pull down to refresh
my sats balance stays where it is",
no! Not stay where it is... my sats balance, all things equal, increase via the rewards pool
It does suspiciously sound like some sort of side payments system... the neutral folks are bought off by the money of the motivated folks... or something like that.
Would be cool to work out a fully specified mathematical model of the SN mechanism, constructed as a mechanism design problem with cardinal utility and payments.
HAVE FUN! Sounds like an awful task to me... but impressive if you pull it off!
I mean, it's my job, and I could probably get a publication out of it, depending on how much previous work has been done in it, and how much anti-bitcoin bias and anti-small-platform bias there is within academia (which I will probably test soon with that other paper)
From my very unrepresentative experience, that bias is very strong.
I'm genuinely worried about it. I submitted the paper on SSRN (not peer reviewed, but i think they do a basic check to see if seems scientifically serious), and it's been sitting under review for much longer than I'm used to for SSRN
What kind of fringe weirdo would be interested in understanding the 12th largest asset in the world?
He'll get it all worked out and then k00b will do an experiment that blows it all to hell.
For this particular case, I feel like theory without empirics would be sufficient to count as a contribution.
I meant he might introduce some mechanism that proves to be analytically intractable.
I have a feeling it's already analytically intractable haha
The one time I tried to really think it through, I concluded that it almost certainly is (at least without major simplifying behavioral assumptions).
What I'm completely certain of is that the rewards incentives are not salient (in the sense experimentalists use the term), so working out equilibria that don't include the cognitive costs to agents would be pretty pointless (other than as an intellectual curiosity).
That's fair. And I think mechanisms exist for more efficient outcomes (under a utilitarian framework) when we're dealing with cardinal utility and payments too. But these mechanisms are often complicated to understand and involve an unreasonably high degree of rationality from the participants, as well as being able to frictionlessly direct side payments to each other.
Still, I think what you bring up does capture a point which is that if we care about cardinal utility (intensity of preferences), then perhaps the zap/downzap battles are just a feature of that, but if we care about ordinal preferences, then it's an undesirable side effect
It doesn't have to be cardinal utility. Ordering the possible rank-sats bundles just radically increases the number of alternatives.
You're sort of assuming that the objective is to have the front page be ordered such that it best satisfies passive readers, when the reality is that we each constantly choose where each post ranks and how many sats we want to retain, jointly.
In that sense, those who don't downzap are choosing "post stays where it is and my sats balance stays where it is", while those who do downzap are choosing "post loses visibility and my sats balance decreases accordingly".
Really, what we each have are orderings of different combinations of orderings + ordering costs and I don't know how SN scores on that. Still not a dictatorship and probably still fails IIA, but it might satisfy Pairwise Majority Rule.