Rediscussion: Appreciating Citizen's Product Design Logic

After the recent launch of the Citizen Web3, due to the complete abandonment of support for fiat currency, and the unclear relationship between Clap and LikeCoin feedback, it once again caused confusion and doubts among creators in Matt City.

Due to the similar feedback mechanism between Citizen Web3 and 1.0 (Classic), and the long-standing "Creation Matching Fund", the creative feedback is easy to fluctuate due to many factors, and it is difficult to predict.

Appreciate Citizens as Pioneers of Transparent Feedback Details

First of all, I would like to affirm the transparent daily chart that Liker Land has done in the past for "Appreciate Citizens (Readers) Monthly Fee Feedback Details", which can be viewed from the Liker Land app.

Just think of the subscription-based products in the past Web2 period, which one has the transparency of these data? When you subscribe to streaming music Spotify or Apple Music, and listen to the works of many creators, do you know how much the subscription fee you pay will give to the creator you love? do not know. What about Vocus Premium? Netflix? Xbox Game Pass? I don't know.

This is based on the initial simple and powerful product positioning of Appreciation Citizens. "Turn Appreciation into Reward" will give 100% of the monthly fee back to the creators you have applauded. Liker Land acts as an intermediary layer and can be used by major content platforms. Unlike the aforementioned Web2 products, all of which are a single vertically integrated content platform, creators must be recruited by various means before they can attract consumers with rich content.

Where is the problem with the feedback mechanism for appreciating citizens?

However, the aforementioned "appreciative citizen monthly fee" combined with the "Creation Matching Fund" distribution method does often result in unpredictable total returns. Over time, because readers really don’t understand it, they simply give up understanding. In essence, many people (including me) just pursue the green halo of admiring citizens on their personal avatars to prove that they support the creator. As for the rationality of the feedback mechanism? Questioned again and again.

I feel it is time to go back and review the product design logic of the year. The following quotes are from these two sources:

• Q&A: Appreciate Citizen's product design logic
• Reply to a previous question on Liker Social

Let’s talk about the feedback mechanism first, hoping to “average” the equivalent value of each clap:

Do as evenly as possible. In other words, try to keep the "Like divided by LikeCoin" number the same.

However, in practice, it is affected by two other product requirements:

1. Try to use up the balance within a month (thus set the amount of LIKE sent out every day)
2. Appreciate citizen feedback is instant settlement! (Creation matching funds are settled daily)

It is understandable that the first point is based on the monthly fee system at the time when the Citizens Appreciation 1.0 is a monthly fee. Of course, I hope to encourage people to pay a fixed monthly fee. Otherwise, if the balance is left and the subscription is stopped, can it still be called a citizen of appreciation?

As for the second point, I think it's a myth. Although "instant settlement" sounds attractive to creators (wow, there will be coins in the account soon), the rationality of distribution is definitely more important.

After thinking about it for a while, you will find that it is almost impossible to achieve the "equivalent value of each clap" by combining the above two points, because it is impossible for you and me to have the same number of clap hands every day, resulting in this feedback algorithm "logically, there must be an estimation part. ”, but how can it be estimated accurately? In the end all I can say is:

Although it seems “unfair” to look at the data of a single admiring citizen for the same number of LikeCoins, sometimes the number of LikeCoins produced is different, the overall is still fair, but it is not so intuitive.

Although it is fair to appreciate the "long-term average" of the distribution of citizens, it actually causes the feedback of each clap to be different, which means that it is unfair to individual creators who get clap at different times. As a result, the feedback value of each clap tends to fluctuate, making people even more confused.

When the product design and implementation are complex to this level, many problems and difficulties can be sniffed out, and the original product requirements should be adjusted back. As Dieter Rams put forward the principles of good design, three of them are excerpted:

• Good design makes a product understandable
• Good design is unobtrusive
• Good design is as little design as possible

"Not intuitive enough" is not good enough product design. Now that we appreciate citizens' full access to Web3, we also avoid the hassle of dealing with legal currency regulations in various countries. It is time to look back and reconsider.

The real essence of Web3 is transparency, and the value lies in decentralized governance

Let me briefly describe the true nature of Web3 as I understand it: transparency, because Web3 transactions can be publicly recorded on the blockchain. In contrast, several giants of Web2 have mastered everyone's hobbies and privacy information, and the subscription service platforms also hide the actual profit distribution of individual consumers' subscription fees.

The real value of Web3 lies in decentralized governance, which can narrow the power gap between producers and consumers. In contrast, in the Web2 period, producers focused on creating products, greatly reducing the threshold for use, in order to attract consumers to their doors, and then concealed the huge gap between information and profits, which eventually led to the giantization of the information industry.

We shouldn't go back to these Web2 product mindsets.

The feedback mechanism of the "Monthly Fee for Appreciating Citizens" and "Creation Matching Fund" must be more transparent

In order to be transparent and simplify the feedback mechanism, I think the above two product requirements should be revised. The following provides personal thoughts for the purpose of attracting others:

Appreciate Citizenship Monthly Fee

1. Change to weekly settlement or monthly settlement, in short, there is no need to pursue instant settlement.
2. The system can still automatically provide the average estimated value of LikeCoin for each clapping according to the user's past clapping habits, and use it as the default value, but before each settlement cycle, send a letter to inform and provide the user-defined value or its upper and lower limits. that power.
3. After the balance of each cycle is spent, the subsequent clapping will no longer have the value of LikeCoin, and a warning message should be displayed when clapping; if there is any remaining balance, it should be directly accumulated to the next settlement cycle for use.

This means no longer seeking to use up the balance in every short period (this should be the source of distribution fluctuations). The price of such product design is that appreciating the monthly fee for citizens can no longer turn "all" mindless applause into rewards, but it can ensure a more reasonable, transparent, and understandable distribution, and reduce distribution fluctuations.

After all, when Web3 products "design" consumers to be mindless clapping readers, isn't that the same as Web2 giants? Facebook encourages users to click likes without thinking, collects personal interests and privacy to deliver content and advertisements, further triggering the Cambridge Analytica incident and causing a crisis of political polarization; Apple, which led the smartphone revolution, designed extremely attractive touch devices Experience the capitalist ecosystem of the App Store and put everyone in a crisis of cell phone addiction. Appreciation of Citizen Web3 should be as "not browsing, but reading" as it advertises to further encourage readers to consciously read and speculate, and it is more meaningful to turn praise into appreciation.

Those who appreciate the beginning of citizens can accept the system's automatic estimation value, and those who are more advanced can customize the value, and the balance can be accumulated until the next cycle to continue to use. is to pursue:

Make the easy things easy, and the hard things possible.

Creation Matching Fund

• Public applause data, calculation method, distribution report

Because it is not open and transparent, it loses the meaning of decentralized governance. It's better to upload the calculation method to GitHub or even write it as a smart contract, so that everyone can see it and propose improvements.

For example, at present, the distribution is based on a "daily fixed amount", but the total number of clapping every day must be high or low. In addition, the weight of praise citizens, the matching value of clapping on different days may fluctuate greatly. This distribution method is obviously unreasonable - creator The rewards from choosing different days to publish works will be affected by the fluctuations in the value of the creative matching fund. Does it feel like a lottery draw?

Due to the creation of matching fund allocation, although the idea should be to encourage free likers to have influence, and to further attract more influential citizens, but it means that it is essentially "getting more profits at low cost", just like Just like investing, someone must actuate how to invest in low-cost behaviors to get higher returns. It can be said to be an endless cat-and-mouse game.

However, the calculation method can evolve and iterate, but it cannot be used as a reason to prevent the disclosure of clap data, calculation methods, and distribution reports.

How to prevent the abuse of money without capital?

At present, I appreciate that citizens have a mechanism for judging and blocking suspected abuses, cheating, and robots. I agree that their "judgment rules" can be kept private, so as to dynamically respond to this cat-and-mouse game.

But there should be additional "proactive" notification of blocked users, as well as an appeal channel.

What's more, I believe that the block list and follow-up treatment should be regularly disclosed, including the false positive rate (False Positive + False Negative rate), which should be subject to continuous monitoring and review.

Why should these dispositions be made public? Web2 giants usually provide statistical transparency reports at most, rather than revealing the details of their internal censorship content, which makes the platform power over users, such as Facebook reporting content abuse, Apple App Store censorship quality It is difficult to supervise effectively. Another example is that there is an open litigation system in the city of Matt. Imagine that if the judgments of the national courts are not made public, will there be judicial independence at all?

Conclusion: related discussions

Determining the mechanisms of these abuses is by no means an easy task, either procedurally technical or human value judgments. Matters also encountered the incident of laundering MAT coins in the early days. So far, in the article rankings on the Matters dashboard , there are still two long-term top three articles, but later they switched the clap mechanism to cooperate with LikeCoin, and the related responsibilities are naturally heavy. handed over.

A related discussion on Discord has pointed out that "quota dispatch can indeed be considered."

Matters is currently open source code, so the mechanism for getting on the homepage (algorithm recommendation) should be open and transparent. This is also a hidden concern. As long as the community is big enough, any public rules must be manipulators. Taiwan is well-known The critics of BBS are deeply manipulated by public relations companies to influence public opinion, because influence is valuable.