TLDRMotivationProve out prediction markets in a low-stakes, real-world settingHighlight high-quality contributions from commentersIncentivize the audience to play a more active role in curation and spam detectionProposalPrototype a standalone comment moderation system (similar to Disqus)Every user who signs up is granted 100 karmaInstead of just upvoting/downvoting, users wager karma on the quality of a commentAllowing for larger sizingQ: What are users betting on?Ideally: "comment quality"Q: How are markets settled? Aka how is "comment quality" assessed?A moderator role provides a source of truth Spam/banned comments pays out to those who bet against"Comment of the week" pays out to those who bet for themModerators would not be allowed to bet on marketsExtensionsHow do you deal with vote brigading? Ideally, you prove identity somehow:The more "real" a profile is, the more karma is granted. E.g. supplying a verified email + phone number + email rewards 300 karmaOr: an actual buy-in cost of some kind (link to a LessWrong profile with 100 karma, etc) is necessary for tradingOr: a paid ACX membership!Comments market may have low liquidity to start:Consider an Automated Market Maker-style prediction market, rather than an Centralized Order Book-style oneTop-level posts themselves can be predicted on as well?Maybe predicting "# of views for this article", or "amount of press for this article"Would quadratic voting for comments work better than a prediction market?Further extension: Quadratic voting for other ACX contests (book reviews, grants)Incentivizing bettors: Adding an overlay (e.g. ante in poker)See the problem with prediction marketsInspirations & ResearchDuncan Sabien bemoaning karma/comment quality mismatch on LessWrongGnosis Protocol on automated market making in prediction marketsQuestionsQ: How could you integrate this directly into Substack?Provide a Chrome extension?Provide a hosted, mirrored copy of the ACX site?Work with Substack's team to inject an iframe?Q: What is LessWrong's/EA Forum's current karma policy?Q: How much mental overhead is involved in bet sizing, compared to a simple up/downvote?Q: Does providing extrinsic motivation (in the form of rewards for up/downvoting) kill intrinsic motivation?Guess: Probably not? Karma is already extrinsic motivation for posting on forums, today, and people continue to post anyways
Prediction markets for ACX comments
TLDR
Motivation
Proposal
Extensions
Inspirations & Research
Questions