Game Theory: NFT Purchases and How They Can Be Improved - BBS Network - We Need Changes!
Game Theory and How It Applies to BBS
BBS aims to provide users with a decentralized social media platform that incentivizes both users and creators to share in the ad revenue of the network.
Game Theory for BBS in it's essence should promote quality content with high engagement to promote further 'impressions' for ad revenue. For the most part, recent changes aim to push towards exactly that. A cutback on how low effort 'clickbait' posts were rewarded was seen. It's no longer enough to get a ton of likes and no engagement.
However I believe there's a flaw with the current iteration with regards to game theory.
Users have little to no incentive to browse new content to curate quality posts.
What do I mean by that? Currently, there are two sides to incentivization:
Content Creation and NFT Purchasing.
I believe a strong step was made towards Content Creation incentivization. I've seen low effort posts get purchased less, and a higher demand/price expectation for quality content.
However NFT Purchases favor power users and in effect hurt content curation.
Look at the top 'Hot' posts, they'll be primarily owned by a few power users who dominate the available NFT purchase funds. This means that impressions and therefore revenue from new popular posts will primarily collect within those same power user's accounts.
Popular post prices are rising, but new users looking to gain value by purchasing will be disappointed. Posts that will get a lot, or even a decent amount, of impressions will quickly be bought up to a level new users won't be able to purchase. New users will be left with low effort posts that may get or two impressions before fading away, or if the post takes off and begins getting impressions it will quickly sell above what they can afford, with new impressions going solely to the new buyer and leaving the original purchasers left with only a couple of impressions.
What does this mean for content curation?
There is virtually no incentive for users to curate new and promising posts.
Taking a look from both sides:
Users who have high funds can simply wait until the post is already gaining traction and dominate the purchase of the post when it gets high enough.
New users or those with low funds can only fight for scraps that may get a couple impressions, but statistically their time would be spent better elsewhere.
But WHY does this happen?
2 main reasons: Bonus funds and NFT Purchase Mechanics
Bonus Funds:You receive bonus funds daily and from likes. ($0.50 each day for visiting, $0.50 for every 5 likes). Bonus funds do not go towards cashout limit, but you CAN buy NFT's.
Popular established users will naturally get more likes by recognition of content, enabling them to establish their purchasing funds even further to acquire popular posts: which will in turn provide them with more purchasing power AND cashout limit.
Putting a cap on the daily limit on bonus funds from likes per day would prevent further consolidation of purchasing funds to power users.
NFT Purchase Mechanics
Current mechanics do not allow 'Holding' a post after purchase, regardless of whether you would want to pay, meaning no matter what you'd like anyone can come and purchase a promising post you just picked up.
That being said, allowing any user to just hold any post they'd like permanently could cause stagnation of purchases in general as an attempt to hold ad revenue, but there is a balance able to be struck.
Lengthening NFT Auctions
Putting a timer before NFT's can be purchased again would allow holding onto content for a reasonable amount of time before giving it up again. The timer itself could be lengthening in time, i.e. the first purchase is made 1 minute after the post, second purchase 5 minutes after that, etc until X hours/purchases, with the final purchase being permanent, the owner retaining the NFT and control completely.
Bids could be placed on the NFT during the purchase lockout period, with the purchase going to the highest bidder within the selected timeframe.
The effect of this would be threefold:
- It would incentivize engaging and curating new content for both power users and new users.
- It would extend the time relevancy of posts by having users keep an eye on posts they're interested in bidding on or have secured, extending the posts activity throughout the bid process(es).
- It would allow users to retain posts after a long enough time, giving an urgency to buy promising posts and allowing users to hold onto ones they feel promising enough to hold on to.
Let me know your thoughts, but I think a simple version of this would be relatively easy to implement on top of current systems compared to requiring huge dev resources for a new method entirely as I've seen some suggest.
