31 sats \ 10 replies \ @kr 20 Mar \ parent \ on: Million Sat Madness is a Keynesian Beauty Contest meta
i hear you on the saliency problem, but SN funds MSM with 3 million sats so we do want to make stackers aware of the contest (and the sats).
raising rewards amounts has been positively correlated to improved key metrics across the site, so i think downplaying the sats might have the opposite effect.
My issue isn't with the reward being large, it's that people are potentially trying to get the reward by gaming the system instead of trying to get the reward through heightened engagement. The problem is stackers having a sense that there's a big payoff differential between zapping the content you like and zapping the content that will earn a reward.
Raising the reward amount is awesome and I'd expect it to yield positive outcomes.
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This is largely anecdotal, but I have noticed much lower zaps on my link posts. People know link posts don't do as well, so there's a disincentive to zap them.
Personally, I intentionally increased my post zapping about a week ago. I had been rationing my sats a little bit, but realized that I was shooting myself in the foot. I'm not zapping anything just because of the author, but I am probably clicking on certain people's posts more often, which leads to them getting larger zaps.
I don't expect to see this really peak until next week anyway, as people sprint to the finish. I did see a comment in the saloon about someone checking out from stacker news until next week so that they can be sure to have resources at their disposal.
I'm not saying we have some huge problem. This is more an expression of concern that over time the behavior on SN will conform to the incentive structure and the incentive structure has a well known flaw that is beginning to show itself.
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fair enough, and appreciate you raising these concerns.
the daily rewards structure has its own flaws too, and on balance the key site metrics seem to be better in March (total zaps, items created, etc…).
the only metric that hasn’t really budged is new signups, but we’ve got a separate experiment planned for that shortly.
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I'll just say one thing, in the first week of April I'm going to do like Siggy and take a week off :) pura madness
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This is absolutely insane. From what I'm experiencing, I think I can get between 30-40 without this madness :)
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As always, I look forward to the new experiment.
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The rewards might not be big enough yet - but in general people game the system to make money. It is common on all the other social medias.
Over MSM, I have been giving zaps more freely, and in general give them to anyone who replies to me thoughtfully. I will 100% reconsider this now that I know I would get more back giving them to highly zapped comments.
Maybe that makes me a jerk, but those are the incentives.
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