Today there is nothing as oppressive as the expectation of unremunerated attention.
Attention should be understood here as a temporary donation of, at the very least, one's time. This presupposes that actions, objects, programs or messages that attract and capture the attention and time of others *do not* constitute a sufficiently compensatory benefit.
Uncompensated attention should cease to be an assumed expectation or requirement to engage in atomic experiences (e.g. reading or commenting on blogs, voting in elections). Instead, inducing or attracting said attention in exchange for *any* form of acceptable remuneration should be pursued. In my view this is only possible by adopting and applying newly emergent economic incentive architectures facilitated by tools provisioned by cryptoassets and blockchain technology (particularly with regards to 'Smart Contracts'). By pursuing such a strategy we seek to emancipate our global citizenzry from the de facto compulsion to relinquish and forfeit valuable personal time and information in exchange for unremunerated experiences.
Thus, my claim is as follows: All experiences should be *potentially* remunerative.
As the title of this post indicates, we are seeking a cryptoeconomic solution - or at the very least an orientation towards a solution - to the problem of unremunerated attention. It may be helpful if we provide a brief definition here. Cryptoeconomics should be understood as an emerging field of study of how we use digital incentives to drive specific resources and behaviors on decentralized networks that lead to some globally desired result such as security or network effects. There is a site called Cent that has been accessible to anyone around the world with an internet connection at beta.cent.co that is conducting an extremely novel and at the same time deceptively simple cryptoeconomic experiment.
First of all, despite only being around for three months or so, Cent has already established itself as a community - to be sure it is still small by modern internet standards. It aspires to be the de(cent)ralized reddit-meets-quora that in(cent)ivizes users by way of Ether (ETH) bounties. Users pose questions or requests to the community that, crucially, carry with them a set bounty denominated in ETH to incentivize as many respondants as possible, and based on the number of upvotes respondants get from other respondants, they will receive a proportional share of that bounty. The key innovation here is that the payout is carried out by a Smart Contract that runs on the Ethereum network - after a question is submitted it triggers an unstoppable automatic application wherein a pre-set timer begins its countdown with payouts released automatically as soon as the bounty period expires.
So to summarize: Cent allows users to offer ETH (digital incentive) in order to drive other users to provide quality responses vying for that Ether which attracts new users who provide ever more quality responses and pose new questions with bounties to attract new users repeat ad infinitum. They have bootstrapped an active community where users are referred to as Centians. Hundreds of bounties have been set and respondants have received thousands of dollars worth of ETH for their attention. Users even receive a portion of the bounty simply for either upvoting or downvoting responses. This is an *almost* perfectly structured incentive architecture. Almost.
The shortcommings - in my view - stem from how the question/bounty-posing feature has been incentivized - or the lack thereof - and the potential for abuse and gaming of the system as it is set up today. Whilst there may be marginal benefit in being able to relatively reliably source a certain amount of responses, it is a shame that there is no way to at least subsidize bounty setters. As a result bounty values have remained trivial, ranging between $3~20 (relative to the given value of ETH to USD at the time a question/bounty is set). Trivial bounties beget half-hearted responses.
Additionally, there is the growing problem of users setting up multiple accounts to game the system and win a larger share of the bounty. There is currently no mechanism in place to prevent someone from setting up multiple accounts in order to game the system by upvoting their own posts and downvoting others. It isn't hard to imagine even passionate contributers becomming frustrated over time if their attention is undercompensated whilst scammers are receiving 3~5x more, at least. Of course if these issues are not addressed they will most likely inhibit any real growth for Cent and its community. Fellow Centian @Maxsterly has already voiced frustration regarding the inability to subsidize question/bounty-setters and multiple users including @dreambig and @soothsayer have complained about the scammers with multiple accounts. Operating a system based off of decentralized logic makes it more difficult - but not impossible - to minimize or prevent such behaviour.
So to conclude I would like to propose a few potential novel solutions:
Firstly, Cent should provide the option for users to 'tip' bounties that they have an interest in. Tips could be split 50:50 between a) the user who set the bounty and b) the bounty itself by adding to it thus incentivizing better responses.
Secondly, Cent should designate those Centians who have been active and provided thoughtful responses over time as arbiters of up upvoting; create a class of 'Centurions' if you will. This will a) eliminate the negative impact that gamers could and have had whilst b) ensuring that Centians who provide original and thoughtful responses are duly compensated. Of course there should be a mechanism created that allows newer Centians to become Centurions as well. A sufficiently decentralized approach could be setting up a hard threshold. Say that if a Centian receives over 100 upvotes across a minimum of at least 5 posts then they are automatically upgraded to Centurion status.
Projects like Cent are paving the way forward towards a very exciting future. The creators behind Cent deserve a lot of praise and all the support they need. Hopefully the proposed improvements I have included may be of some assistance in creating not just a better user experience on Cent, but a better future for everyone around the world.
