Would love to get feedback on this version. I've been thinking about this for awhile and recently revived something I first posted on HN back in 2009: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=586798
Eventually I realized that asking for payments, even as micropayments, doesn't work as the mental transaction cost is just too much. Instead I got inspiration from Ted Nelson's concept of "transcopyright" where the creator of the content is interlinked with the content itself. This too had its complexities so I simplified the linkage to be indirect by picking up existing ids that were near the content and using those as the basis for a retroactive value system I called kudos.
Today's implementation is a browser extension that looks for existing ids: things like GitHub/HN/Reddit/Youtube/Twitch/Bluesky/X/email, etc... and uses that to define your "corner of the web". Essentially these are the people that make the web pages you depend on, a kind of personal attribution graph.
You can put in a url on the home page and get a rough idea how this might work.
After a month you'll have a distribution which we use to send points to, and those points can optionally get converted back. It's kind of like shareholders buying shares in a corporation, and then later getting a dividend based on their ownership.
To encourage people to pay I built a "universal tier" system where you can cause some of your work to be paywalled behind having a tier access. Unlike something like Patreon you would be supporting the whole web rather than just one person. Tiers can gate access via a web component we have on the apps section, or via a Discord bot.
The best way to see it in action is actually with the browser extension, however you can also CC: a special email address to create kudos. That's probably too much so I'll leave it there, but happy to answer questions.
In a flash of nostalgia from my early web programming I remembered the names "Rob McCool" and "UnCGI". Much to my surprise what looks like the original Uncgi source code and website is still available. This is what open source looked like before GitHub.
I recently did something similar but as a Mac app.
It sounds like a similar stack, but distributed as an app. FFmpeg (LGPL compilation).
I haven't tried Pixi.js, looks interesting. I guess it was good for this.
Have you looked at remotion? I found them good for somethings, but ended up using Safari for rendering (instead of remotion's chrome-based rendering) because app packaging was easier that way.
I didn't think so, but LLM's have taken so many tropes of a certain style of writing: the bullet points, the contradiction to make a point (not this...but that...) that when I see that style, I automatically question it
But you made actual clear points, so it didn't really feel like it, but honestly I can't be sure anymore!
That sounds closer to achieving a good outcome. Of course I think anything that includes the set of all users as columns will be game-able. You need to either choose the set yourself from "trusted peers" or "foaf" degrees, or maybe better use retroactive signals rather than purely like-driven approaches.
The spoilage by money is half right, but I think the more interesting part is where the money ends up and how that influences the system.
I'm increasingly convinced the issue isn't feedback itself, but centralized, global, aggregated feedback that becomes game-able without stronger identity signals.
Right now the incentives are tied (correctly or not) to these global metrics, so you get a market for faking them, with money flowing to whoever is best at juicing that signal.
If instead the signal was based on actual usage and attributions by actual developers, the incentives shift. With localized insight (think "Yeah, I like Golang") it becomes both harder to fake and harder to get at the metric rollup.
Useful reputation on the web is actually much more localized and personal. I gladly receive updates on and would support the repos I've starred. If I could chose where to put my dollars (not an investors), it would likely include the list of repos I've personally curated.
This suggests a different direction: instead of asking "how many stars does this have?", ask "who is actually depending on this, and in what context?" or better retroactively compare your top-n repos to mine and we'll get a metric seen through our lenses. If you want to include everyone in that aggregation you'll end up where we are now, but if in stead you chose the list, well, the stars could align as a good metric once more.
The interesting part is that the web already contains most of that information, we just don't treat identity as a part of the signal (yet? universally?).
Tangential but I have more than 5k repos starred (according to my GitHub profile) organized into lists but the way I discover interesting stuff on GitHub these days is through people I follow. Follow interesting people, find interesting stuff. Sometimes it's that easy.
What's more it became obvious to me two or so years ago that GitHub is going the way of LinkedIn slowly but surely. Lots of professionals on there just because it's expected of them, some interact occasionally with the "social media" aspect of it and fewer still really thrive on that part. Time will tell how this will pan out but just look how many Developer and Linux influencers became huge on YouTube and other places this last year. Most of them barely had more than 10k subscribers 3 years ago and now people look to them for their next tech stack and hot framework/tool/library/distro and so on.
I mean isn't this just a side effect of DIDs coming out a time when a lot of activity happened with blockchains? They came from w3c, a web org.
I guess my experience is similar to what you're saying though: we didn't really need that crypto layer to immediately gain value. But the way it compressed ids into a single namespace, that was useful.
SaaS pricing is tough. Free trials work, but startups often need a middle ground between free and enterprise without requiring a credit card. That's why we built betapass—users pay for access, and funds are distributed based on usage.
They are labeled "fake" and there's a pretty obvious call to action to replace them with human testimonials when we have them. It certainly seems better to call them out as not real than have them try to pass as real. What they're trying to convey though is valid and hopefully helpful to the reader. It's a good question though and I'd certainly be willing to learn from it if there's an obvious violation.
Eventually I realized that asking for payments, even as micropayments, doesn't work as the mental transaction cost is just too much. Instead I got inspiration from Ted Nelson's concept of "transcopyright" where the creator of the content is interlinked with the content itself. This too had its complexities so I simplified the linkage to be indirect by picking up existing ids that were near the content and using those as the basis for a retroactive value system I called kudos.
Today's implementation is a browser extension that looks for existing ids: things like GitHub/HN/Reddit/Youtube/Twitch/Bluesky/X/email, etc... and uses that to define your "corner of the web". Essentially these are the people that make the web pages you depend on, a kind of personal attribution graph.
You can put in a url on the home page and get a rough idea how this might work.
After a month you'll have a distribution which we use to send points to, and those points can optionally get converted back. It's kind of like shareholders buying shares in a corporation, and then later getting a dividend based on their ownership.
To encourage people to pay I built a "universal tier" system where you can cause some of your work to be paywalled behind having a tier access. Unlike something like Patreon you would be supporting the whole web rather than just one person. Tiers can gate access via a web component we have on the apps section, or via a Discord bot.
The best way to see it in action is actually with the browser extension, however you can also CC: a special email address to create kudos. That's probably too much so I'll leave it there, but happy to answer questions.
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