help us allocate attention on a shared forum space?
I feel like the premise of “let the rich allocate what gets attention” is just not an appealing system. You said this has already happened on the forums, but you were okay with it because you got money for it. In other words, you were paid to allocate your attention to politics you otherwise wouldn’t have paid attention to. This feels ripe for the rich to essentially propagandize things that, typically, result in them holding (or further accruing) power… which they already do, this forum just does it more nakedly.
(I also don’t think we need markets to allocate food at this point either, and in fact the profit motive is the reason we haven’t yet solved hunger globally)
This is a fascinating idea to think about.
My initial reaction — like many here have expressed — is that it sounds like a bad system.
There are two floating ideas: one where external money comes in and another where the money is not real but rather internal currency that floats around in closed economy within the forum. I’m also presenting a third related option: pay-to-join.
It sounds like the forum you’re part of works for your community so I can’t really argue against that. With the benefits you listed, I’m wondering how much of that is actually due to the money and how much about people who decide to participate — ie. would that forum still work like this if it didn’t cost money to participate?
Question about that @scoresby
Does that money stay in the system to use for posting/upvoting or can you cash it out? Does money flow only in or also out?
The pay-to-participate system immediately runs into the problem of giving more power to people with more money to decide what is posted and what posts float to the top through up/downvotes. That’s how a lot of our society works and at least I’m personally more interested in fighting the system than promoting it.
On an idealistic level, this could work. In a world where money is allocated (in this case, upvoted) based on real merit and not for advertising, propaganda and helping out your friends, I could see a case where these micropayments encourage quality over slop. In the real life, I’m not so optimistic.
And in that ideal world, I don’t think we’d need to use the money as a moderation tool. It could be used as an incentive for good participation but if people were already committed to pushing quality up, I don’t think gatekeeping with money to enter would be necessary.
Like some have pointed out: if the fee for entry/posting/upvoting is too high, you keep out people who could be great contributors but can’t afford to pay for it and invite in people who can pay to get their message out there. If the fee is low enough, there’s incentive for bots and scams to pay little to fill the forum with their message and make more than it costs. We already know from all the bot networks that it’s not about the cost but the cost/benefit ratio that determines if something is worthy. And if money is the only moderator in the forum, there’s nothing to stop someone like that from taking advantage until the forum dies.
Second case that was brought up is not using real money for entry or posting but entry to forum earns you some amount of tokens or credit you can use.
I think a lot of the concerns from first case still hold here: a group of people/bots/alts can push their message through by circulating the currency within themselves by posting and upvoting each other. Even if it’s not a criminal type of scam, these kinds of popularity contests can make it very lucrative to form these cliques and people who are not popular or have a group of friends in the forum might never get popular enough to see their posts climb the ladder.
Any forum that uses upvote algorithms to rank posts is deemed to suffer from this — economy involved or not. In my opinion the Discourse / phpBB style classic forum is way better approach where you can browse most recent by category/subforum. It requires human moderation to keep spammers and scammers out but for real contributors, I believe it’s better than popularity contests.
Of course, there are also forums that require fee to entry. Every forum that is a membership perk for any sort of paid membership fall into this category.
This is a bit tangential to the original topic as here it’s not the money that’s doing moderation but rather barrier to entry. Since we were discussing forums and money, I figured I’d bring it up as an option where money is involved but it’s not running the internal hierarchy of contribution.
I haven’t run into forums like these in the past but if I did, I wouldn’t join. I don’t believe money would be a better moderation tool than building a team of compassionate, emphatetic humans who care about fairness. Gatekeeping access to discussions and knowledge through money is very much against my values of openly sharing as much as possible to benefit everyone regardless of their financial or social status.
Thanks for this thoughtful reply.
First to answer your question:
> Does that money stay in the system to use for posting/upvoting or can you cash it out?
You can cash out. I paid for the esim I’m currently using with money I got from the forum.
Let’s say the goal is to have a forum where leadership is not responsible for moderating the content. This may be desirable because “building a team of compassionate, empathetic humans who care about fairness” is actually impossible – not because such humans do not exist, but because we are all different.
What I consider mods dealing fairly with some post may be seen as quite unfair by other members of the community. It is one of the central problems of social media that we are such different people that we don’t know what it is good and right in all cases.
I’m not making the case that everything is entirely subjective (there are behaviors that are shit and no one should tolerate), but I think the middle ground is far larger than most of us suspect and I don’t believe it’s reasonable to expect a mod to be a saint.
So, it might be the case that forums should just be built around like-minded people who all somewhat agree on how moderation should occur – and I think this is where many of the forums on the internet are today.
But, if you look on the fringes of those forums, I suspect you will find rather a large group of people who don’t feel like the forum moderation treated them fairly – largely because the process is opaque and full of uncertainty for the user.
The system I’m proposing isn’t necessarily better at promoting good content or excluding awful people, but it might be able to deliver enough moderation in a highly transparent way such that people are willing to put up with the rough edges.
I’m fascinated by the fact that you seem to think it’s better for the rich to run the forum and that it would somehow be “fairer” than moderators who are human.
As a hypothetical example: do you think that if someone uses their money to post and upvote really heinous content to the top, the better option than having imperfect human moderation is to require everyone else to pay to push it down?
I agree and I believe those happen in every forum that has moderation. Someone who is being moderated (by removing their posts or banning them for example) will be salty about it, regardless of whether they did right or wrong because they obviously think they were in the right.
I’m just having a real hard time seeing that money would be the fair solution to the problem. You don’t need to have a long look into the state of the world and how wealth is distributed to see that there’s a lot less fairness there than in human moderation decisions.
What are the benefits of “transparency” in such system? Someone (or a group of someones) with more money than you (or your group of people) can moderate your actions on a whim. I think that most well operated forums have more transparency (for example, rules and following them and opportunity to appeal) in moderation decisions than “we don’t like you so we paid more” system. Am I missing something here?
Any system where the only way to have an opportunity falls under “don’t be poor” is not a very good system in my opinion. Even if it’s transparent on who paid you out.
I’d rather be entirely solitary online and shout at the void from my own website than put up with the sort of forums you have in mind, or a space like Stacker News. There are reasons I don’t frequent HN, and one of them is that I see parallels with your reasoning and the sort of reasoning that most frequently gets praised on HN.
if someone uses their money to post and upvote really heinous content to the top
We’ve had this happen twice (honestly, not really heinous, but self-aggrandizing or strongly off-topic and fairly unpleasant content). In both cases, the users who were attempting this lost interest fairly quickly (about a week?) and all the other users made money (because all the money the person was paying went to the community rewards pool). Most people muted the posts they didn’t like to see and continued to use the site as if the self-aggrandizer wasn’t there.
It takes less than $5 to get a post to the top of the front page, and a user could probably keep it there for less than $20 a day, unless the other users really wanted to make a point by trying to downvote it. But, yes, some rich person could easily try to dominate the front page. In that event, I expect most users would mute them (which in our case means you don’t see their content).
You don’t need to have a long look into the state of the world and how wealth is distributed to see that there’s a lot less fairness there than in human moderation decisions.
I don’t see why this is true. If we recognize that there is massive inequality in the distribution of wealth why would we assume there is not such inequality in the distribution of the power to moderate? Are wealthy people more or less likely to own and operate widely-used forums?
What are the benefits of “transparency” in such a system?
I find it strangely soothing to know why things happen. Things like shadow bans and getting hidden by moderators are pretty horrible experiences. I think we may agree that closed source algorithms as used by things like Twitter and Instagram are even worse than moderators, but having done some moderation in my life, I feel that it is very easy to be too busy to explain to a user what is going on (also considering the user may have strong emotions around what is going on).
I would be curious for your thoughts about what sort of tests I might run to discern whether this system is treating people unfairly.
Once again just my values and opinion, but I wouldn’t be comfortable contributing to a forum (even if I got money from it) if to the outside or new member who hasn’t muted something, really bad stuff would be on the top. I wouldn’t want to be associated with such forum in any way.
I’m maybe thinking it from a narrower perspective but outside the big social media advertisement platforms like X, Reddit, TikTok and the like, I don’t think money is the source or motivator for power. I don’t know anything about the ownership or moderator structure of 32-Bit Cafe but I doubt that having money is a big factor in who is a moderator here — if I’m wrong, someone from the forum can correct me.
Power dynamics are always there, sure. Quite often, the people who start the forum, start with themselves as the rule maker and maybe a small group of moderators who are their friends or trusted people. Then they choose who gets to join or has to leave that group that holds power.
It becomes a question of what kind of a community you want to join. You can look at how the community operates, how transparent their decision making and moderator selection is and decide if you think it’s a good model that fits your values and desires.
I agree on the second part but if someone spends money to shut you down, do you know why it happens? What’s the difference between a moderator doing moderation or another user spending money to do moderation in terms of the transparency? That’s what I don’t quite understand.
For me, it would suck way more if I couldn’t participate in a forum knowing that the only reason is that I’m not rich enough. That has nothing to do with my behaviour or my contributions, just how much wealth I have amassed and can use in such system instead of having to use it to buy food and medicine and paying rent.
That’s not to say that human moderation decisions can’t be horrible, wrong and non-transparent. They absolutely can. I’m still a bit salty for some forums that decided to shadow ban or kick me out back in the day. I don’t think I would feel less salty if the reason was “I have more money than you”.
To me, this kind of system sounds like a “might makes right” type of system where “might” is wealth. Not a system of rules or commonly agreed guidelines. Just money. And don’t get me wrong, I am privileged in my wealth (working in tech kinda does that) so I’m not worried about my own ability to participate. But I have learned from the societies around us globally that limiting access or giving more power based on money is not a very good way to build society.
Wealth has such strong connection with things like inheritance and privilege that it closes the gate to a lot of people with no fault of their own. It’s of course more important to fix on a societal level than a web forum but I do think that small things like these matter and influence how we participate and thus form the society. I’m a strong advocate of open access to knowledge, contribution and influence.
I would look at who are being excluded from participating and if that exclusion has an effect to their future standing in society (for example, through gaining knowledge, making connections, gaining visibility/influence/etc). Does the access through wealth increase the opportunities of the wealthy because they can buy their way into the top with contributions that are of less quality than someone who can’t pay the gatekeeper.
I’m hoping this post collects the rest of my thoughts on the idea. There might be some overlap with my anarchist cybernetics post above.
Alright, I think we need to backup a second and ask ourselves: “What is the point of moderation?” This is a question I’ve thought about before, where I posited this list:
You’ll notice that, of these, they are all about removing content (apart from 5 which is about labelling). I think it’s important that we’re all on the same page that moderation is not about “promoting good content” - good content is the default (and moralizing content in this way, and turning moderators into curators, only heightens my later argument about normative moderation). People join forums and other communities to participate within them. There’s sometimes a level of gamification, like discourse employs, but I don’t consider that moderation and further I don’t think socializing is the kind of thing we should be attaching extrinsic motivation to, as intrinsic motivation is fine and those extrinsic motivators can lead to dark patterns (like the badges for consecutive days logged in >.>).
I also don’t say “banning”, “punishing”, or “excluding” in any of the items. As I mentioned before, I share your desire to decentralize power (even if we disagree on whether using wealth is a meaningful way to do so - and in your last post it seems you shifted the goalpost towards transparency rather than decentralization, but I don’t see stacker news delivering well in that regard either). I’m also generally against punitive justice and a supporter of restorative justice. So rather than “excluding people”, I think moderation should be more about preventing harm rather than punishing people - and when punishments are used, they shouldn’t be permanent.
Its easy for the biases of the team to lead to conservative governance, as described by Wilhoit as “There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” This can create a highly normative community, like you allude to when discussing the fringes of community. Moderation should generally be tolerant of the diversity of a community and allow for “rough edges”. In fact, I think a lot of the small web is about supporting diversity and trying to avoid the homogenization and normativities (esp neuronormativity) enforced by the big web.
A lot of communities today also operate under “benevolent dictator for life” governance, esp when the infrastructure for the site is owned by one person. Even one of my favorite small web communities, omg.lol, falls under this description (Andy does seem like a lovely steward though). It causes not only the potential for misuse of moderation tools, opague rules people must follow, but also creates a community with a bus factor of 1!
The solution to all of this doesn’t mean moving to a wealth-moderated community, though. That moderator-less community is actually still susceptible to conservative moderation (I highly recommend reading “The tyranny of structurelessness” for more on this). It still has infrastructure owned by a single person. It can still be highly normative, just one where instead of deputized moderators, you’re pressured by everyone richer than you instead. (you mention the fringe being put upon by traditional moderation but did nothing to help the situation for those who are both fringe and poor)
To be clear, I’m not going to suggest I have the definitive answer for how decentralized moderation ought to look (although I do have ideas), but I strongly believe what stacker news has is worse than centralized moderation in terms of safety, inclusion, and protection from harm. After all, a visibility ranking algorithm does not set out with those goals in mind, and moderation of any kind does. In general, I think it would be better to encourage places to simply adopt more egalitarian forms of governance, including ownership of the commons (the site’s infrastructure). That was the reason I linked to anarchist cybernetics from the get-go.
I do not like stratifying the userbase where the richer get access to the more premium/highly visible parts of the site.
Good point! If someone tells me they visit 4chan, their insistence that they don’t browse /pol or /b will do little to quell my judgement.
I agree so much with this, and it helps me understand why I had an instinctively negative reaction to this statement:
I don’t think it’s healthy for online communities to be built around “people who agree on things”. I’m on this forum because I have a website and a home server, not because of my beliefs, which, I very much hope, are not the exact same as those of other people I interact with here. Including on the topic of moderation.
Great point about upvoting not being the job of moderators, too – on platforms where it exists, it’s user-driven, so two different things are being discussed here even if they’re being handled similarly in Bitcoin Ancap Utopia. (Fwiw, I think the upvote system is hellish but I have similar feelings about many of the “modern” features of Discourse.)