I think web3 content-discovery has the potential to be better than web2 content-discovery, because tokens and prices have a “put your money where your mouth is” quality that upvotes don’t have.

Content/creator tokens offer a way for early believers in a content item/creator can invest in it by buying up some of that content/creator’s tokens. Well, just as in other kinds of markets, prices are information signals: the price of a token is useful information about the expected value of that creator or content item.

So what I’m imagining now is a system that watches all the tokenized web3 social-media content and looks for surprisingly-priced tokens. That is:

  • Invent whatever heuristics you want for estimating how much the tokens for a particular creator/post ought to be worth (based on the creator’s follower-count, what the general subject-matter area is, how much donation money his posts have earned in the past, etc.).
  • And then notice tokens that are priced either higher or lower than you expected:
    • Tokens priced lower than you expected might be an opportunity to invest. (“Wow, this creator is really good and underappreciated” / “Wow, I expect this post to go viral and people haven’t realized it yet”)
    • Tokens priced higher than you expected might be an opportunity either to short (if you think the content is overrated) or to subscribe. (“Hey, this creator’s token prices are higher than expected… I guess people believe in him, maybe I should check him out… wow, this content is actually really good, I think I’ll follow him.”)

Or to put it another way: content-token prices decouple the question of “will a lot of people value this content?” from the question of “do you personally like this content?”

  • On Reddit, Reddiquette says not to “downvote an otherwise acceptable post because you don’t personally like it”, but of course that’s what everyone does; downvoting to denounce/suppress is basically the norm. I suspect that that dynamic might play out differently if downvoters had to put their money where their mouth is by shorting the content token.
  • Similarly, plenty of posts get a ton of upvotes even though I suspect they wouldn’t get a ton of donations. (e.g. Echo-chamber preaching-to-the-choir posts that say nothing new. People are happy to upvote those, but I wonder whether they might be more reluctant to donate real money.)

Of course there’s no reason why web3 can’t still use web2-style upvotes and downvotes; I’m not expecting those to go away, and I don’t think they’re always bad. And I also don’t think that a piece of content isn’t worth creating just because it doesn’t get a lot of donations. But I do think that longing/shorting content tokens might create a new kind of signal that can cut through a lot of the noise that we currently get with systems based on upvoting and downvoting.

Just to summarize, the point of a system like this is:

  • If you believe in a creator or if you really love a particular post, you can boost the attention it receives, provide a more-stable source of revenue for the creator, and also potentially make a profit for yourself, by purchasing its token (but at the risk of losing your money if you’re wrong).
  • If you’re looking for good new content to follow, you can look at lists of highly-priced tokens (or surprisingly-highly-priced tokens - an already-popular creator will already have high-priced tokens, whereas an up-and-coming creator might have tokens that aren’t so highly-priced but are still higher-priced than you’d otherwise expect), as a way to find people who are creating truly valuable content. And this signal will hopefully be less muddled than the signal you’d get if you were only looking at a system based on less-meaningful upvotes/downvotes.

(Crossposted on /r/Web3SocialMedia; feel free to comment there.)