1149 sats \ 9 replies \ @Undisciplined 15 Apr \ on: Join Us Today for a Q1 Review + Q2 Roadmap Discussion (11am ET) meta
The referral idea is really fun. I had a thought that would probably be a pain to implement, but here it is:
What if instead of having one referrer, we could have many referrers?
I was thinking about the same process you described, except that instead of switching referrers every time you follow someone's link, they would accrue a referral share in you.
Maybe, I come to SN via one of @grayruby's sports contests, giving him the initial referral share. But then, once I'm here, I follow nine of @elvismercury's links to older posts. Grayruby would now have a 10% referral share and elvismercury would have 90%.
They could also be weighted by duration, to give the initial referrers more of an advantage, but I'm guessing that's overkill.
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Maybe so, but I'm anticipating that the all-or-nothing nature of the new rewards system might lead to spammy looking posts that are full of unnecessary links.
Going with shares would really allow strong content creators to build some capital over time. The proposed system seems too frantic and, dare I say, too high-time preference.
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I think something like that is structurally ideal. We discussed something similar. The complexity makes it hard to reason about though (for the average non-incentives nerd) and I think that'd have a big impact on the effectiveness.
The ideal action experience seems to be: I do obvious easy X and predictable good Y happens
A large portion of the negative emotions about rewards seem to come from the predictability of Y being low for instance.
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That makes sense to me, but it also seems like giving us all a stake in each other would be the most aligned with the feeling of community you guys have cultivated.
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Maybe mechanism design is the right term.
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This is a little outside my wheelhouse. I know it's an issue that experimental economists (major overlap with behavioral) always have to deal with. Oftentimes, they're trying get subjects to jump through some pretty complicated hoops, so they need the UX to be as intuitive as possible.
I'm not aware of one canonical treatment of the subject, though. It seems like individual experimentalists largely navigate it on their own, while borrowing heavily from each other.
It is mechanism design, but mechanism design is generally more theoretical and would tell you about the incentives created by the system you're studying and what it's equilibrium conditions are. I'm sure there's a bunch of work on applied mechanism design, though.
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"applied mechanism design" was the search query I needed to find this course and its reading list.
I don't expect to find a direct answer to anything we're talking about here, but it should improve my intuition at least.
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I'm glad my rapidly rusting knowledge was able to help.
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