Paul Martino's Advice for Cent

I was re-listening to one of my favorite podcasts of 2017, the Paul Martino episode on the Software Engineering Daily podcast that I included in my lists of all things good the other day.

In the episode Paul recounts a few of the mis-steps he and his team made working on an early, initially successfull, but ultimately failed social networking site called Tribe.

Paul gives listeners a full five-course meal of food for thought, but what really grabbed my attention was this: "[Tribe] didn't pay any attention to curating who their initial user base was."

The initial users themselves set the tone for the site, and usually earlier than many would expect. Once set, it is nearly impossible to alter.

In Tribe's case, they got all the 'burning man' users that were purged enmasse from Friendster. In the end, this super alternative crowd was no match for *that* social network that started with a highly curated group of users from the Ivy League.

Cent of course is my favorite site these days. It is a little less than half a year old (154 days to be precise) and based on the number of responses-per-bounty, it's user base is growing into a globally diverse group.

But like Tribe before it, Cent seems open to accepting everyone. Since any account can upvote anyone else, basically everyone who posts a response gets a piece of the bounty.

If we were a commons, everyone would be starving. Cent is, in effect, curating poverty.

As fellow Centian @paulkay put it: It's just too damn hard to earn beer money on Cent.

Cent isn't the only blockchain-based app or site to pay out crypto for user generated work either. Earn and Steemit are more popular and successful. Despite the shortcommings of those sites, several of their users bring in very large returns.

Add to that Earn's highly selective, curated lists and the fact that it has convinced a bunch of really big names to sign up and the differences become clear.

Cent's novelty is very exciting to be sure, but passionate users will leave soon if there are sites that provide better incentives.

As I have proposed elsewhere, I believe there is a novel way to solve this issue: institute a new user-class called Centurions, who alone have the ability to upvote or downvote responses.

They would become the keepers of the site, and since upvoters receive 10% of each bounty, they would have a financial incentive to continue improving the site and user experience.

Most responses would still receive a nominal payout for their contibutions, but Centurions would ensure that users receive larger portions of bounties by guaranteeing the majority of upvotes go to "higher quality" posts. This would provide a great benefit to bounty setters. The higher payouts would also help draw in new users. New users would raise the overall calibre of responses and incentivize people to post more bounties.

Allowing each user to see which posts each Centurion has upvoted (like Disqus upvotes) would further help improve the overall experience.

And anyone who makes a certain number of posts that receive a certain number of upvotes would become a Centurion, kind of like a decentralized knighting. Over time those minimum criteria would increase as a way to ensure that quality standards remain high.

Lastly, when it comes time to airdrop CENT tokens, by introducing the Centurion class it should be easier to find clear metrics by which to determine who contributed the most to the site. A token-curated-registry approach could then be implemented so that anyone willing to temporarily stake their credentials could apply.

Cent, together with Centurions, would be curating constantly improving users who contribute responses of increasing quality.

Cent needs to start curating quality. Here's hoping they do.