Since the early days of the internet, there has been a constant movement of people, from mailing boards to Facebook and Reddit. Eternal September keeps chasing out the best who are then followed by the rest with the process now repeating.
Although Facebook is one of the biggest companies on earth, few think it is cool – your mom is on it. Meanwhile, Reddit, itself a product of an exodus from Digg, has brought to the forefront a serious problem, private sector censorship of free speech.
The duo of Daniel Larimer and Ned Scott , the former a techy, the latter from the world of finance, think they have a solution, Steemit . The blockchain-powered platform is a mixture between medium and reddit where users are paid for voting and posting in a new currency called steem, currently valued at around $0.23 per unit. Steemit users just received the first payout, $1.3 million in total, but can this really work? The incentives of steemit’s design
There has been much debate on the use of money to incentivise intrinsic behaviour, such as studying, donations, or healthy activity. The jury is still out with one study concluding that the effects of monetary incentivization on intrinsically motivated behaviour, basically, depends: “A considerable and growing body of evidence suggests that the effects of incentives depend on how they are designed, the form in which they are given (especially monetary or nonmonetary), how they interact with intrinsic motivations and social motivations, and what happens after they are withdrawn. Incentives do matter, but in various and sometimes unexpected ways.” The incentives of streemit’s design were described by Larimer, speaking to CoinTelegraph In eight points:
> No transaction fees.
Mandatory spending.
Liquidity rewards to bootstrap market trading.
Everyone who provides value should get a stake. Don’t ask for […]
