To identify and reward the users who have contributed value to the platform—a form of signaling, which those users can parlay into public reputation.

Incentives for productive speech: A speech community is likely to produce whatever kind of discourse it incentivizes. This means that users should have formal or informal incentives to produce speech that is recognized by other users as worthy.

A scholarly culture that reads and discusses enduringly great works incentivizes the production of such... See more

That said, the platform may not have a clear sense of the contributions’ value, especially early on, so there needs to be a mechanism for experimentation and recalibration around token distribution.