After reading the article “Comments: Community and Indirect Incentives,” the reader raised the following question:
Reader:
This article explores how to solve the problem of uncertainty in user contributions in the Internet era and explores the design of Internet communities and incentive mechanisms.
The uncertainty of user contributions. The article mentions that the POP (average value per person) algorithm cannot effectively measure the contribution of each user because the user’s contribution is uncertain. In the past, some projects tried to describe user contributions through a point system, but too many points would cause user confusion. In contrast, the indirect reward mechanism proposed by Mr. Zhu can solve the incentive problem of uncertain behavior, similar to the salary system, which closely links the incentive design with the actual contribution of users.
Direct incentives and indirect incentives. Direct incentives, such as YouTube’s revenue distribution mechanism, are fair to a certain extent. Still, the top users (big V) often get most of the benefits, while the value of small content creators is ignored. The article believes that YouTube’s distribution method is similar to “piecework wages,” while indirect incentives are similar to “rank wages. ” This mechanism can better protect the interests of long-term contributors.
These two parts are apparent; I haven’t figured out the following.
New factors in the Internet – group owners and big Vs. The article points out that the Internet era has given birth to two new roles: group owners and big Vs. Group owners gain income by managing and serving groups, while big Vs accumulate fans through knowledge sharing. How to measure and motivate the contributions of these two roles has become an important issue in the design of Internet communities. That’s 2.0. Now, the main force of the Internet is the anchor; what are they? Big Vs. are Internet celebrities from the Twitter culture in the Weibo era.
Zhu’s answer:
Anchors are also big Vs, and we use fans when evaluating.
Reader:
Community civilization and decentralization. The article cites Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin system as an example to illustrate the decentralized nature of the Internet. Unlike traditional centralized platforms, the Bitcoin system relies on collective decision-making by the community rather than corporate management. The article believes that this decentralized community structure is more in line with the characteristics of the Internet. It proposes that the community should also be the core of platform projects. A healthy ecology should be built by introducing indirect incentives and community governance mechanisms. The bond of the cryptocurrency community is “coin.” Points can measure the contribution of coin holders, number of group members, and number of fans. Through the design of 12 levels, contributors in the community can obtain indirect incentives similar to job-grade wages. This mechanism expands the application scope of the traditional “company” mechanism and takes the community as the highest decision-making mechanism of the project. It is very different from the Bitcoin community.
Zhu’s answer:
Yes. The Bitcoin system is not a platform, and users are not part of it, just as people who hold gold have no direct relationship with the gold mining industry. The platform is different, and the addition of users directly increases the value of the project. So, we need to improve the Bitcoin community further.
Reader:
Regarding the summary and outlook, the article finally discusses the revolutionary characteristics of the Internet era and believes that building a community with coins as the bond and introducing an indirect incentive mechanism may be a direction to solve the problem raised by Kevin Kelly. The community concept proposed by Mr. Zhu defines the core characteristics of Internet civilization as “community civilization,” which is a path for Internet development with the community as the core. We haven’t discussed it thoroughly here. Compared with traditional industrial and agricultural civilizations, “community civilization” should be a “virtual community civilization,” emphasizing decentralization, collaboration, and group operation based on interests, values or some common interests in the Internet space.
Zhu’s answer:
This article is short and unclear. Readers can refer to the “Invite Satoshi Nakamoto to Welcome the New World Series” on the Chainless website, 16-5 Conquer the world but not Possession the world; Postscript: The new world needs a financial scale with an unchanging ruler, Comment: Summary of the innovation of production relations in the Chainless system. I’m afraid I have to disagree with the statement about virtual currency and virtual community. It is the statement made in the early years when the laws and characteristics of Bitcoin and the community were not clear. Now, Bitcoin is considered a stored-value currency, and there is no mention of a virtual community in the cryptocurrency community. There is a virtual community as a game, which is fundamentally different from the community here.
Reader:
This civilization is a product of the development of the Internet and technological progress. The core is decentralization, and our relationship with decentralization is still vague, which differs from the top-down pyramid structure in traditional societies and enterprises. In community civilization, every member can be an equal contributor, and the distribution of power and resources is determined by the consensus mechanism within the community rather than controlled by a single centralized entity. It is entirely different from the fixed rules of centralization. The emergence of Bitcoin and blockchain technology typically represents this concept. They have achieved decentralized trust and value transfer through distributed ledgers and consensus mechanisms and faced voting system problems such as forks.
The community is a collaboration based on shared interests or common goals. In this civilization, members gather to form a community because of shared beliefs, interests, or goals. Collaboration within the community is not just for economic benefits but, more often, for realizing common ideals or visions. This collaborative relationship goes beyond the traditional market exchange relationship and emphasizes sharing, co-construction, and win-win. How should these be motivated? Suppose our plan only considers the fairness of interest distribution. In that case, it is unable to cover the needs of this group of people. In community civilization, users are not only consumers of services but also creators of content and value. Internet platforms such as TikTok and YouTube stimulate users’ creativity through community mechanisms, allowing each user to contribute content, knowledge, or other forms of value. This contribution is often fed back and recognized through likes, shares, comments, forwarding, etc., forming a self-driven value creation cycle. It directly reflects the interests and popularity of Internet celebrities, which is no less than that of celebrities.
They have also been capitalized one after another. There was Kardashian before and Dong Yuhui after. What technical support can the chainless community provide to our potential Internet celebrities? The incentive mechanism that should be emphasized should be more diversified, including both direct economic incentives and non-economic incentives such as reputation, influence, and recognition. This new incentive mechanism uses points, levels, virtual currencies, etc., to effectively measure and reward users’ contributions, encouraging more participation and contribution. Self-governance and democratic decision-making, the governance of community civilization, often bottom-up, emphasizes democratic participation and collective decision-making. Community members decide the rules and development direction of the community through voting, discussion, consensus, etc.
This governance model makes the community more flexible and adaptable and can better reflect members’ wishes. If we position ourselves as a community based on currency, will this restrict us? Community civilization represents a new social organization, gradually formed under the impetus of the Internet and new technologies. Community civilization pays more attention to individual participation and interaction than previous forms of civilization, so incentives are significant. The fundamentals of incentives are the fair distribution of currency and the large circulation. Otherwise, it will not motivate people if you can’t cash out the currency.
Overall, by comparing the traditional incentive mechanism with the indirect incentive mechanism proposed by Mr. Zhu, the article explores how to effectively deal with the uncertainty and unfair distribution of user contributions through the innovative design of community and incentive mechanisms in the Internet era. At present, chainless already has a community. It will be easier to understand if these issues can be combined with the actual operation of the community.
Zhu’s answer:
Communities are divided into interest communities, benefit communities, and belief communities. Chainless communities are proposed with reference to the practice of cryptocurrency. The characteristics of this type of community are that coin is the bond, and the nature of different communities is different. With coin as the bond, it is mainly manifested as a benefit community. Of course, faith and interest will also be used. Faith communities are broad and often do not necessarily have a definite organizational form, such as religion. Communities must be diverse and have various creations. Community civilization began on January 9, 2009. It still has a long way to go and needs practice from all parties. The exploration of the Industrial Revolution took 400 years.
Reader:
Mr. Zhu: There are two core thoughts about the community. 1. Using big V group owners to build a community somewhat differs from the current mainstream model. In addition to text and video, live broadcasting is also the main form of the current community. MCN jointly creates the live broadcast room and is responsible for content and promotion, customer service, Internet celebrities, and the platform. This intermediate platform has an algorithm, and it also has offline support and traffic support. How can an ownerless community compete with a centralized platform? Twitter can block Trump and can also use traffic to support Kardashian. Then, who can decide who the platform should help in our community? MCN can also buy traffic for Internet celebrities; what about us? In addition to the basic robot automatic reply, the platform provides dedicated software for offline customer service to help them quickly reply and interact. Also, it includes traffic analysis to MCN so that you can clearly know where and what kind of people are watching your content, paying for you, and unfollowing you. What can my group owner get? The community platform must reach this level to be considered 2.0 standard, and the entry-level 3.0 should be better. Just the big V and group owner remind people of the era of Weibo and Zhihu.
Zhu’s answer:
The definition of big V includes anchors. The difference is that TikTok and other platforms are aimed at unfamiliar markets. In contrast, chainless big Vs are aimed at unfamiliar and community markets. There are also centralized platforms controlling unfamiliar markets because they need to earn the main profit. How does the exchange make a profit? Earn the transaction price difference. It is fair. In the current platforms, such as Tktok and YouTube, is there a concept of group owner? Customers are scattered soldiers and guerrillas. With group owners, big Vs will prioritize private domains. The private domain is the community where the big V is. He gets dividends in the community and will be subject to dual constraints from the core team of the community and the group owner. It needs to be further explored in practice.
The model of the chainless community is to earn the price difference, and the private domain is the “acquaintance” market to earn conscience money. The interference of chainless platforms is like the landlord of exchanges and free markets, which is only responsible for maintaining basic order. Now the traffic is supported, whoever does well they support? When you invest in advertising, I will help you, which is a violation of fair rules. Bribing government officials to get benefits is a crime. Isn’t it a “bribe” for the platform to do this? Google clearly marks which information is an advertisement, and YouTube has five seconds to turn off advertisements, which is much fairer. For a community to survive, the first thing is to maintain fairness and justice and then be open and transparent. Of course, freedom of speech has limits; freedom of opinion must be protected, and harming others will be prohibited. What is harm? At least within the scope of social morality.
Reader:
2. Regarding indirect incentives, points and cash are less stimulating and real than traffic incentives for content makers. Under the phenomenon of Internet celebrities, the most desired incentive is to be popular, to be on the hot search on Weibo, and to be the first on the list on TikTok. Our indirect incentives must consider traffic. Most content makers want traffic support.
Professional MCNs include screening, incubation, content development, technical support for self-content platforms, continuous creativity, user management, platform resource docking, event operation, commercialization and cooperation, sub-IP development, etc. A series of chains and complicated work, which are difficult for non-professionals to coordinate in place in a systematic manner. A mature short video MCN organization has professional content production capabilities, content distribution capabilities, full network marketing capabilities, fan management capabilities, and even data analysis capabilities that can comprehensively assess content producers, helping content creators to incubate IP and commercialize. The professionalism of operations has become the key to the success of MCN organizations in the fiercely competitive short video field.
Zhu’s answer:
Yes. But it is not the platform’s job; it is the job of Big V himself.
Reader:
I also missed the live broadcast room’s e-commerce function. I remember that you regard e-commerce as an important business.
Zhu’s answer:
Chainless Community is a financial e-commerce site, and the Chainless White Paper provides an example of financial e-commerce. Simply put, financial products need to be explained and credited. Selling this type of product is not as simple as selling physical products. The community will be very cautious when selecting products. It is the joint work of the core team, Big V, and the group owner. The specific method is explained in Chapter 3 of the white paper.
