DAOrayaki DAO Research Bonus Pool:

Funding address: DAOrayaki.eth

Voting progress: DAO Committee 2/0 passed

Total bounty: 120 USDC

DAOrayaki DAO Research Bonus Pool:

Funding address: DAOrayaki.eth

Voting progress: DAO Committee 2/0 passed

Total bounty: 120 USDC

Types of research: DAO, Quadratic Funding, Gitcoin, Tip

Original Author: owocki

• Original title: A Quadratic Funding Powered Social Network

• Note: This article assumes that the reader is already familiar with quadratic financing and how it works. If you're not familiar, check out https://wtfisqf.com/ first!

• Seek a better social network.

In July 2021, Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, listed the important items of DeFi on Ethereum in the past, as follows:

use ethereum

Social network

public goods

Yesterday at RadXChange Denver 2021, in the "Regenerative Crypto Economy" session, we explored what is wrong with social networks in the web2 era, and what it might look like for social networks in the web3 era to be more regenerative for the ecosystems they serve .

Inspired by these two experiences, I wrote a document detailing an experiment I led at Gitcoin (an open source software development incentive platform) in early 2020 involving public goods + social networking.

• experiment social network

• One problem with new social networks is how to channel their network effects.

• Before you have any users on your social network, you won't have any utility for people who join. There won't be any users on the network until there is any utility for those who join. It's a vicious circle.

• Gitcoin is not facing problems for the following reasons:

• Gitcoin Grants grow rapidly during bear markets.

• The same goes for Gitcoin Hackathons.

• At the beginning of 2020, we had 20,000 active users and had delivered approximately $4 million to OSS developers.

As usage has grown, we've tried to figure out a few things:

How can we make Gitcoin feel more like a community? Give it a shared space where you can have a chance to meet just by showing up.

How can we showcase the network's activity in new/interesting ways?

People come to Gitcoin once or twice a quarter to contribute to a Hackathon or grant, how do we keep them coming back to our missions often?

In 2020, we have been trying to find some ways to solve these problems, and Gitcoin's Townsquare is one of them.

In this place, we can aggregate all the interesting things on Gitcoin in one place. After all, a lot of interesting public goods financing happens on Gitcoin. It's going to be a whole new way to get into "Townsquare," right?

The idea ends up looking like this:

Seems like a standard newsfeed, right? ----It is true

In this way, we stumbled and built a social network in the era of Web 2.5. ux feels like web2, but it enables web3, so we jokingly refer to this era as Gitcoin web 2.5.

• Let's stop making trouble!

• The problems with web2 social networks are well documented elsewhere. They are unforkable, they create dichotomy, they are like royals, where nasty arguments can arise.

• We are determined to leverage our web3-ness to alleviate some of these problems and create something novel.

• We're also interested in using this "Town square" tool to solve problems for people already on Gitcoin. Members share many different types of stuff on their Gitcoin News Feed.

• They will advertise their grants.

They will try to hire people.

They will call for customer support.

tip

They share memes.

What we've seen is when people have work to do, they come to the newsfeed and ask the community for help.

But we didn't see many people show up to answer questions, explain how things work, or provide thoughtful feedback. So we set out to try and find a solution to this problem.

tip

To encourage people to help each other and openly build on web3 primitives, I created the feature to prompt other users in the newsfeed, here's what it looks like:

You can send tips by clicking on the little ether symbol on the newsfeed.

And decide how much to send in the next conversation.

Tip > Like

Like is the most useless thing! They are in unlimited supply and you cannot spend them on anything. They are like short-lived dopamine rush drains, leaving the creator who receives them feeling empty!

One of the things we want to prove is that it's possible to build a social network on something that's native to web3, not on something that's like.

I want to give our users something more valuable than what they like. Intuitively, a micro-cue is a better measure of whether content is actually being valued.

People like something, it is people's instinctive reaction. People tip someone when they feel they are truly getting value.

There is a subtle but important difference. ...but who cares about making 30 cents? At the time of this experiment, 0.001 ETH was about 30 cents. Gas fees on the Ethereum mainnet are low enough that you can send transactions for 30 cents without worrying about gas.

When we rolled out the prompt, one of the things we saw was that people weren't really using it. When we asked why they weren't using it, our answer was unequivocal: "Ah, 30 cents, who cares?"

So we tried an experiment. We took the most powerful mechanism we know of - quadratic financing, and pointed it at the problem.

Mini quadratic financing

In early 2020, I quietly launched a project we called "mini quadratic financing". That's a $200 weekly subsidy for those who contribute helpful reviews to the platform. Here's what it looks like:

Every week we put 200 DAI into the matching pool, and we hype users that if they get a tip, they will get a quadratic match (like they already do with Gitcoin Grants).

This is a module that advertises the Mini CLR Rounds leaderboard

We did it!

Over the next few months, people sent hundreds of tips:

The median tip amount was the default amount of 0.001 ETH ($0.30 at the time), but the median match amount at the time was 0.005 ETH ($1.50).

• Here's how tip amounts are distributed by tip size:

• Over the next few weeks, we ran 14 consecutive mini-QF rounds with a total of 2,348 donations resulting in 1,085 matching payouts.

• behavior change

Most importantly, we saw dramatic changes in the behavior of participants.

DAUs rose.

Community members seem to really care about climbing the leaderboard.

They moved from passively ignoring each other's requests for help to being more proactive in helping with issues—directing support requests to relevant knowledge base entries, answering questions about the network.

In effect, this experiment created a class of community members who get paid for helping + providing value.

I tweeted about the change in behavior we saw:

witch resistance honeypot

Another benefit of the Mini QF experiment is that it allows us to speed up running Sybil tools that we are quietly building primarily to resist the Gitcoin Grants round.

• The main funding round is 1/quarter, and the honeypot 1/week QF round means we can see how an attacker can attack a system and learn how to better mitigate it.

• Some of these insights exist as major parts of our strategy against witches today.

Overcome through events.

Unfortunately, the situation is contrary to the experiment:

In the summer of 2020 (commonly known as DEFI summer), the gas fee on the Ethereum mainnet will increase

We moved on to other things like integrating ZKSync into Gitcoin Grants or adding batch checkout on Gitcoin Grants, or trying to figure out what GitcoinDAO would look like. Or create a new landing page and navigation structure for Gitcoin to make it easier for people to browse. Or the impending spin-off from Consensys.

Due to these events, we had to drop the mini OF experiment and focus on our core - Gitcoin Grants.

But I think there are still a lot of good ideas out there. What if we replaced likes with tip subsidies throughout social media? Can we eliminate the asymmetry between the value created and captured for creators on social media, and realize Vitalik's web3 social media dream?