Help decide the name of my free market content platform. \ stacker news ~tech

Help decide the name of my free market content platform.

13.3k sats \ 5000 boost \ 19 comments \ @Michelson_Morley 11 Sep 2023 tech

Before you worry; it's not in competition with stacker.news. What it is is simply (following the Austrian mindset) the most unregulated market possible, where the commodities being traded are posts and comments. Very similar to stacker news, huh? I agree. I've been wanting to make a new reddit for a while, and was lucky to find SN. My site will be FOSS and I will provide APIs so that any content made on my side may be automatically synced to SN, meaning it can only help grow SN, (if SN staff so wishes, I'd be up for any collaboration obviously).

With that said, I'd like some help picking a domain name, if anyone wants to help! And maybe some criticism of the idea if you have it in you. Test early, test often, that's my mantra.

So. This app can be thought of as stacker.news, but with a few more features. My motivation for the app is this:

The true price of a commodity is extremely valuable information. It is the difference between 50 million people dying of starvation and the invention of the digital computer. Price is everything. In our context, the commodities are posts, tweets, comments, youtube clips, etc. The price is the "karma", or "likes", or "views", or "zaps".
Since you can't make bets with no money, "likes", "upvotes", these free "price signals", they carry no inherent weight. These platforms must therefore resort to top-down-manipulation to make their recommendation systems work. Ineffective. Manipulative.

Solution:

Posting a post on my platform, though similar in user experience to SN / reddit / HN, can be seen as creating a publicly traded nano-business. It will cost the user 100 sats. Posts each have 1000 (tbd) shares, and the creator owns 51% of these, while the remaining 49% are for public sale. (sidenote: Owning majority of shares means you can admin the post)
Upvoting / downvoting is similar in UX, but upvoting means you upzap, and will buy as many shares as a Sat can currently buy that post for. Continuing the case above, the posts shares cost 100/1000 = 0.1 Sats. Since you upzapped once, spent 1 sat, you now own 10 shares, or 0.01% of the post. Downvoting is the same as "shorting" the stock, so you can make money if you think the post is not that good.
If the post is very funny or you think others are going to like it a lot, you might buy more. If it does happen that the post is totally bought (no public shares remain) then auctioning begins for those who opt in. So you can sell your shares here to highest bidders.
The highest current buy/sell order filled is the post/comments actual value, like karma or likes.

I'm considering simplifying it so that zaps just give money to the shareholders of the post (just like they do on SN if you've forwarded sats from your post), and making "bids/shorts" for actual shares a separate part of UI.

Anyway! That's the basics of it, using a free market to gain true knowledge about the prices of our modern age commodities. Looking for name suggestions, but any suggestions or criticisms —at all— are very welcome.

hex.gy0.0%

penny.vote87.5%

pos.tf12.5%

underpri.se0.0%

8 votes \ poll ended

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1184 sats \ 7 replies \ @Natalia 11 Sep 2023

To be honest, I found it a bit complicated.

One of the most important things content creators want is peace of mind so to focus on creating itself, and getting appreciated for their work, which means better direction would be either 1. making things simpler and easier to onboard them or 2. helping them receive the value they deserve.

Names-wise, I think they are a bit hard ( sorry, I can't think of any adj to describe it ); maybe try something more creative and simpler to understand?

142 sats \ 6 replies \ @Michelson_Morley OP 11 Sep 2023

Thank you, this is very valuable feedback! Since this is stacker.news, I can in fact show you that it is valuable to me by zapping you 500 sats :)

1527 sats \ 3 replies \ @Undisciplined 11 Sep 2023

I feel similarly to @Natalia, but I think there is a neat concept here. To me, the big question needs to be "Why would a creator switch to this platform?".

If you want to bounce ideas off of someone, feel free to hit me up. I'm an economist and some of my training was in experimental economics, which is largely about designing this kind of system. In particular, I think the downvote mechanism is going to be complicated to implement.

21 sats \ 2 replies \ @Michelson_Morley OP 12 Sep 2023

Wow, I will definitely take you up on this offer! What a deus ex economica..

Just to again be clear: My overriding motivation here is: I'm a real von Mises fanboy, convinced and fascinated by the mechanism of markets (which are unique to all other computing systems), and their ability to accurately discover the worth of things.

If content feeds (like NOSTR) could be fed into a stock exchange/ clearing house / broker (which is what I'd be, I expect), find angel investors ("Oh hey, a picture of a frog I found on reddit! I'll buy 100 shares of that for 5 sats each, because that's gonna be hilarious tomorrow!") . Ever visited reddit.com/r/memeEconomy? Those peeps i suppose :) (in reality, it'd just be me, for a long time)

In this example, since I got the content off reddit, I would have filled in a link to the reddit post or comment, and it recreates the UI of the post from that, including link back to the original post and author. I figure 10000 shares can be the standard issuance (don't know much about this) so since I bought 100 for 5 each, then the post is now worth 500 sats. Since I own 25%, creator owns 26%, there are 4,900 shares available for public purchase and they're initial value is 500sats/10000 = 0.05 sats. I can either sell the post shares for that or more. Whatever I chose, thats what the posts "upvotes" or "zaps" will be, its the bid price.

Hopefully someone thinks the frog is funnyier than I did so I can recoup my sats, but it's not so big a deal since we're dealing with pennies here. More fun.

Now the upvote mechanism (zapping) means paying for either 1 share (regardless of cost) or paying some amount of sats (regardless of the size of the share you get).

And the "downvote" question, yes definitely the hardest or me. I'm thinking it's a forwards contract, maybe just set with a delivery date of one week. "I pay you [less than market price] in one week". If the "upvote" button was treated as the long position, could that work, in order to clear the orders? I'm such a novice at this.

I just want buy / sell signals on memes/posts/videos that are backed by real money instead of "clicks"! :) I want to see a stock market app that shows accurate value of whatever content anyone cares to make.

The better known such profitability is, the more creativity will be unleashed, I think.

Finally, I'm not sure if people would need to switch to "my platform". I'm thinking about it more like a service, so users could certainly see the stuff on my site, but it would all be an open API and other's (like NOSTR) could use the price data to supplement their own recommendations.

1000 sats \ 1 reply \ @Undisciplined 12 Sep 2023

I think a lot of stuff will become more clear once you start actually coding it, but it sounds like your thinking it through in the right way.

If you're imagining it as more of a service than a platform, is the idea that you're generating the microbusinesses for the original post creators from Reddit or wherever (who probably will never log on), so that they could claim the shares of their posts later?

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @Michelson_Morley OP 12 Sep 2023

Yes, that's accurate. Ultimately it would function as a type of patreon.com, but where artists don't have to sign up beforehand.

Just as posts/content can be split into shares and traded, users can be. Specifically, "angel investors" in this service are trying to find good tweets, videos, posts, because they themselves can be traded, and their share-price will increase if they're good at finding good content.

That's the incentive for "angel investors": Sure, you can just copy someones tweet and take credit. You can forge a Picasso and sell it; people might buy it, might start providing you patronage. But what happens when someone finds the real Picasso?

What makes someone want to "zap" you on stacker.news? They're providing patronage. Would you zap a known reposter? A forger? Maybe.

Thanks for helping me spell out these ideas, it helps a lot.

50 sats \ 1 reply \ @Natalia 11 Sep 2023

this is the way:)

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @nemo 11 Sep 2023

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581 sats \ 2 replies \ @south_korea_ln 11 Sep 2023

I want to downvote anything that makes me think of Richard Heart. So def no hex.gy ;)

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @Michelson_Morley OP 11 Sep 2023

Thank you, I have to google him. 500 sats to you for helping me avoid a blunder :)

50 sats \ 0 replies \ @nemo 11 Sep 2023

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521 sats \ 1 reply \ @BBitcoinUSA 11 Sep 2023

Upzap.com

9 sats \ 0 replies \ @Michelson_Morley OP 12 Sep 2023

I like it!

50 sats \ 2 replies \ @locomancell 12 Sep 2023

If you wanna this to work as a collaborator to Staker.news I think you should call it more like Forkstacker.vote or something like that. Good luck with your project. I can't wait to be posting on it!

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @Michelson_Morley OP 12 Sep 2023

Thanks :) It wouldn't be associated with stacker.news specifically. All content hosts (twitter, tiktok, youtube, stacker.news, etc), are places where creators (and reposters) exist. The purpose of the service I imagine is to be a NASDAQ for content, and ultimately a place where creators (as opposed to reposters) can be discovered and patroned.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @locomancell 12 Sep 2023

Oh, I think I understand now. Then It would be something kinda like friend.tech, where people can buy shares from fav users and trade it like we do with stocks (or so I've heard lol)

50 sats \ 1 reply \ @south_korea_ln 11 Sep 2023

It's giving me some NFT vibes in terms of buying and selling. What's one to prevent from copy pasting a successful post? I read it very cursively, I admit.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Michelson_Morley OP 11 Sep 2023

Well, what's to prevent someone from forging a painting and selling it? The answer is: nothing. These are problems markets solve on their own.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @biggo 11 Sep 2023

wall of text man, might should have been a bounty? :P