This joint project with Monk Prayogshala aims to understand the possibility and effectiveness of web based monetization as a mechanism to promote sharing of better quality information in online spaces as opposed to vanity metrics like likes and follower counts.
As part of this project we also plan to build and share the source code of a web service that people could self host in their communities. This would enable anyone to create an online content platform that rewards its community members for sharing and engaging with their content without tracking their data.
Any reconceptualization of the Internet requires rethinking incentives not only for content creation but also for content discovery and amplification. Academic and civic attention has been devoted to platforms’ amplification algorithms. But in countries such as India, content is amplified in closed messaging apps such as WhatsApp even in absence of platform enabled amplification. The lack of centralized moderation makes the information consumers the primary line of defence against low-quality information.
Research has shown that a minority of individuals share the majority of the content. A majority of social media users fall back to disengagement as a tactic, regardless of their alignment with content shared on social media. Our project, co-developed with Monk Prayogshala and funded by Grant for the Web, aims to understand if these silent lurkers may be mobilized to be critical and more active participants in online conversations.
We are building a mock social media platform to study people’s content sharing behaviour. People who signup for the study are divided into 2 groups - vanity and monetary. People from the vanity groups get rewarded or punished with changes in their vanity metrics (follower counts) and People from the monetary group are rewarded or punished with changes in their monetary metrics (coins). The aim of the study is to compare how content sharing behavior is affected by these different incentives.
We will also build a self hosted forum software that integrates the Interledger Protocol. We would use insights gained from the psychology study to design a monetary reward system for users of this forum software. This forum will allow moderator/publishers to reward users for creating and sharing high quality content on the platform.
| Directory | Description |
|---|---|
| psych-study-platform | platform to conduct the psych study |
We are going to start onboarding our psychology study participants onto our platform starting June 5th 2022.
For more details on this project please send an email to one of the following email IDs: