🥲 bad incentives ruined the internet

Should you implement a model that enables users to pay the creator or to pay for their content? In most cases we’ve seen, paying for the creator is more effective.

However, today’s platforms abuse human psychology by manufacturing experiences that use variable reward schedules, where rewards are delivered intermittently and randomly, with the intention of maximizing users’ response rate.

We’re in a constant battle to find our own sense of identity within the overarching internal values of the scene we want to belong to, and on that journey we’re incentivized to continuously prove our allegiance (“fanship”) and how we’re ‘in the know’.

I recently spoke with Matthew of Cent.co. Cent is an impressive platform that has been experimenting with the fascinating concept of seeding a person.

The internet phenomenon that is Wikipedia does not use “straightforward rewards” as the basis of its incentive system. Millions of people contribute to the online encyclopedia, but aren’t incentivized to do so through explicit reinforcement.

YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok — and other ads-backed platforms — define north star metrics around maximizing the time we spend within the bounds of their walled gardens. The platforms’ incentives hinge on the need for as many eyeballs as possible on ads. Hence, their algorithms sift through to assign a higher weighting on content that captures... See more

The most interesting part of Cent’s iterations was the move from seeding posts to seeding creators. We’d highly recommend reading through their decision to do this, but in short, seeding posts “didn’t make enough people enough money enough of the time”.

Part of the issue is the strong focus on distributing financial reward in exchange for participation. It’s a well established belief that reliance on extrinsic motivators, especially financial ones, are not enough. User's intrinsic motivation, and, specifically, perceived enjoyment, is a more explanatory variable of continued use.

It is vital that we build platforms that enable degrees of self-expression and self-protection, but we must place guardrails to ensure we’re encouraging positive behaviors.