Rewarding Our Community's Contributions

ADALove, interesting and relevant point. Let’s look at it from a perspective as to what motivates persons to be actively involved and committed to work on an initiative. Several extrinsic and intrinsic motivators that could apply to the Cardano forum with some thoughts around them:

  • Recognition: this has two dimensions: appreciation by forum members that translate through views, hearts, bookmarks, replies (certain types). Being part of ‘community’ is important for most persons and meaningful and respectful engagement is an important motivator. Recognition by the Cardano team that can translate through ‘Great thought, we’ll look at this’, ‘Could you expand on that’, ‘Have you thought of this, what’s your feeling about…’, ‘Actually, we are looking at this’ or ‘Well, this is the way it actually is’. It’s easy to do (but needs attributed resources, and an active monitoring of the forum and input of Cardano team members who have direct links to key team members to be able to inject ideas or obtain feedback. I think this is important in making the ‘connection’ to the forum. In the issues that I find interesting I have not seen any of this. Either there is no interest from the team or it is missed. It is clear that if there is no engagement with specific threads by forum or team that the threads die, and with it comes a demotivation to further engage in the forum.
  • Payment in ADA: an option and certainly a motivator, ADALove has worded these well. I understand that the Cardano team has no real financial issues (for the moment), so contributing would show a commitment and recognition of the team to the contributions of members. A caveat here though is that different persons come to the forum for different reasons, some come for support (technical ‘:angry:, this doesn’t work as it should’, mental ‘:cold_sweat: the bottom is falling out, hold my hand…’, understanding ‘:thinking: how does this work?’), some help by giving ideas/ approaches how to do things, some are interested in trading/ making it big, some want to see how they can ‘use’ Cardano in their work/ life, others are more interested in exploring the potential social/ financial/ political implications of Cardano/ the blockchain. All of these are valid, but not all of these are equally popular, by using only ‘easy indicators’ like hearts you may push the forum in a certain direction. The incentives should be used in a way that all real contributions that add value are supported. Incentives steer, and I don’t want the forum to only have messages like ‘got an ADA tattoo today’ or ‘HODL, HODL, HODL…’ (luckily we’re far from being there for the moment, but if the incentives are used in a wrong way it could go that road). Incentives should be based on added value brought to the forum and the Cardano movement, and measuring this has to go beyond ‘likes’ (ADALove: not saying you’re advocating for this, I just want to add some additional thoughts). We also need to understand that this forum is silo-ed based on language, There are parts that are inaccessible to most of us, and these may get very little attention because nobody can read them, yet may possibly yield the most insightful posts… Another caveat is that bringing in ‘money’ changes dynamics and perception, so it has to be managed carefully.
  • Being part of a movement: reading comments I have the feeling that many actively choose for Cardano, not because it will make them ‘big bucks’, but because of what it is and what it could bring to society. Feeling part of this ‘movement’ and better understanding Cardano, and feeling that we may be contributing to this will also be a motivator for many I think. How motivating would it be to get a message from a key person in Cardano saying ‘Great idea, we’ll be looking into that’ or a question to the forum ‘what are thoughts around this…’? Involve us, drill into and use the quality of thinking on the forum, from what I’m reading it is clearly there.
  • Understanding: many probably want to have a better understanding of complicated and complex domain that is trying to find its place in society (and that could potentially be a very disruptive - and positive - technology).
  • Opportunity: both extrinsic and intrinsic, opportunity to use insights or technologies to advance ones own work and activities/ priorities, possibly even at some point get professionally involved around Cardano and its roll-out. Financial by playing the markets cleverly, and a whole wad of other opportunities that involvement in the forum and Cardano could bring.

There are probably other elements to mention but I’ll leave it at that.

Ultimately, everything is about cost and benefit. For me, working as consultant, the time I put into writing for the Cardano forum is time I’m not prospecting for future assignments, developing new approaches and tools, studying or that I use to strap on the snow rackets (we have 40cm snow for the moment) and dashing off into the woods for a 2-hour stroll with the dog enjoying nature while doing a work-out … The last weeks I was quite active on the forum, but the balance makes that I will not be able to continue maintaining this level of engagement. What is the cost, what are the benefits? Just to make clear, my main motivator is not money (though we obviously need to survive). While as an individual I’m not important for the forum, I think that there are others like me on the forum who will ultimately have to balance their commitment. What type of forum do we want, one-liners, or a forum that tries to go a bit deeper?

The key message to the Cardano team is: if you see value in having a rich and vibrant community, that could potentially feed innovative ideas to you, and who could potentially help in rolling out specific parts of the programme, then do identify and analyse what extrinsic and intrinsic motivators makes people want to get involved, and create the forum you want by pushing the right buttons…

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took me a second to get it :slight_smile: lol

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Think its a good idea to increase participation of contribution. I have been using Steemit since October. I had really not posted much on any platforms before including facebook. The rewards incentive helped me to come out of my shell. I think the same would be true for many just watching and holding ADA now if there was a bit of reward incentive. I hope it would be better then the Steemit system, a fair distribution of reward for contribution that is not based on or influenced by power or amount of ADA held. Linked is a recent post on steemit about ADA wallet. https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@potplucker/cardano-wallet-daedalus-download-experience

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@Afridev and @ADALove I’ve really enjoyed reading through this thread… some tremendous thoughts and I love a lot of the concepts.

We are looking at this - amongst a long list of other projects :rofl: - feel free to send me a PM and introduce yourself - we are very keen to get to know the people contributing in such a valuable way.

Best wishes,

Jon :slight_smile:

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@saline09 I’m not sure–hopefully within the next 60 days or so. There are actually two Cardano-based projects that I will reveal to the community when I feel the projects are ready for our own peer-review process here.

Everything would progress so much faster if my body didn’t require any sleep.

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This was such an intriguing mystery that it inspired “The Ethereum of Japan is a Ghost Town!” I also enjoyed the rest of your post.

ADALove I look forward to hearing more about your projects.

@ADALove, I’m trying to wrap my head around this, and having a bit of a hard time envisioning a system that rewards honest effort over political demagoguery. Especially if views, likes and bookmarks are the measure for rewards. Seems like it would turn into a popularity contest, and it might clutter the space with outrageous, half baked ideas and poorly researched proposals. It might also lead people to post propaganda counter to the community’s interests.
Besides, I thought we all wanted to get money out of politics. :wink:

Don’t get me wrong, I believe participation in the community should be rewarded. I just think we should give a great deal of thought to what we want to reward.

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I understand your concerns. Here are a few thoughts to consider. . . .

Money Is Not the Problem; Broken Incentive Structures Are the Problem. In general, money is not the problem; it’s the incentive structures within any institution that become problematic when they encourage counter-productive behavior. For example, if politicians’ salaries were directly tied to their performance, then money would actually create positive incentives for them to make more effective governance decisions. In contrast, the problems with money in politics today are based on the influence it buys for narrowly focused special interest groups, which is what corrupts the governance process in many ways.

We All Recognize Quality When We See It. In our case, the ADA rewards would only be granted based on the quality of the contributions; and we know this would create a positive and viable incentive structure because every conscious human can distinguish between relatively good contributions and relatively bad contributions. Thus, as a post accumulates more hearts/bookmarks/etc., it rightfully should receive more ADA. Garbage posts and pure propaganda could be down-voted and/or ignored, which is what already occurs on Reddit and many other online communities.

Popularity Contests Are Good if They’re Based on Substance. There are many kinds of popularity contests. Some people in this community are popular because they’re smart and they contribute meaningful content to the forum. Nerds are popular at MIT when they invent amazing technologies. We give these people lots of hearts/bookmarks online and in our minds already. There’s nothing wrong with this kind of popularity; and it’s this kind of popularity that would be duly rewarded in an ADA reward-based community.

Culture Drives Behavior. This is true in online communities, organizations of all kinds, and entire countries. Our community culture here is uniquely thoughtful and supportive. This results in a substantial level of self-discipline in our community with respect to moronic comments. People intuitively sense that morons and childish behavior feel out of place here; so, they usually refrain from doing stupid things here. And we collectively deal with the bad apples pretty effectively already by unleashing generous cans of respectful and intelligent whoop-ass on them. Our community culture will never change as long as we continue nurturing the community with substance and thoughtful contributions.

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I sincerely hope this will be the case, but what will happen as DL tech gains traction?
Imagine a time when Cardano is the premier crypto platform, with hundreds of millions of users and trillions of dollars of transactions. Will community participants be as altruistic then? What happens when a really smart bad actor plays the long game, accumulating wealth and followers over time, only to use that wealth and support to accomplish unscrupulous goals?
Most of the corrupt super rich types are philanthropists with sterling biographies on Wikipedia, and they’ve been trained to play the long game and win popularity contests since birth.

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The scale of a socioeconomic system doesn’t destroy culture as long as the institutional structure of the system is based on fundamentally sound incentive structures. This is one of the reasons why the Scandinavian countries have become so successful by every median income and human development metric, while many other countries have languished and fallen behind over the past decade in the same metrics.

Effective incentive structures scale well and they don’t depend on altruism. It’s really about Game Theory: When the incentives of the game are designed properly, people don’t have any incentives to undermine the game. This is because their interests are fundamentally aligned with playing the game by the rules. Cardano’s Ouroboros PoS protocol is actually a great manifestation of this and it’s one of the most significant reasons why many people have confidence in Cardano vs. most other blockchains.

Human nature is fallible so we should always expect some bad apples in every environment. That’s a predictable threat that can be reasonably mitigated. However, the few bad apples are not the biggest threat to a socioeconomic system; the biggest threat is incentive structures that are designed so badly that they actually transform many good apples into rotten apples, which unnecessarily injects many more bad apples into the system. This is what occurs in the U.S. political system today: We have many thoughtful, smart people who go into politics wanting to make a positive difference, but the incentives within the U.S. political system are so broken that they transform most of the good apples into rotten apples over time.

All socioeconomic systems are successful to the degree that they avoid creating an unnecessarily high number of bad apples in proportion to all the good/neutral apples within the system. That’s exactly what Cardano is designed to accomplish.

@ADALove I really like the idea, I have never used steemit, but I get it, I like Dan (he is another fearless crypto dev) so maybe now that this has come up I will go and try out steemit see what I like and what I do not - I will check it out over the next couple weeks - but somehow I think it would be better built through a contract and not as ADA being the coin used to distribute the wealth, ADA will be very volatile over the next couple years and a smaller cap coin would be much better suited for the venture I think, something along the lines of Doge coin would be perfect I think, keep some fun in it, I also believe we ought not recruit the team behind Cardano to set up something that taxes the development team - we the community should take responsibility for what we want to come of our invested interest, ADALove it appears to me that you could pull off a smart contract and do this if it is something that you wish to do, but let’s not tie everything we do within the community back to the dev team, nothing wrong with recruiting them to be involved, but I think it should not be ADA but another on the Cardano platform.

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@anon20038177 Interesting points. I addressed the “distracting the team” issue in a previous post earlier in this thread. But to save you the effort of searching for it: In short, if fanatical community engagement is important to the team, then it’s not too much to ask the team to provide simple tools that magnify our community’s impact. And Charles is already pretty good at delegating and hiring new devs for each new project and sub-project; so, the distraction factor is not that significant IMHO. (But of course, prioritizing time and resources is always important.)

However, these are not mutually exclusive ideas, i.e., there’s nothing stopping technically skilled members of the community from volunteering to build anything and coordinating their efforts with the team. If I was still in my 20s and didn’t have many other managerial responsibilities, I would not hesitate to create the plugin myself. However, I haven’t had to write mission-critical code for years since I always have employees to do that for me while I’m more focused on management these days. So for those reasons, I’m probably not the best person to write the plugin code. But if this is still an outstanding issue in the coming months, I may put one of my engineers in one of my companies on the task at some point.

Regarding the use of ADA and its volatility: This is an interesting issue. There are philosophical and practical components to it. Over the past week I’ve been thinking about a lot of things that relate to this point. Soon I will address this point within the broader context of several other issues. Then we can revisit your specific point after I’ve laid out the broader ideas as an RFC from the community.

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Thanx for the reply, i think I could support asking the team to get involved, considering the resources they have, might be a good distraction if it ends up being distracting at all.

Thanks @ADALove for starting this thread. I have been thinking about the comments for a few days. It brought me to the realization that I am not 100% sure what the ultimate “function” of the Cardano community is, beyond larger community (of ADA holders) = more decentralized = more secure network. Also, more community activity = more potential for adoption by real world commerce = increase demand for ADA = rising price. Oh, yeah, don’t forget crypto-kitties. What else?

These things are obvious, but is this the fundamental and ultimate purpose for community involvement? Get more people and convince them to stay longer because increase community = increased security & value of my assets.

In a local (analog) community personal relationships are grown and the social aspect has meaning and value. I can see value in a digital decentralized community in that it brings together people of a common interest to share experiences, thoughts, ideas, etc. So we help each other learn, enjoy each others company. We enjoy socializing around common interests. Is that all, or is there more to it?

I went to a basketball game tonight with my family and before the game started they sang the national anthem. People put their hands over their hearts, but I have a difficult time with that and just can’t do it. I don’t feel a strong “allegiance” to the flag or nation. I feel disconnected, manipulated, and mis-represented. I don’t agree with the politics, policies and practices that are going on.

Should not community run deeper than “my money is secure and growing” and “I enjoy chit chatting with those guys”? I don’t personally have a deep interest or lasting need for that kind of a community. But yet, I want to be part of something that is grass roots and that I agree with philosophically and that seeks to fundamentally change the world for the better. Lots of people do, and realize that change must begin “outside the camp”. That kind of a community is not just about gaining wealth or intellectual stimulation (although these are good things), but also taking action and making the world a fundamentally better place. It is not only about what I personally can gain, it is about paradigm shift for the potential betterment of humanity, or perhaps some small or large slice of it.

Perhaps I am getting ahead of myself with all this, but I am struggling to see what the ends of this decentralized community will be, what good will become beyond increased value of ADA and pleasing interaction, why I should invest myself deeply into it, and what are we trying to accomplish. I think this revolution is (could be) much deeper than just a “new asset class”, there is something more meaningful going on. Those we seek to displace will soon realize it too, if they haven’t already.

I am behind Cardano all the way because it is the superior technology in the space, Charles has convinced me of this. I want to be involved in the community deeper but my time is scarce (and therefore valuable). Investing money is easy. Investing time is difficult (for me personally). But, if there was a compelling vision for the community, something more than increased value & security of ADA, something I could be more fundamentally passionate about, I would invest my time (and myself) and could passionately sell it to the millions of people who feel like I do.

I think the Cardano Foundation should start speaking and doing videos/interviews to relate deeper the humanity side of the vision of Cardano to the world (Charles covers the tech quite well already). Perhaps they do this already? @jonmoss do you work for the CF?

Sorry for rambling, anyone following me? Constructive criticism welcome!

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Quick follow up… you may wonder what my post has to do with incentivizing the community. Incentives are typically in the context of achieving some goal, hopefully something more meaningful than to “make crypto great again”. As I started to run “thought experiments” about the different directions this could go, I quickly realized I don’t really have a grasp on the underlying vision (what the tech will seek to accomplish in this world). The best I have heard is “to be the financial stack of the 3 billion without access to basic financial services” (or something like this). What does that mean? How does that look? What about me, I already have access to financial services, why do I need Cardano beyond as an investment?

Before commenting on incentives I would like to be clearer about who “the community” should be and what function “the community” is suppose to serve in the vision of the Cardano Foundation?

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Hi @ADALove, I really like the concept of a tipbot for this discourse forum. I have recently come across this reddit post where community members have managed to create a beta tip bot for the CardanoCoin sub reddit. Perhaps we should reach out to them :slight_smile:.

@Bullishdong LOL, that’s a pretty funny app. Well, as much as I like experimenting with new ideas and encouraging everybody to contribute, I noticed a couple significant issues on that Reddit post that we should point out here.

  1. When projects that significantly impact the community are not coordinated transparently, redundancy and broken expectations can emerge. This happened with that tip-bot app because somebody else was already pre-hired to create a tip-bot in exchange for some ADA from the community. I saw one of the moderators on that thread complaining about this; so, it’s a good reminder for us to communicate our intentions to the community first before we do any significant work on behalf of the community. This will avoid hurt feelings and wasted time/resources.

  2. That tip-bot is currently centralized and controlled by that random developer. He’s probably a trustworthy human, but I have no idea who he is. Additionally, the whole point of building Cardano is to eliminate our dependence on fallible human nature. So, this is an important factor when we discuss any new projects: If the project requires any centralized management of ADA/USD funds, then I don’t think we should do it unless the core team manages the project directly. They’re the only group that we should trust when it comes to the custody of any community funds. And as a matter of principle, even they know they need to gradually build out all the decentralized treasury features so that we don’t need to trust them in the future, either.

This brings us back to my original thought process for this project: We need to lobby the core team to build it because it requires substantial treasury features that I don’t think anybody outside the core team can effectively manage without creating some anxiety about trust issues throughout the community.

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Good points, let’s lobby the core team after the release of Coguen. Because it would require smart contract functionality as you rightfully suggested.

Edit: Since it will also require treasury features and they will not be available untill the voltaire update, I’m interested in finding an alternative to rewarding our community’s contributions in the meantime. I do agree on your points made about the reddit tip bot, I did not consider the intricacies of such an endeavour.

@chad.stewart I deeply appreciate the authenticity of your post for many reasons. Based on the thoughtfulness in your post, you probably already know most of what I’m about to write, but it never hurts to rekindle the power of our core values from time-to-time. . . .

I am not 100% sure what the ultimate “function” of the Cardano community is. . .

The Socio-Biological Purpose of Our Community. Nothing significant in this world can be accomplished without a community of like-minded humans working together at various levels. “Working together” requires an emotional connection based on some set of shared experiences, shared values, and shared beliefs about how the world works. The emotional connection is the invisible glue that keeps humans together when they’re working toward hard goals, which no single human could accomplish alone. So, that’s the socio-biological purpose of our community.

The Functional Purpose of Our Community. Building world-changing systems is hard. The Cardano team can’t do any of this without a fanatical community of like-minded people preaching the Cardano gospel from every valley and mountain. Cardano is competing against far more powerful organizations with much deeper pockets, including governments and Fortune 500 behemoths. Cardano will lose market share to inferior platforms if we, the community, don’t help offset the hype and propaganda coming from those other groups. Failure to capture a critical mass of market share would be bad for our political freedoms and for our pocketbooks. So, we must fight alongside the team with every ounce of available time and energy to prevent that from happening.

We enjoy socializing around common interests. Is that all, or is there more to it?

When Time is Scarce, We Can Still Allocate Some Mental Space-Time-Energy to Preparation. I’m an introvert and socializing often drains me, but when it comes to things and people that are important to me, I still try to allocate some mental space-time-energy to thinking about how to contribute something meaningful/productive to them in some incremental way. Sometimes time is so scarce that we can’t even act on our thoughts, but the process of thinking about the things/people that are important to us prepares us to contribute in meaningful ways later when more time is available. That’s how I approach this community.

I don’t feel a strong “allegiance” to the flag or nation. I feel disconnected, manipulated, and mis-represented. I don’t agree with the politics, policies and practices that are going on.

The Path to Enlightenment and Joy is Paved with Disillusionment and Despair. I understand and appreciate your comment above at the deepest possible level. I served in the U.S. Air Force and worked inside the USG (specifically, in the intelligence community) during the first half of my career. They brainwash everybody into believing the U.S. is the greatest country in the galaxy. Then, as I observed how the USG systematically sabotaged, manipulated, and destroyed entire countries and its own citizens, I become deeply disillusioned and depressed. I wrote several books and immersed myself into building several companies, but those were just distractions from the deep sadness that I’ve had since my eyes were opened to the truth.

Cardano = Realistic Hope and Hope = Inspiration & Joy. Now, for the first time in my life, I see a realistic path forward for humanity to restore trust in capitalism and democracy. It won’t be easy. Many special interest groups will fight us at every step of the way. But that’s OK because we only have one life to live and we may as well do something interesting and meaningful with our lives while we’re here.

A Life with Purpose Creates Endless Inspiration & Motivation. Having a sense of purpose in our lives is one of the greatest gifts that we can ever receive. I’ve had a sense of purpose for many years now, but Cardano super-charges my feeling of purpose by giving us the technical tools to make a truly global impact, which was not possible up to this point in human history. I can’t imagine a more exciting and meaningful purpose for our lives than to build more equitable, trustworthy, and sustainable economic and political systems for our future and our posterity.

Should not community run deeper than “my money is secure and growing” and “I enjoy chit chatting with those guys”?

Yes, I hope my comments above convey a deeper purpose.

I don’t personally have a deep interest or lasting need for that kind of a community.

As an extremely busy introvert, neither do I. But where there is purpose, there is endless inspiration and motivation to contribute as much as possible to the fulfillment of our shared purpose.

Perhaps I am getting ahead of myself with all this. . . .

Not at all. Everybody must find a path between lethargic disillusionment and energized purpose. Your path is probably different than mine, but hopefully my path gives you some ideas about how to find your own path to purpose within the context of our community.

. . . if there was a compelling vision for the community, something more than increased value & security of ADA, something I could be more fundamentally passionate about, I would invest my time (and myself) and could passionately sell it to the millions of people who feel like I do.

Vision without Community is Delusion, but Vision with Community Fuels Life-Changing Revolutions. The vision for what we can accomplish with Cardano is crystal clear to me, but the drudgery of everyday life can sometimes cloud our vision. This is precisely what community is for: When we perceive the world in isolation, it’s easy to forget why we are here, what we can do to contribute, how to overcome life’s challenges, etc. But when we open ourselves up to a community of like-minded humans, we reinforce our purpose, our vision, and we become more than the sum of our parts. This process is what empowers small groups to make a big impact in the world.

Shared Vision Is Our Bridge from Dream to Reality. When we think deeply about what Cardano realistically represents for humanity, the vision of how we can harness it as a community should emerge spontaneously, like a spark in the darkness. Once you see that vision, it is breathtaking; and you can’t stop thinking and talking about the vision and what you’re doing to contribute to the fulfillment of that vision.

I think the Cardano Foundation should start speaking and doing videos/interviews to relate deeper the humanity side of the vision of Cardano to the world (Charles covers the tech quite well already).

I appreciate your sentiment here, but I think this is asking too much from the team. Their job is to build the technology (which is already very hard) and the community’s job is to reflect and amplify the human elements of the technology so the rest of the world can see and appreciate our shared vision. Yes, the team can spend more money on marketing, hiring some pretty faces to regurgitate some talking points, but ultimately, the humanity of Cardano must bubble up organically from our community. Truly authentic communities can never be created from the top-down; they must always emerge from the depths like a natural spring bubbles from the bottom-up.

Sorry for rambling, anyone following me? Constructive criticism welcome!

Perhaps our collective rambling will help others to connect with the community in some meaningful way.

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