A New Way For DADA. Part III.
RECOGNIZING CONTRIBUTION
At DADA, we recognize that our content creators add as much value to the platform as we do as developers. As our CTO says, “we created the body and our users gave it a soul”.
Artists and art enthusiasts have contributed to a collection of unique and original content that has value. And we want our artists to be monetarily rewarded for their contribution.
We’ll implement an incentive system to reward our users for the content they create.
UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME FOR VISUAL ARTISTS
We believe that every artist should have a base level of income security and that their universal basic income will result in an explosion of creativity, entrepreneurship, and research.
In 1956, struggling writer Harper Lee received an envelope from family and friends with a year’s salary in it. It read, “You have one year off to write whatever you please”. She used her time to write To Kill a Mockingbird which went to win the Pulitzer Prize and sold over 30 million copies worldwide.1
DADA’s ultimate goal is to guarantee a basic income, a fixed amount sufficient for subsistence, to artists in our community.
[caption id=”attachment_3419" align=”aligncenter” width=”630"]
Visual conversation by Gil Sanson, Adriana Lopez and Boris Toledo Doorm[/caption]
QUANTITY VS QUALITY
We don’t believe that art creation is exclusive to artists. DADA’s purpose as a platform is to democratize the creative process by encouraging anyone to freely participate in these visual conversations, whether they are professional artists or regular people.
We have implemented a gamification system that allows anyone to participate while filtering trolls and maintaining a level of quality to the content created by the community.
GAME MECHANICS
We designed a gamification system that assigns points to contributors through skill, community participation, and community validation, and which ensures, in a non-competitive way, that high-quality conversations will retain their consistency.
We use our gamification system to identify those users who create value for our community. New users need to accumulate a certain amount of points in order to start responding to conversations at the same level.
However, any artist with more skill or experience can draw with anyone of their level and below. This nurtures a spirit of collaboration and even learning, while at the same time it ensures that people with fewer skills will not ruin a more advanced conversation. Although drawing is the activity that garners the most points, these are also accrued by participating in the community: following and liking other artists and their work.
Users who reply to other users earn more points than those who don’t engage with others. We have a leaderboard to discover artists. We noticed that rankings based on followers made people competitive and we took them out.
Because we didn’t want the number of followers to be a sign of influence, people can follow artists they like but we don’t show who the followers are or how many followers artists have.
CURATION
Basing our gamification system on the most amount of likes for drawings can recognize quality content up to a point, but it’s limited when it comes to artistic expression. For instance, some drawings or responses may not be optimal in terms of skill, but they are valuable in terms of expressiveness and ingenuity, traits that make DADA delightful. Hyper-realistic drawings will tend to get high numbers of likes because of their technical complexity, but simpler yet more expressive drawings may also contribute enormously to our collection and not generate many likes. That is why we have a curation system that ensures the quality of the content.
Any user can become a curator of content on DADA. Curators have a tool that allows them to give a substantial amount of points to a limited amount of drawings per week. To become curators, users need to accumulate points and meet a set of criteria based on their contribution and artistic sensibility.
Curators earn dada tokens for their contribution.
CENSORSHIP
We are an art platform: we encourage individual and communal freedom of expression as long as it meets our established criteria: controversial art made on DADA needs to have expressive or artistic value. Like any content platform, we have clear guidelines against abusive and inappropriate content. Erotic art is allowed. To paraphrase Judge Potter: we know obscenity when we see it.
At the beginning, we were faced with a good amount of obscene drawings or really bad drawings from visual trolls. We were able to neutralize them through our gamification system. We also banned anyone making penis doodles that we did not deem artistic.
Since we don’t want to be the centralized authority deciding what’s considered offensive, instead of censoring content, we designed the point system so that offensive content becomes marginalized and remains unseen.
We have strived to create a community so cohesive and healthy that it discourages trolling. This goes beyond establishing clear community guidelines; it entails constant communication with our users. When users sense that there is a ghost in the machine, this makes it harder for people to troll.
[caption id=”attachment_3418" align=”aligncenter” width=”630"]
Visual conversation by Veronica Ettedgui, Toti Vollmer and Beatriz Ramos[/caption]
DIGITAL RIGHTS MANAGEMENT (DRM)
The blockchain allows recording the provenance and authorship of digital assets, thus solving one of the biggest problems for content creators on the web, which is the pilfering of digital content used without permission or attribution.
Content creators on DADA will be guaranteed IP protection and proof of ownership on the blockchain. We’ll generate certificates of ownership for each drawing.
Collectors will also have a record of their ownership and, when drawings are licensed, they will be able to profit from such opportunities.
All transactions related to a drawing will be forever verified and tracked through smart contracts, without any intermediaries, and artists will always get their fair share of the profits.
A DIGITAL ART MARKETPLACE
Many people don’t see the value in digital art yet. But we do.
As the world is increasingly digital, and people spend their lives on the web, it’s time for the value of digital content to be recognized. People consume content, including art, in many digital ways, from their computer screens to their phones, tablets, and even their watches. The quality of digital art and its presentation now rival any of the traditional visual arts.
By assigning DRM to digital assets, it is possible for content creators to issue limited-edition artworks, which may create demand and help raise the value both of the content and of the dada token.
By creating a scarcity of selected high-quality digital artworks, we can create a marketplace/economy where people can finally afford to own a cherished work of art that, as in the analog art world, may appreciate in value. The rank injustice of collectors selling artworks for exponentially higher prices without ever remunerating the original creators is a model that needs to disappear.
Thanks to blockchain technology DADA can offer its vast collection of digital art in limited editions with IP protection and proof of ownership.
DADA will channel the collaborative digital art created on the platform into a marketplace that redefines what it means to be an art collector. We see this marketplace as a hybrid of art collecting and trading cards. We’ll leverage our gamified system to make it as fun for collectors as we’ve done for artists.
[caption id=”attachment_3354" align=”aligncenter” width=”581"]
The Creeps And Weirdos Collection of Digital Art by DADA[/caption]
COLLECTING DIGITAL ART
Most of our users come to DADA to enjoy art. Many say that whenever they have a bad day, they browse DADA to make them feel better. We want to connect artists with the people who find value and delight in art.
Now art lovers can have a more active role in DADA and own the art they love, while investing in the artists they admire.
With the help of the blockchain, we can make sure that the art collector will have an authenticated piece of art, whose provenance and whereabouts will be transparent.
Collectors will display their digital art in their profiles. Because DADA is a collaborative platform, we can incentivize collecting by creating engaging scarcity strategies for consumers to create and complete their collections via purchasing, trading, selling, and even licensing art.
CREATING DIGITAL SCARCITY
Each copy of a limited-edition drawing is a unique digital asset that is represented by a token in the Ethereum blockchain. Smart contracts will verify and execute the terms of every transaction related to the drawings.
There are 5 levels of scarcity:
• Common — 1000 copies
• Uncommon — 500 copies
• Rare — 100 copies
• Very Rare — 50 copies
• Extremely Rare — 10 copies
Criteria used to define the level of scarcity of a drawing:
Common:
• Drawings made by DADA.
• Popular drawings without replies.
Uncommon:
• Drawings that are not popular but are a branch of a popular conversation.
• Drawing challenges created by DADA.
• Drawings made by popular artists.
Rare:
• Drawings that have been licensed (t-shirts, etc) by the time of the sale.
• Drawings that are part of a popular visual conversation.
Very Rare:
• Drawings that connect an important point in a popular conversation.
• First drawing of a popular visual conversation.
Extremely Rare:
• Popular drawings that are part of a popular visual conversation.
[caption id=”attachment_3347" align=”aligncenter” width=”599"]
Art by Moxarra[/caption]
PROFIT DISTRIBUTION
Primary Market:
The original owner of a drawing is its author. The first time we sell a drawing the percentage structure is:
• 70% to the artist
• 30% to DADA
Secondary Market:
After a collector acquires a digital drawing, if they sell it at a higher price, they will receive 60% on the profits. They get the biggest part of the profit because once they sell it, it no longer belongs to them. The artists, on the other hand, will always receive 30% on every subsequent transaction in the secondary market.
In this case, the profit structure is as follows:
• 60% of the profit to the current owner
• 30% of the profit to the artist
• 10% of the profit to DADA
PLATFORM
DADA has a gamification system that assigns points to its users for their participation. This point system will be the basis for our reward generation. The users will be able to exchange their assigned and generated points for dada tokens. In this way, we can reduce the cost associated with Blockchain transactions, specifically Ethereum.
The existing registered users on DADA (160K as of this writing) will be issued a wallet which will store the dada tokens users gain by interacting on DADA either as content creators or content consumers. Instead of assigning a certain amount of tokens per transaction, we will make a single exchange transaction on behalf of the user, so that the user can convert their accrued gamification points into dada tokens.
DADA TOKEN DISTRIBUTION
• 30% Crowd sale
• 20% Development team
• 50% Foundation (art projects funding and reward allocation)
THE DADA FOUNDATION
DADA will work to structure and form the DADA Foundation, a non-profit organization, to oversee the fair and productive growth of the DADA Ecosystem. The DADA Foundation will administer the dada token supply and the DADA Rewards Engine.
OPEN GOVERNANCE
We envision a fully decentralized, autonomous and self-sustaining global community. Appreciating that open governance is challenging to implement, the DADA Foundation will facilitate the entire ecosystem’s transition to a fully decentralized and autonomous network. We see liquid democracy as DADA’s system of governance.
Liquid democracy is a powerful voting model for collective decision-making in large communities. Liquid democracy “combines the advantages of direct democracy and representative democracy and creates a truly democratic voting system that empowers voters to either vote on issues directly, or to delegate one’s voting power to a trusted party”(2).
Footnotes
1) https://futurism.com/images/universal-basic-income-answer-automation/
