Synereo - Earn Money Using Social Media

[DecentralizeEconomics]

Next month, Synereo is releasing their beta social media application.  If you don't know, Synereo is, at its core, a decentralized, monetized content delivery network.  By allowing users to directly own their data, thus cutting out the middleman (aka Mark Zuckerberg), Synereo passes on the profits to its userbase.  This is referred to as the "attention economy".  As users view and refer ("like") content coming into their personalized streams, they generate a reputation score and earn money.  The attention economy is powered by AMPs on a Casper blockchain.  All settlement is done in AMPs, but the user will have the option of earning any currency they wish.

My question to you is, "Would you change your social media network if you could actually earn money by simply using another network?"

Personally, I think this model has a great, widespread appeal to both the privacy oriented crypto crowd and the general market populace.  Who wouldn't want to earn money by doing something they already spend time doing?

[robelneo]

Tsu has been doing that over a year and they have been a lot of social sites that pays just to use their site just like they do on facebook,one site that is also doing that,that pays through crypto currency is startpeeps own by jens,they had a thread here,looks profitable though ..

[Snail2]

Next month, Synereo is releasing their beta social media application.  If you don't know, Synereo is, at its core, a decentralized, monetized content delivery network.  By allowing users to directly own their data, thus cutting out the middleman (aka Mark Zuckerberg), Synereo passes on the profits to its userbase.  This is referred to as the "attention economy".  As users view and refer ("like") content coming into their personalized streams, they generate a reputation score and earn money.  The attention economy is powered by AMPs on a Casper blockchain.  All settlement is done in AMPs, but the user will have the option of earning any currency they wish.

My question to you is, "Would you change your social media network if you could actually earn money by simply using another network?"

Personally, I think this model has a great, widespread appeal to both the privacy oriented crypto crowd and the general market populace.  Who wouldn't want to earn money by doing something they already spend time doing?

The answer to your question depends on what I would find on that new social media network. E.g. on facebook or twitter I'll get huge number of people and a lot of attention if I'm doing it right. On LinkedIn I can find the right people if I need something, and vice versa.
If I can find only the same 50 or let's say 200 people chatting with each other (or with themselves on different nicknames), that's not much use even if I get paid for being bored to death there. Tagbond is a good example for this.

[twister]

Depends on how famous it becomes and the user base it is able to acquire, the whole point of social media networking is you get exposed to a lot of people and it helps you achieve whatever it is you're trying to through these channels and if Synereo is able to do that than people will join and making some money for doing things you already do will be an added advantage.

[TPTB_need_war]

Tsu has been doing that over a year and they have been a lot of social sites that pays just to use their site just like they do on facebook,one site that is also doing that,that pays through crypto currency is startpeeps own by jens,they had a thread here,looks profitable though ..

See this: http://cointelegraph.com/news/synereo-attention-economy-and-distributed-cloud-to-deliver-next-generation-social-networks

I am in the midst of studying/researching Synereo's white paper, Hangout videos, and blogs. Some of my initial thoughts are here.

One of the salient questions to answer is if there is something about doing it decentralized that will make it more compelling than those sites you mentioned.

Another critically important question is whether Synereo attention model will work well.

And third whether the attention model is comprehensive or instead limiting.

I do not understand why Greg Meredith has been asked to talk about SpecialK and be the co-developer in the context of the Casper block chain consensus model overhaul for Ethereum (which I have asserted is fundamentally flawed). Even Greg admits in the Synereo whitepaper that their algorithms don't attain (and don't need to attain) a global consensus. So this has already caused me to doubt whether any of this is well thought out (although the attention model is orthogonal to Casper afaik). I need to complete my research before I can comment with full understanding.

I have very strong doubts about whether people will want to get paid from a social network, because I think the earnings will be so small that they will be offended. They join social networks for greater reasons, such as sharing, interacting, etc.. Instead I think you need to give them a better experience of what they really joined for. Some people do earn money now using Facebook to sell and promote things. The revenue opportunities are othogonal. So far I thinking Greg Meredith is trying shoehorn one attention (math) model onto a very diverse social human phenomenon. But I need to study more to see if I find some reason to think he is really onto a powerful concept. Synereo is extremely complex to analyze from all facets including technical and markets. I am expecting that what we really need is unbounded experimentation (free market) of models (but what would that really mean and would it be decentralized and do we really need decentralized).

Again if this is just a speculator thread and you just want to sell the slogan and ignore the details, then please tell me so. Then I will keep my future comments in my own little echo chamber else where.

Edit: the two posts preceding mine are actually quite insightful and astute.

Edit#2: the poll is worded in a very misleading manner. Some people may wish to vote No not because they don't like the money but for other reasons, such as the money being so insignificant as to the reason they use a social network. The author of the OP seems to be overly enthused on having found the greatest thing since sliced bread, but he may be in for a reality check.

[TPTB_need_war]

Does anyone have any data on what users typically earn from these sites?

Let me attempt a "back of the napkin" guesstimate.

Normally ads pay between $1 - $10 per CPM (thousand impressions), but it can be even less if there are very low CTR, low sales conversions/branding recall, or too many ads on same page. For starters let's assume the revenue distribution is egalitarian (i.e. uniformly distributed among users), and assume a typical user views 100 ads per day. So that is $0.10 to $1 per day in revenue for each user. That isn't even a third world wage any more.

Perhaps with multiple ads on the same page and very well targeted ad content, we could raise that by a factor of 10. Then it might be worthwhile to someone in a third world country, but it doesn't seem like it will ever be worthwhile to someone in a developed nation. Okay $300 per month might be worth it to some kids who live with their parents in a developed nation, but it isn't going to be participating in the significant portion of the economy.

It just seems to me to be economically implausible as a motivation to seek out a big chunk of the economics of social network. Social networks are driving much larger economics that are the derivative sales that come from networking.

Now a concept such as Synereo doesn't have to be about revenue for users. It could be focused on achieving other goals that are important to users of social networks. So far Greg Meredith hasn't articulated that clearly to me.

I will be trying to figure this out. It is a complex mental challenge.

I would appreciate all the information and opinions I can read from others about what other social networking experiments are doing and their results. As much data as possible please.

[monsterer]

Normally ads pay between $1 - $10 per CPM (thousand impressions),

In my experience that's too high by a factor of 10 - 100 for CPM ads. Maybe CPA you might get closer to $1 per action, but they're generally pretty low quality ads, which you wouldn't want on a social network.

[TPTB_need_war]

Normally ads pay between $1 - $10 per CPM (thousand impressions),

In my experience that's too high by a factor of 10 - 100 for CPM ads. Maybe CPA you might get closer to $1 per action, but they're generally pretty low quality ads, which you wouldn't want on a social network.

Are you sure? I am saying $1 - $10 paid per 1000 displays of the banner ad. During the dot.com bubble is was as high as $40. Has it declined now below $1?

Tsu has been doing that over a year and they have been a lot of social sites that pays just to use their site just like they do on facebook,one site that is also doing that,that pays through crypto currency is startpeeps own by jens,they had a thread here,looks profitable though ..

This doesn't look good:

"tsu is an invite-only platform that rewards social activity for all users"

[monsterer]

Normally ads pay between $1 - $10 per CPM (thousand impressions),

In my experience that's too high by a factor of 10 - 100 for CPM ads. Maybe CPA you might get closer to $1 per action, but they're generally pretty low quality ads, which you wouldn't want on a social network.

Are you sure? I am saying $1 - $10 paid per 1000 displays of the banner ad. During the dot.com bubble is was as high as $40. Has it declined now below $1?

Last time I looked into this (a good 5 years ago, mind) you'd be lucky to get $0.4 CPM on google adsense, which is the highest paying service.

[TPTB_need_war]

Normally ads pay between $1 - $10 per CPM (thousand impressions),

In my experience that's too high by a factor of 10 - 100 for CPM ads. Maybe CPA you might get closer to $1 per action, but they're generally pretty low quality ads, which you wouldn't want on a social network.

Are you sure? I am saying $1 - $10 paid per 1000 displays of the banner ad. During the dot.com bubble is was as high as $40. Has it declined now below $1?

Last time I looked into this (a good 5 years ago, mind) you'd be lucky to get $0.4 CPM on google adsense, which is the highest paying service.

You mean for the website owner's earnings. That is after Google takes its cut right. So figure the advertiser is paying roughly $1 CPM. Synereo intends to cut out the middle man.

[TPTB_need_war]

Let me attempt a "back of the napkin" guesstimate.

Normally ads pay between $1 - $10 per CPM (thousand impressions), but it can be even less if there are very low CTR, low sales conversions/branding recall, or too many ads on same page. For starters let's assume the revenue distribution is egalitarian (i.e. uniformly distributed among users), and assume a typical user views 100 ads per day. So that is $0.10 to $1 per day in revenue for each user. That isn't even a third world wage any more.

Perhaps with multiple ads on the same page and very well targeted ad content, we could raise that by a factor of 10. Then it might be worthwhile to someone in a third world country, but it doesn't seem like it will ever be worthwhile to someone in a developed nation. Okay $300 per month might be worth it to some kids who live with their parents in a developed nation, but it isn't going to be participating in the significant portion of the economy.

Please note that the $300 per month upper end of the guesstimate is for targeting adults in Western countries with higher paying jobs that enable them to spend money. But that $30 - $300 monthly guesstimate is not worth their time to waste viewing 100 - 1000 ads per day on a social network.

The Western teenager demographic and third world users that have less money to spend on products advertised, thus the ads pay less. So that would not be $300 for a teenage or third world user. More likely in the realm of $10 per month. And that is a waste of their time as well.

Paying users to view ads is not an economic model (ditto paying users to solve CAPTCHAs such as for crypto coin faucets). If it was, many sites would be doing it successfully and teenagers and third world would be employed doing it.

While Chinese consumers are increasingly listening to music on licensed services, the most popular services are free and supported by advertising, generating very little revenue for record companies.

As shown by Information is Beautiful’s updated-for-2015 visualization of the subject, signed artists make .0019 cents per stream on Pandora and .0011 cents per Spotify stream. The worst payout of all for musicians, however, comes from Youtube, which pays out about .0003 per play. An artist signed to a record label would thus have to have their Youtube video played 4,200,000 times in order to earn the monthly U.S. minimum wage of $1,260.

Pharrell’s ‘Happy’ Streams 43 Million Times, Makes Less Than $3,000

Paying a site for advertising since it aggregates users and earns $1 - $10 per user per month is a viable economic model:

Facebook recently acquired WhatsApp for 19b
USD, paying 42 dollars per user. [11] Similarly, the value of Facebook and
Twitter users is often calculated through their market cap - currently at 141
and and 81.5 dollars, respectively.

[TPTB_need_war]

I will be making some comments as I am reading the Synereo white paper, and the coherent, holistic analysis will hopefully follow later after I am done reading the entire white paper (note Elokane already admitted to me that the white paper is missing some critical algorithms such as the ability to filter out low/zero information/entropy actions such as when users Like all their friends' timeline posts irrespective of value of the content that was shared).

End users can run the service on their own computation devices, gaining
full control over their data. Thus, Synereo is directly aligned with the shifting
trends of the web from a centralized model, to a more open, user-centric, dis-
tributed architecture. As part of an eort to make the Synereo technology easily
accessible to large audiences, we provide an architecture for deploying central-
ized Synereo web-based gateway services, such that technically-able users - or
partner services - can host Synereo nodes as a service to their peers.

Unfortunately I explained a dilemma:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1340057.msg13670558#msg13670558

If the users store their files on their own computer, then there is no way to enforce legal orders, thus the Synereo protocol will be banned by (centralized gateway) hosts. And if Synereo doesn't allow users to host content from their computers, then user's can't resist government regulation of their activities. Besides serving files from user computers over ISPs that have asymmetrically low upload (relative to download) bandwidth is a Tragedy of the Commons as some ISPs effectively pay for other ISPs' lower upload allowances (which is why Bittorrent is throttled/banned by many ISPs, which thus helps drive the Net Neutrality politics that will enslave us in internet taxation ... which btw I pointed out to Bittorrent in 2008, I offered a solution, and they apparently ignored me...click link above to read more).

So the point is that hosting illegal content is a non-starter. And thus hosting (at least high-bandwidth or copyrightable) content on user computers is a non-starter.

If we are going to find utility in Synereo, it has to come from gains in user's sense of value from the attention model, which is what I will be analyzing.

It is not clear if there is any advantage to it being decentralized (but I do hope to find one that matters to users). Mostly the masses don't care about decentralization ideology. They care about the value they get out of the social experience (and not just monetized value). However, we are already seeing where the values of certains users (e.g. musicians) are in conflict with the values of certain music promotion sites such as SoundCloud and Spotify. I have also been analyzing these music promotions sites. There are many. And that might be the more important trust that is being violated, not the reporting to the government which I think is not an actionable cause for most people:

Faced with these numbers, many people are asking themselves, Does it make
sense that the value we create simply by sharing our lives online is retained by
the people who happened to be the rst to provide the infrastructure allowing
us to do so? That these social platforms stated aim is to increase the revenue
they can extricate from us? From our basic need to communicate and share
ourselves with others?
Indeed, this is how current social networking service providers see their users:
as unpaid laborers. As free content creators whose behaviors can be recorded
and measured, the data generated auctioned o to corporations. And for many,
this may still be ne. The services given are now seen as basic necessities in
our digital age, and so perhaps the balance struck between user and service
provider is a fair one. However, there are other issues tipping the scale against
the incumbents: theres been a breach of trust. The information going into user
feeds is being manipulated, and the information going out - including details
of our activity outside of Facebook - is being handed over to governmental
authorities; privacy settings be damned.

I didn't know this:

Ello, a recent attempt to create an environment
where users arent monetized through ads, exploded in popularity within a few
months of its launch, registering 1 million users and keeping 3 million more on
its waiting list as it went on to scale its centralized technology. [17]

Please refer to prior discussion here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethtrader/comments/42rvm3/truth_about_ethereum_is_being_banned_at/

Note I am ideologically in support of a decentralized concept. But economics rules ideology. So let's see where the chips fall in terms of analysis. As the preface to the white paper says, a manifesto is not sufficient. One must also have an economic plan.

[TPTB_need_war]

Economics and game theory seems to be one of my forte or at least interests/hobbies, so let's take a tangent and start by analyzing economically Ello's business model:

"Say you’re a musician or a band, and you want to control multiple accounts from a single login," Budnitz said. "We can charge $2 for that. It’s not for everyone.”

Budnitz says he has seen thousands of emails from users suggesting features for which they would be willing to pay, and Budnitz says plenty are already in the works.

Ello founder Paul Budnitzpaulbudnitz.com

"Let’s say that for a few bucks, you can buy an emoji pack designed by a popular street artist," Budnitz says. "Because of how we've built Ello, it naturally lends itself perfectly to that."

Other hotly suggested features include the ability to browse Ello with inverted colors, turning the screen black and overlaying it with white text. Interestingly enough, the feature saw over 500 requests, mainly from Ello users in Europe and Japan.

And while others have debated how feasible Ello's ad-free business model will work out

[...]

"An advertising-based social network is by its nature, it actually has to do things, because all those things are the things that make it money," Budnitz says. "If we started doing that, everyone would say 'f--- this' and leave — excuse my language."

At the end of the day, Budnitz says keeping Ello sustainable will be a relatively simple feat, given that Ello's business model is inherently different from Facebook's, and that means the costs are different, too.

"There are seven of us running Ello now, with some extra programmers helping us out," said Budnitz. "It is not very hard to run at this scale, and Ello’s getting pretty big. And data is really cheap! I think if you don’t have to have an office building full of people figuring out how to manipulate people into giving you more data, it’s really not that hard to run a network with a ton of people on it."

The problem is that due to centralized control, Ello is putting itself in a position where it has to compete against others who might want certain features which ameloriate other features which Ello has a vested revenue interest. It is simply impossible for a centralized, top-down controller to remain impartial. Some users may want some feature which provides some necessarily benefit to those users but in some other way actually bypasses the need to buy a different feature from Ello. These users presumably won't be free to program a plug-in that destroys Ello's revenue stream, just as no one is allowed to program a App plugin for Facebook which displays advertising.

Ello has just shifted the enslavement problem from ads to paid features.

And their claim of anonymity and defense against national security gag orders is BULLSHIT. They can't guarantee those attributes being a centralized entity. Furgetaboutit.

So right off at the start, we see Ello's principle founder is not thinking clearly or is disingenuous.

Not to mention that a site which charges for features can't scale as well as one that gives everything users want away for free. Nevertheless Facebook and SoundCloud are also restricting and harming some (but is it significant enough?) users as well, so maybe there is a better balance. Is it Synereo's decentralized design? I will continue the analysis.

I can say with near certainty that unless you offer some compelling feature where all their friends will want to join, users here in the Philippines will not be interested in leaving Facebook where all their friends already are.


Understand from the upthread guessimates, that Tsu's and GetGems' business model is fundamentally flawed (probably also in other ways):

Gems
2
allows users to compensate each other directly
for messages and advertising using their own cryptocurrency. Gems developers
have explicitly described the compensation model of their system in terms of
the attention economy
3
Since users are paid for their time and attention, these
networks are described by their developers as contributing to the economy of
attention.
Compensating users for their attention is certainly better than expecting
their labor for free. We welcome the move to recognize user contributions to
the value of these networks, and to reward the love and eort that goes into
all the content they produce. However, the issue is more complicated than
simply paying people for their attention

The case of freemium gaming makes clear how schedules of rewards and
reinforcement can be used to compromise or even undermine a users agency.
Instead of assisting in the process of selecting for action, reinforcement learning
trains the user to expect specic rewards when adopting the goals and behav-
iors imposed by the scheduling system. Eectively, these compensation networks
redirect user attention and action to serve the purposes of the network

[...]

Estrada and Lawhead [29] distinguish between systems that disrupt user be-
havior by introducing new computing tasks, from those that leverage existing
behavior to perform useful computational work. They call the latter \natural
human computation". We see Tsu, Gems, and other such compensation net-
works as a "disruptive"[i.e. information destroying] approach to social networking, and propose Synereo
as a "natural" alternative.

[enhu]

Next month, Synereo is releasing their beta social media application.  If you don't know, Synereo is, at its core, a decentralized, monetized content delivery network.  By allowing users to directly own their data, thus cutting out the middleman (aka Mark Zuckerberg), Synereo passes on the profits to its userbase.  This is referred to as the "attention economy".  As users view and refer ("like") content coming into their personalized streams, they generate a reputation score and earn money.  The attention economy is powered by AMPs on a Casper blockchain.  All settlement is done in AMPs, but the user will have the option of earning any currency they wish.

My question to you is, "Would you change your social media network if you could actually earn money by simply using another network?"

Personally, I think this model has a great, widespread appeal to both the privacy oriented crypto crowd and the general market populace.  Who wouldn't want to earn money by doing something they already spend time doing?

YES! I would change my social media network and may even delete may fb account

Seen something like this before but didn't make it big like fb. if this is going to be big and has shared by thousands, this could actually make it and may even kill facebook.
There will always be better one. how would you sell ads to this social media if you don't get to gather user info?

[TPTB_need_war]

YES! I would change my social media network and may even delete may fb account

And if all your friends, customer, collegues, etc do not follow you, then you will be all alone (even if the site has a million users who are not people you relate to).

Your Fb contacts may not care about ideology. And they may like or at least not hate Fb as much as you apparently do. Hey I don't like the idea of centralized overlord either, but the fact is when I need to communicate to my connections, they are all on Fb.

Seen something like this before but didn't make it big like fb.

Diaspora (now defunct):

A simple look at dierent oerings in the space, aiming
to subvert some of the aforementioned premises, have been met with hope and
with praise before ever delivering anything substantial. Diaspora, in many ways
ushering the concept of a decentralized service, was quickly backed nancially
by hundreds of people.

if this is going to be big and has shared by thousands, this could actually make it and may even kill facebook.

You mean 100s of millions, else your contacts won't likely be there.

There will always be better one. how would you sell ads to this social media if you don't get to gather user info?

That is the analysis I am doing now. Stay tuned for future posts...I have also invited the Synereo lead dev to come here to this thread (he said he has been ill past couple of days)...

[TPTB_need_war]

Attention is selection for action

[...]

This section is excellent (click the link and read it). But the devil will be in details.

Note even Stackexchange, this forum, and Reddit are attention economies (with the former and latter incorporating voting and comment threads so that users can impart their appraisals of relevance and accuracy).

For example, I get your attention when I bump posts to the top of thread. I also have a reputation (in some reader's opinion) that my posts are informative and valuable. However, some other readers hate my writing and think it is too verbose, technobabble, and/or rude (please do click that link for a prime example!). So ideally my posts should only be seen by (get the attention of) readers who will value my posts. So an attention tool (hopefully automated) should detect which users don't want to see my posts and hide them. But you can't hide my posts when someone else replies to them and that other person happens to be someone that readers who don't want to read me, do want to read the user replying. So there is an unresolvable conflict in such a model of attention based on personal reputation.

This is essentially the MAJOR FLAW I see so far in Synereo's Reo attention model core concept. It conflates the attention economy with personal reputation. It seems an attention model will need to be much more complex than that. Any way, let me continue analyzing Synereo's model to see if I learn something that changes my conclusion.

I am thinking about models for an attention economy. Stackexchange and Reddit irritate me because they allow disrespectful (and spiteful, political, turf battles) downvoting instead of a system of community selection. There should instead be subcommunities I think, and you only comment in the communities that value you. That is the only way I see around the conflation of personal reputation and interleaved discussion. But I need to think that out more. Just a very rough idea for now.

Existing social networks tally up likes and reshares, but
they do nothing to describe the network you're helping to build or how to make
it stronger. The point of these networks is to make you feel like a celebrity of
your own minor fandom, not to make you feel like an agent in control of your
social life

The other thought I have is the yes in centrally controlled social networks the users are not in control of what they can do and how information is prioritized for them. But I am also thinking there doesn't exist only one attention model. Rather the number of attention models is as unbounded as is the diversity of human beings. Every human is unique! (read my linked blog for elaboration on why that is so)

Thus I am thinking one of the fundamental flaws in Synereo may be the hard-coding of one attention model network wide.

1.3.1 Core concepts: Reo, engagement, and AMPs, oh my!

Reo

Reo is a measure of your reputation as a publisher of attention-worthy content.
Given two participants, say Troy and Abed, in an online community, we write

Reo(Troy; Abed)

to indicate a quantitative measure of their relative standing
in the community. Roughly speaking,

Reo(Troy; Abed) refects how much the friends Troy and Abed
have in common have paid attention to Troy versus Abed.
As such, the measure is not symmetric; that is, we normally expect

Reo(Troy; Abed) ≠ Reo(Abed; Troy)

engagement

Reois built on top of the notion of engagement (Troy; Abed), which is a quan-
titative measure of how much Abed has engaged the content output of Troy;
respectively, engagement (Abed; Troy) is a measure of how much Troy has en-
gaged the content output of Abed.

These two notions feature in the algorithm for prioritizing content in a user's
stream. Essentially, the more Troy attends Abed's content, the more likely it is
for Abed's content to show up in a place in Troy 's stream where Troy will notice
it. Likewise, the higher Abed's standing in the community relative to Troy, the more likely
Abed's content will show up in Troy's stream in a place where he is likely to notice it.

So this assumes (roughly) that the actions of which content they attend to amongst my common friends with another person, determines the ranking of that person in terms of the prioritization of displaying that person's content to me.

That does not seem to have high informational value. My friends may not even have the same preferences that I do.

Perhaps Synereo is planning on determining who I have the most in common with in terms of preferences and do it either automatically or assisted by me, but I am still not sure if the actions of those people will best reflect my priorities and preferences because as Synereo's white paper admitted in the "Attention is selection for action" section that my circumstances determine my priorities on my attention.

It seems the fix is to allow reputation per agent to accrue to different genres on sharing, i.e. granular reputation. In other words, hashtags.

Again I am leaning towards that Synereo's attention model is flawed, even though their ideological and conceptual basis is admirable.

But let me finish the rest of the white paper...

[TPTB_need_war]

The AMP Token To complement these two forces, Synereo introduces the
AMP . A user can publish content with a certain amount of AMP s attached. The algorithm for
prioritizing content also takes into account how many AMP s have been invested
in the content and can use this to bump it into a more desired location. In
this way, AMP s provide a way to purchase a shot at a user's attention. Users
receiving amplied content will also receive a portion of the attached
AMP s. The more Reo they have relative to the poster, the more their attention is valued by
their shared community, and the more AMPs they will receive proportionally

Frankly speaking the AMPs seem to violate the correct logic about attention value not being about paying users. I am unwilling to be paid $1 - $10 per day to view 100 spams ads per day (notice how the ads here at Bitcointalk are very discreet and take only a small space between posts or on user's signature lines). AMPs crypto currency seems to be an appendage to drive another P&D scam to sell an ICO.

Afaics there is no reason to involve a monetary unit in the attention model. Advertising could instead become sponsored content that is desired by users (i.e. sponsorship paying the artist for its creation and then placing the sponsorship in the content, e.g. a Dominos pizza is delivered in the video). AMPs appears to be an ill conceived gimmick to drive speculation fever in a very risky, experimental project that might fail as Diaspora did.

Besides the rest of the Synereo network operates on a decentralized, no-consensus model, which is the antithesis of a crypto currency which requires global consensus. Conflating Synereo with a crypto currency will thus end up forcing Synereo to be centralized (see my research in the Decentralization thread for why and also my formerly censored thoughts about why afaics the work that Synereo's Greg Meredith is doing for Ethereum's Casper consensus protocol is flawed and won't solve the inherent flaw in Ethereum w.r.t. to decentralization).

Similarly, when Synereo launches, an initial supply of
AMP s will be available for purchase and distribution to early
users and contributors. Synereo also oers a unique social approach to proof-of-
work that will be connected to a kind of "mining" and AMP
creation. However, the discussion of this is currently out of scope for this paper.

It is impossible to invent a PoW which derives from a decentralized, no-consensus network which isn't about consuming a resource and also achieve global consensus on the distributed ledger's (block chain's) Consistency due to the CAP theorem.

This is nonsense to claim you have such a PoW.

Edit#2: so on page 33 (#31) it is explained that it is not AMPs that are socially "mined" but rather Reo is socially mined and then can be perhaps some exchanged for AMPs. But this doesn't solve the problem that this will cause a divergence of consensus about the value of an agent's Reo score:

Socially meaningful proof-of-work and "mining"

AMPs If all value associated with cryptocurrency must ultimately trace back to value
originating in at currency the transition to cryptocurrency will be a slow pro-
cess, indeed. If, however, we provide a mechanism whereby a key aspect of the
creative process is re ected in the AMP's relationship to value, that process can
be dramatically accelerated. What everyone implicitly understands, yet very
few explicitly acknowledge is that creativity has a distinctive mark: creative
processes are ex nihilo; they generate something from nothing! Whether it's a
new algorithm, a new song, or a new way of looking at the world, we recog-
nize creativity in the freshness and newness of the oering { something is there
that wasn't there before. Human life vitally depends on the font of creativity;
without the renewal of creativity value slow receeds from our lives.
However, without a mechanism whereby that creativity results in the cre-
ation of currency, none of the value created by a genuinely creative oering is
recognized. All of the existing currency traces value back to some other source.
So, without such a mechanism the creative act is not recognized properly by the
system. Note though, that if they nd their audience, the consistently creative
participant in the network will have high Reo. Their standing in the community
will re ect the recognition of their creativity. If they had a means by which
they could turn some of their accumulated Reo into AMPs, literally capitalizing
on their reputation, then the system would actually have a means to recognize
the creation of value in the creative act.

The attention economy

Out of these core concepts we build an economy of attention; a way to manage
this highly limited resource of the human brain. In some sense, this economy
is not unlike an economy in a functioning capital-based democracy. Typically,
such economies come with two dials: on the one hand, citizens can express their
voice through democratic processes, such as elections, referendums, and other
mechanisms where they can cast their
vote
. On the other, citizens engage in the
creation, distribution and consumption of goods and services and use capital as
a means of facilitating the benecial ow of this wealth.
Both processes ultimately result in the distribution of goods and services.
And as long as the linkage between votes and capital exchange is suciently
weak, citizens have
two
distinct ways of expressing their individual and col-
lective will about the functioning of the economy in society. When working
eectively, these two channels provide a mechanism for balancing the collective
will (largely identied with democratic participation and self-determination at
that level), with individual will (largely identied with the ow of currency and
self-determination at that level).
The notion of
Reo
, as can be seen in its technical form in chapter 2, is essen-
tially a kind of attention-based measure of the collective will: it looks remarkably
like a kind of online voting. Meanwhile,
AMP
s are unabashedly an attention-
based form of currency. As such, these two notions are balanced against each
other and provide a means of balancing collective will with individual will. What
distinguishes Synereo from the idealized capital-based democracy, however, is
the reconciling force of
engagement
. In point of fact, a democratic society lives
or dies according to the engagement of its citizenry; but there is no objective,
reied measure linking this directly to the distribution and ow of value. In
Synereo, there is - the attention model allows each and every individual to cast
his \vote" and show his engagement without making any special eort beyond
his normal participating in the network - and this additional sophistication cre-
ates more subtle network dynamics, hopefully leading to a more balanced social
model.

The entire point of an attention model is to remove the conflict in the community by making the communities more granular and eliminate the tension. I should be able to participate in multiple sub-communities and my posts to those communities should be relevant to the shared interests and attitudes of each sub-community.

I am leaning towards your model is fundamentally conceptually flawed for as long as it is including AMPs and Reo is not more granular than the monolithic agent.

Edit @ 30 minutes after post time: Ah now I see it mentioned that more granularity for Reo is contemplated:

Further developments of this model include more
fine-grained distinctions between information types, social consensus, and other
signals that shape the network and the flow of information and attention in it.

Edit#3: So the only reason to use process calculi to model the network versus kinetic proofreading (think of Facebook's Like) is to incorporate AMPs:

Using
the social network interpretation kinetic proofreading provides a quantitative
model of an attention economy. As such, it stands as a competitor to the
Synereo model. That's why we care.
Comparison
As mentioned in section 2.2.6, we hope to publish quantitative
comparison results in a subsequent paper. More qualitatively, the question is,
does Synereo's network model do anything to improve this basic mechanism?
The short answer is that Synereo includes each of the attention ratcheting mech-
anisms and amplies them. However, it balances that with
AMP
s. This acts as
a kind of catalyst or enzyme working in the opposite direction to the natural
signal improvement.

[TPTB_need_war]

This discussion should indicate precisely how the construction of the
Reo measure defeats Sybil-like attacks. If either Stilgar or Usul create an army of bots,
all ready to attest to the power of their creator's word, this attestation is highly
unlikely to contribute to the standing of either in the eyes of the other because
they will not share the bots in their common community.

I quickly read from page 14 to page 24 and this comment about Sybil attacks on Reo seems to be correct. Any user who has not acknowledged the Sybil agents (bots) will thus not receive their influence in terms of relative Reo score.

[enhu]

That is the analysis I am doing now. Stay tuned for future posts...I have also invited the Synereo lead dev to come here to this thread (he said he has been ill past couple of days)...

It has to be business friendly still just like facebook, maybe allowing businesses to create an app or pages as well. I think this is one of the feature that makes facebook very successful.
I was with myspace when facebook started and I ignore the first months but then I kept hearing it until i register a profile and my business but its too late since most of the URL are already taken.

[TPTB_need_war]

At dinner tonight (we dined out, budget style), I asked my 26 year old filipina gf (we are in Mindanao) if there are any things she doesn't like about Facebook. She is on Facebook in her new Samsung J7 mobile phone app during all waking hours on our WiFi connection which she prefers instead of my old laptop because she sometimes its "hung" (meaning the laptop is so old and under-provisioned that it has to be rebooted frequently). The mobile phone can be enjoyed from the sofa, in bed, and the it is easy to rotate screen for a video and also accepting calls and reply to SMS is all conveniently in one hand held along with Playstore apps (which my WinXP laptop isn't configured to accept).

• Photos & videos of horrific vehicles accidents (e.g. motorcycle driver's head crushed under wheel of bus) which she is curious to look at but she wishes it was blocked from her Timeline feed.
• Naked and pornographic videos & photos, again which she might be induced to view when in front of her face, but she would prefer they not be displayed to her.
• That she can't always play a video or music in the Timeline and must click off to a website such as Google to view it.
• That people can add her to Groups without her permission which is annoying (and all her friends agree they hate this).

She mentioned what she likes about Facebook:

• Interacting & staying up-to-date on happenings with her friends.
• Sharing music.
• Sharing jokes, funny videos, cute dogs, babies, anything pink, etc.
• Posting photos, especially ones she alters with apps such as replacing her black hair with gold hair, and humorous or girly effects.
• She also of course loves Google Playstore where she finds new apps to do funny or girly effects with her video Camera and/or photos.

Compensating users for their attention is certainly better than expecting their labor for free.

This is very powerful, GG is doing more with less friction. Imagine if each Gems is worth one dollar, its userbase would reach millions where you could basically earn serious money per day. In netnox case he would get $183 per day just by airdrop. We are seing that GG model is working pretty well, i mean its reaching 100k users already.

Please quote that correctly because I didn't write that. I was quoting Synereo's white paper. I fixed it above.

My point is that paying users for interacting on social networks, or paying them to watch ads, is not a viable economic model. I provided a link to my post at the Synereo thread that explains why I think so.

GetGems is not reaching 70k users. That is the count of downloads and downloads doesn't equal users. We'd need some statistics on actual usership, e.g. how many minutes per day using the app, etc.. I'd expect roughly 5% of downloads convert to users if the app is very good and has a compelling use case.

Additionally, the value of Gems is irrelevant if there is not a compelling reason for the users to trade the tokens with each other. There is no way investors in the token are going to finance you to give away $183 per day to each user just for being in a daily airdrop. That is pure fantasy. You have to actually create an ecosystem. You can't just drop money and expect an ecosystem to magically emerge. There must be network efforts.