It's funny.
I don't think pay-per-engagement is good for incentives (it encourages sensationalism), which is why I haven't turned it on after all this time despite now having ~1 million followers.
But I agree with Devon that if it exists, it should be transparent+itemized. 🧵
My main concern with that level of detail is it gives more transparency to those who'd try to play the system.
I suspect that's why @nikitabier doesn't do it.
And that feeds back into why I dislike pay-per-engagement. If you can't make it transparent, there's likely a reason.
Introducing tips would be a potential approach.
Folks on the small decentralized social media protocol Nostr have had that for a while with zap tips.
As I've seen there, fun-but-shallow posts get likes, while deep posts that punch above their weight get real-money zap tips.
In that Nostr environment, you know exactly what you got paid for every post.
Some posts there earn me zero or a few cents. Like for a meme or short comment.
Other rare ones earn me thousands of dollar-equivalents. I wrote something deep, heartfelt, actionable, rare, powerful.
Here, I get paid zero per post (because I choose to opt out of pay-per-engagements on this platform).
Likely if I got paid per engagement, my memes and short controversial statements would be my main income and my longer, thoughtful threads would underperform.
For example, @Devon_Eriksen_ writes posts on X, often quite long-form. They influence people, sometimes significantly.
Agree or disagree with him, those who agree are sometimes like, "I'd pay ten dollars for this".
But they wouldn't do that for a meme with 10x the engagement.
The value of tips is that you can't game them, especially if you publicly itemize where tips came from as Nostr clients generally do.
And bots paying most users tips doesn't make a ton of sense. It's expensive.
It's often real personal value transferred, in other words.
Options:
-You can incentivize virality for posting things people view as bad but are popular/controversial.
-You can incentivize enjoyment for good but shallow things (cats).
-You can incentivize deep/thoughtful posts where people learned and want to tip.
There's a trade-off.
As a platform, do you maximize raw engagements with a given thing, e.g. "look at these two people fighting <insert racial claim>"
Or do you optimize quality like, "I want to tip this person's post" or "this person has 10k posts with no community notes."
And unlike decentralized networks, centralized networks run into all sorts of regulation issues with tips. Money transmitter licenses, KYC, etc.
In contrast, a decentralized social network can enable BTC/LN payments without a central platform to call upon. It's a swarm.
In general, I think quality-oriented metrics are better incentives, and one of the best mechanisms for that is to let the users decide what to transfer value to (tips, zaps, etc).
People "like" (costless) and actually "pay for" (costfull) different things.
Unlike decentralized places such as Nostr, centralized places generally don't have an incentive in that quality/tip direction. That's why it's not here.
So, they want to 1) keep you on the platform as much as possible, and 2) rile you up with sensationalism while you're here.
That's why I don't turn on monetization on this platform, despite my scale. In fact, it's partially *because of* my scale.
For better or worse, my posts are my own reasonings.
Raw engagement numbers, as big as they are at times, mean little to me.
Quality metrics do. https://t.co/ITbOG0y0qe
Dear @nikitabier :
I'm actually having a lot of fun watching you demonetize the copy-paste brigade.
But I also find myself in a position where my payouts often don't make a lot of sense. Sometimes they're curiously low. Sometimes they are strangely high.
Now, I'm aware that you and your team are constantly tweaking to try to incentivize content that is original and well-received, so the way payouts are calculated varies week by week.
But the success of incentives is bottlenecked by people's understanding of what they are.
So I don't want the payout structure changed... you're probably changing it all the time and figuring out how is your burden to bear.
I'd like it itemized. Post by post. So much for this one, so much for that one. That way, I know what the tweaks are trying to encourage.
Not just to chase the money... although, yes, I like money, and I'm a professional writer, which means I'm supposed to get paid. But also because this kind of transparency creates the potential for a two-way dialogue about what constitutes "good content".
Is it "better" to write a long, thoughtful analysis that not everyone has the patience to read, but some few will really enjoy? Or to try to distill the zeitgeist of the day into a pithy encapsulation?
Before X, social media sites were mostly random, and when they became intentional, it was mostly only through censorship, focused on content... what topics and ideas are to be shut down.
But making social media useful is probably more about form... what kinds of writing, what sorts of presentations, are most valuable to subscribers.
And X appears to be trying to work in that space.
Itemizing payouts would give some transparency into what X's current concept of the goal is.