Incentivizing human curation with Bitcoin

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Back in the BCH and early BSV days, Yours.org was a blogging site where users could earn Bitcoin from posting and upvoting content. When upvoting posts, users could earn if other users upvoted the same post afterwards.

As the FAQ states, the first quarter of voters always make a profit. I posted regularly on Yours, but I also stalked the site to upvote Satoshi Doodles and others early in hopes of making some Bitcoin.

This was great while the BSV price was $60!

While the voting system was fun, one cannot ignore its Ponzi scheme nature. Profits were dependent on other users voting afterwards, so the only way to make money was at another’s expense.

The system did add value to all Yours.org users by providing the top human curated posts backed by money, it also created the perverse incentive of upvoting something because you think others will vote, not necessarily because of the quality of the content.

Yours was still used when Venezuela started to undergo its hyperinflation phase, so users would upvote posts where people were begging for money for their dire situation.

Imagine profiting off someone else’s tragedy.

Yours is basically dead now as you cannot log in, view posts, or do anything really but we can learn a lesson from its attempts at incentivizing human curation.

Yours did demonstrate that there is a market for curation. One of the criticisms of Twetch is that to earn Bitcoin there is that you must be an influencer to do so.

Likes are the upvote but are a simple 5 cent tip to the receiver. Branching is a means of curation with potential to earn but has limited benefit for a user with a low follower count.

Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit all have the same built in curation mechanisms: free upvotes on posts. However, on a daily basis we see the disastrous consequences of this as any entity can spin up bots or pay users to Astroturf any subject in order to sow hate and confusion among their own users.

Thus, we can learn from Yours that the curation event must have a cost. A recent feature of Twetch is the @TwetchDat bot which will auto-twetch a post replied to on Twitter. Its feed on Twetch is a list of curated tweets from humans archived on the ledger.

This development makes the CEO quite happy, as users now do not have to leave Twetch to get the latest news.

Current Twetch bears the low cost (mining fees only) of archiving these tweets and the service is free for any Twitter user to summon the account.

Twetch users do have an incentive to manually archive tweets first because any subsequent tagging of the TwetchDat account will branch the original archived Twetch—meaning the original user is rewarded for discovering valuable content.

https://twitter.com/coinyeezy/status/1290928411905597441?s=20

Example here:

This scenario where the user can potentially earn does require that the user bears the high upfront cost of archiving the tweet and image to the ledger, aligning incentives. There is a cost to curation, a potential to earn and a value added to all users of the platform.

I believe this example is only the start of making a market for human curation with Bitcoin. I look forward to other innovative solutions being developed that take advantage of the benefits the ledger provides.