Token Curated Registries to Save Reddit
Business leaders, academics, engineers, journalists, politicians, and urban planners are faced with huge amounts of actionable information every day. To be successful in their roles, they must thus also develop an ability to analyze the most essential elements of this information. This skill has become even more important in the Information age. One could even argue that it is an entire job in itself replete with a distinct workforce eagerly awaiting to fill in.
Token curated registries are one way that such a workforce could manifest itself. In adding monetary value to list curation, like a subreddit or Yelp rating, whole communities are empowered to block spammers and promote the highest-quality content for all users. It’s a win-win.
There’s a Subreddit for That
Reddit is full of thriving communities, curious users, and benevolent moderators. In many ways, it has been one of the least contentious web sites since its inception in 2005. Strangers have helped others find lost items on some occasions, while other groups have had a direct influence on real-world events from climate change to sexism in the gaming industry. This is only the tip of the iceberg, too.
There exist 1.2 million subreddits as of 2017 on the website, each with their own small community and niche subject. This could be a subreddit dedicated to eating sandwiches, screaming fish, or another in which people believe that birds are raging a war against humans. This is part of the beauty of the site.
The points of interest can be as low- or high-stakes as a community wants. It should, however, be noted that as soon as a community steps away from cat videos to political activism, it will also attract some bad seeds.
These bad seeds can infiltrate a pro-Hilary Clinton, anti-abortion, or any other contentious subreddit and cause all types of havoc. The same is true for the moderators of each subreddit. Active community members who show genuine interest in the well-being of a group can quickly become tyrants who ban, block or deride any criticism from participants. And as these more contentious subreddits grow in size, so too does their influence on the greater Internet and world at large.
Free entry to Reddit is both a blessing and a curse. Anyone can join and create a platform for their favorite niche. All they need is an active email address. Like setting up an account, upvoting and downvoting content is also free. With enough influence, either organic or artificial, one can even begin to sway Reddit’s “hot” post algorithm to rank a post higher within a subreddit.
When Free Becomes a Problem
In 2015, leading up to the presidential campaign, r/The_Donald appeared as a subreddit to gather around the newly-announced presidential candidate. Growth within the community was sluggish, to say the least, and the rhetoric docile despite tolerating openly Islamaphobic remarks. Naturally, because of this tolerance, r/The_Donald became an outpost for a slew of other racially-charged baggage.
Soon, subscribers from 4chan’s viler extremist corners began trickling in. They adopted much of the same aesthetic of the original subreddit and contributed increasingly more unpleasant content. Sincere members who criticized the evolution from political movement to a platform for hate speech were downvoted into oblivion or outright banned by moderators. The chaos was further amplified by the documented infiltration of Russian agitators working for the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a well-known company involved in online influence operations.
It was eventually determined that the IRA owned roughly 944 user accounts spread across r/HillaryForPrison, r/The_Donald, and r/TheRedPill (another alt-right outpost). Between these three subreddits, Russian trolls were the most active on r/The_Donald and ultimately became Trump’s largest, most vocal online advocacy group.
The above is an extreme example of users manipulating social media platforms. It does, however, underline the importance of rethinking current Internet-based business models and how they are maintained. If finding information related to a federal election can be exploited this severely, imagine how simple it would be to orchestrate such memetic warfare for the journalists attempting to cover the story?
The Internet is slipping further and further away from the rich, encyclopedic vision of free knowledge for everyone every day. The victims of this delusion are manyfold from political candidates, the free press, our niche collective, and startup founders attempting to make an impact. This is because what we see on the Internet is dictated by lists of information that follow algorithms vulnerable to misuse.
Whether it’s Reddit, Twitter, Tumblr, or Facebook, all of these platforms can be gamed for a very low cost. Triggering a trending topic isn’t difficult if you understand exactly how the algorithm works. Previously, we have outlined a few other examples of this issue from a marketing standpoint. There are teams of people, particularly from the blockchain space, that are attempting to rewire the current business model. Another technical solution is that of a token curated registry (TCR).
Make the Internet Great Again
When looking for a bar in a new city, you might check Yelp or some equivalent for the “Best Bars in Berlin.” The site will provide a list of select bars in different neighborhoods. The top choice is one that the community has decided is the best; they did this by giving it the most five-star rankings, adding helpful commentary, and so on. And although it appears to be a well-curated list only made possible by charitable users, the story is much more complicated.
Sites like Yelp are all controlled by a centralized company. This means they can block the reviews of a bar, manipulate ratings, and, insofar as it is free to use, are subject to manipulation. Alternatively, using a TCR some of these issues can be reduced while still profiting from the Wisdom of the Crowd and high-quality, objective information. Let’s imagine a tokenized version of the same list.
A group of Ethereum enthusiasts whips up a TCR and begins submitting proposals for their favorite watering holes in Berlin. Each time a user submits a bar, they place a small stake in ether to have the bar included. If no one disagrees, then everyone waits a pre-determined amount of time and the bar is included. If, however, one person disagrees, they must match the initial stake to launch a voting process. Here, all votes are made by different users staking different amounts of ether to cast their opinion.
If the majority of users decide that the bar should be included, those who voted for its exclusion lose their deposit. These lost funds are redistributed evenly to the majority. The same is true if it turns out that the majority of users don’t want to include the bar.
Although the process appears cumbersome, reducing it to a few simple steps is the task of a sleek design. The benefits, in theory, ensure that the information in the list is more legitimate as users made their bets using real monetary value. The use case for all social media platforms is immediately visible, but it’s only just the start. TCRs can be used to fund open-source development projects, arrive at better conclusions within an organization, and if a tokenized version of a subreddit becomes popular enough, curators could technically begin profiting from their work.
In a much longer piece on the subject, Simon de la Rouviere, an Ethereum developer, wrote:
“Topic-based communities can coordinate around sharing information important to them. If effective curation occurs, it attracts new participants and thus a topic-based community that curates well can collectively earn from doing so.”
Reduced to the fundamentals, TCRs, and tokenization by association, simply offer a stricter mechanism for determining what is valuable to a community. It also makes the process of manipulation much more expensive.
The genuine pursuit of the good of community, plus a high barrier to disrupt this pursuit, appears, at first glance, to be something the Internet desperately needs.
