Bitcoin Forum

Bitcoin => Bitcoin Discussion => Topic started by: EskimoBob on May 07, 2012, 06:01:09 AM



Title: use *coin for rating points in a news portal (or blog)?
Post by: EskimoBob on May 07, 2012, 06:01:09 AM
Friends of mine have a news site that has existed for over 11 years. They use "Slashdot like" karma points system for comments and users.
Plan is to move this site to Drupal and start using BTC (or LTC?) instead of just points. Now users can have BTC in the bank and not just good karma :)

Plan is this:
1) Generate a BTC address for every user, who has posted at least N comments in last X months.
2) Transfer Y coins (10-??) to every BTC address for free (users can add coin to this account number)
3) Every time you mod a comment or article, coins are transferred
4) Readers can tip writers the same way
 
Comments and suggestions are welcome.

BTW, do any of you like to program this module for Drupal 7.n?


Title: Re: use *coin for rating points in a news portal (or blog)?
Post by: Stephen Gornick on May 07, 2012, 09:01:07 AM
1) Generate a BTC address for every user, who has posted at least N comments in last X months.
3) Every time you mod a comment or article, coins are transferred
Comments and suggestions are welcome.

Paying using a quantitative metric and not qualitative metric will likely not give the results you are looking for.  Especially if a bot can profit from it.

As far as a forum which acts as a wallet as well, Ogrr does this.

Witcoin used to do this. 

It's quite a task to get users to pay:

Witcoin couldn't figure out how.

CoinSmack was along the same lines:
 - http://coinsmack.com

There have been calls from Reddit /r/bitcoin to add these features (e.g., tipping).  Reddit is open source so it may happen someday.

Quora has a Quora credits incentive system that has had mixed reviews.

There should be a winning approach where micropayments can help build and foster community and participation, but it has been elusive so far.  I see success from the crowdsource microlabor task platforms (TaskRabbit,  Zaarly, etc.) but those are a "do this and get X" type of concept.  When it goes lower to Q&A types of sites (e.g., Quora, Reddit) or Forums, people won't pay for service nor tip.  At least that's that what I'm seeing.


Title: Re: use *coin for rating points in a news portal (or blog)?
Post by: EskimoBob on May 08, 2012, 10:33:19 AM
Good points Stephen Gornick. Thank you.
We had a plan to kick start the tipping by depositing a small amount to every active account.
I started to think about using LTC (litecoin) because buying 1000 LTC costs close to nothing and the tip's can be "bigger numbers".
Do you like to receive a tip for 0.0005 or are you happier to see 0.5 or even 5? :) Humans like the bigger numbers.   

Quote
Paying using a quantitative metric and not qualitative metric will likely not give the results you are looking for.  Especially if a bot can profit from it.

Mod points are given for your comment quality not for quantity. If the comment sucks and is off-topic, you get no coin but negative karma and your comment falls quickly under the display threshold (like in Slashdot). Using a bot to scam the comments rating system is pointless because you can not transfer the coins out (at leas in the beginning) and if we discover some type of abuse, we will take all the scammers coins for good and also from all the accounts used by bots.
It is a non English site and this probably keeps the larger part of the world away.


Title: Re: use *coin for rating points in a news portal (or blog)?
Post by: Stephen Gornick on May 09, 2012, 01:04:06 AM
Do you like to receive a tip for 0.0005 or are you happier to see 0.5 or even 5? :) Humans like the bigger numbers.

.0005 BTC is 0.5 millibits (mBTCs).

That's the denomination Ogrr uses.

I started to think about using LTC (litecoin)

If you are doing an internal thing where withdrawal isn't allowed then why even mess with BTC.  Just call them credits, like what Quora does, for example.

And when you do eventually want to allow cash out, just peg X number of credits to 1 BTC. (e.g., 1000 site credits = 1 bitcoins).   That's what SealsWithClubs.org does, for example.