Masmic platform is designed for meritocratic community participation
Naval Ravikant, CEO of AngelList and one of the most respected thought leaders in the blockchain space, in June 2017 shared an insightful Blockchain Manifesto which cleared a lot of confusion surrounding what blockchain is and whether it is just a fad or a revolutionary tech in early phase.
In this manifesto, he opined that “blockchains will convert networks into markets”. This was going to be a huge development as most of the networks existing today are not grounded in market principles.
For e.g. democracy can turn into mob rule. Similarly, a network like Quora can be misused for spamming because the incentive-disincentive structure is not strong enough to ensure highest quality -> disincentives for spamming is not large and incentives for high quality submissions are just limited to non-monetary incentives.
With Masmic, we are bringing the benefits of turning a network into market by powering the entire network through micro-payments. Additionally, an innovative game theoretic incentive structure based on crypto-economics has been designed to ensure that individual user self-interest and overall platform interest are positively correlated.
What this ensures is the following:
i) Only those questions/bounties/tasks can be posted on the platform for which the bounty giver feels a monetary value can be attached, howsoever small it might be. This will ensure that noise on the platform is minimal and quality of posts is high.
The amount of monetary value doesn’t matter as much as just the fact that some monetary value is attached to every post. Integrating micro-payments made possible by use of cryptocurrencies gives flexibility to each poster to assign a value he/she deems fit.
ii) The bounty giver can assign multiple rewards for even a small bounty value, again made possible by micro-payments for the first time. These rewards will also be unequally distributed, with top contributor earning much more than the bottom contributor.
For e.g. let’s say, someone posts “What’s the best nature documentary to watch on Netflix” with a bounty reward of $1 worth of cryptocurrencies and with 10 rewards. Here, the top contributor will earn much more share of $1 than the 10th contributor.
But as everyone is putting in almost equal time effort to write the answer, everyone will want to be the top contributor. Thus, game theory will come into picture. This healthy competition among all participants will ensure that each one will contribute to the best of his/her abilities. Additionally, although only 10 rewards are there, the actual contributions might be many more than just 10, which will add to the value of platform for all users.
Overall, this game theoretic model of reward distribution will ensure that user submissions are of highest quality.
From a content consumer’s point of view (separate from bounty poster), it can be expected that he/she will get good and genuine recommendations.
iii) Finally, there comes the issue of sorting of answers. Let’s say, in the above discussed example, the bounty post gets 22 submissions. Who’s to decide which one is 1st, which one is 10th and which one is 22nd.
Instead of giving this power to the bounty giver who may be biased in his choosing, this quality sorting will be judged by all the platform users.
But why would platform users waste their time in sorting the answers? Because a fixed proportion of the every bounty value will be kept for providing monetary incentives to the users who contribute in sorting. And sorting rewards will be linked to whether quality answers were chosen by the user or not.
When a bounty duration gets completed, every task/bounty/question will have a series of user submissions which will be sorted on the basis of true merit/value. All this could be made possible through the power of micropayments and the right incentive structure for user participation.
