> Something as simple as an organic comment promoting a product can actually drive real sales, and the John Doe that posts such a comment gets zilch.
Of course, if you incentivise this, you destroy comments entirely as they fill with people pretending to be organic product recommendation.
I (and I think quite a lot of other people) devalue information when someone has been paid to bring that recommendation to us, because it's in their interest and not ours.
> they fill with people pretending to be organic product recommendation
Only if it's free to post, right? If no one has skin in the game, then you'll get spammers. Consider a simple system where people pay 10 gold to post and 1 gold to vote. At the end of the month, the pot of gold is paid out to the top posts and the voters who made the best bets.
I am not a game theorist/economist, but perhaps there is a set of rules such that every actor in the system is rewarded for their proper usage of the system, otherwise they get penalized, but this is only possible if it requires stake to be in the system, which is impossible in "free and always will be".
It needs to be expensive to go against the community, which is why actions should cost a nominal amount of money. If this is the case, dividends or incentives could be paid to users for participating in a productive protocol.
(Edit: Of course, there will always be the people who have tons of money and can manipulate the system, but how is this different than people with tons of money who buy account farms and drive impressions, e.g. fake news, ads, etc.?)
Isn't Youtube actually trying something like this, where community members can get paid to be moderators, essentially?
I think the only place I've ever found where it's not free to post was Metafilter, where it was a one-off charge of $5 as an anti-spam measure. And it went to pay the moderators.
Of course, if you incentivise this, you destroy comments entirely as they fill with people pretending to be organic product recommendation.
I (and I think quite a lot of other people) devalue information when someone has been paid to bring that recommendation to us, because it's in their interest and not ours.