🥲 bad incentives ruined the internet

We are likely entering a 2-4 year period where founders — Web3 founders in particular — will overshoot in their reliance on token incentives to drive their communities. Like Charlie Munger, they are right, but not fully right. We will learn a lot from their experiments and mistakes, but if you want your project to succeed, don’t forget the heart.

Incentives for productive speech: A speech community is likely to produce whatever kind of discourse it incentivizes. This means that users should have formal or informal incentives to produce speech that is recognized by other users as worthy.

A scholarly culture that reads and discusses enduringly great works incentivizes the production of such wo... See more

This dynamic — the dependence on our creative labor to develop content and our curation labor to teach recommendation algorithms, while optimizing for ad revenue — is actually the core business model of virtually all content platforms, from YouTube to Facebook, Netflix to Instagram.

Success here will come down to implementation details. The incentive structure, funding sources, size, goals, moderation approach, and community management philosophy of these networks will determine their long term viability as both businesses and communities.