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I think you have the opportunity to play with community moderation. Hacker News uses upvoting and downvoting to do this, but you can only downvote after a certain amount of reputation. You can use sats earned as some quasi-reputation score and use that to give such people some power to downvote for some sats. Personally, I think downvotes should be way more costly than upvotes. It's a serious accusation to be making and most people don't do it unless it's serious. You also don't want it to be abused. Thus, making it more expensive will make people think twice about it.
The idea of staking to post is good as well. It has the nice side-effect of preventing spam. So posting might cost 10 sats, but also 10000 sats in a stake. If you try to flood the place, you're going to lose 10,000 sats per post. It can really become a market based moderation system. Bad posts simply go down. Obviously, this is not going to be easy to balance, but you have way more tools than Hacker News or Reddit does. Also, if you figure this out, it will monetarily incentivize good comments even more than they are now.
I really like the incentives around staking and I want to experiment with it at some point. My main concern is it might be hard to communicate, but there are probably solutions to that.
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Simple MVP: downvoting costs 5x the upvoting.
Slightly more difficult: each post costs a "deposit" of 10,000 sats which will be refunded if you have a non-negative score within 24 hours. If you have a negative score, you give up your deposit and it goes to the distribution pool for the next day.
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I dig it. Downvotes will make it clear whether your stake should be returned.
Downvoting seems to have the unintended consequence of encouraging trolls though. It gives them feedback (rather than crickets) which probably motivates them - but if they also lose money perhaps it doesn’t make it worth it.
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It sucks if I post something Bitcoin related, then an army of shitcoiners comes in to downvote my post. If no moderation is done, I will effectively loose my deposit for no reason. Although they loose their sats, it affects me as well.
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In that case, they're literally paying for the attention. And given it goes to the community pool, there's some interesting economics at play here. Would people tolerate trolls if they're getting paid for it? I'm actually curious how much trolls are willing to pay and at what limits they stop.
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I think we would probably converge on something like 20 trolls pay for 80 users.
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So we're back to advertisers?
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Not exactly, but also note the difference that those "advertisers" would pay the users directly...
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