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.
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?).
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.
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.