People will create content for free. Places like wikipedia, Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo Answers, whatever prove that. Some people like to get upvotes or likes, others just like to take a topic and expound on it a bit and see how people react. Some people probably have other motivations.
Adding money to it commercializes things. Changes incentive. People start working to earn money rather than for the joy of contributing. Partly this is good - some of my favorite YouTubers work full time at creating the content I like. Partly this is not good - lots of content on YouTube for example is kind of cookie cutter attention getting spam type stuff.
Google itself is another example. Before, and in the early days of Google ads Google results were amazing. Nowadays Google seems to mostly return ads, top X lists, spam, and such.
Imagine reddit where the goal was to earn upvotes. That would look a lot like spamming low effort memes. Maximum possible return for effort. If your upvotes are money, I think that's what you'll tend to get.
Adding tokens isn't just about money -- it provides a lot of features that simple money doesn't.
For example, each token may have voting power, allowing users (and more so power users) to have a say in the decision making of the product. Holding tokens (versus selling them) could also come with extra VIP privileges (similar to a rewards system). The point is to reward users for providing content, not just in money but also a say in the platform.
I agree with you that people will create content for free. But I think there is still a massive audience that could provide great content thats left out on the sidelines because there is no other motivation.
Why is youtube so much bigger than reddit? Youtube is literally an ecosystem -- where successful youtuber's have set up great partnerships outside of youtube due to their content. Individuals have built a career on youtube, something not possible on a free model like reddit.
"Partly this is not good - lots of content on YouTube for example is kind of cookie cutter attention getting spam type stuff. --> there may be ways to combat this, if the algo deciding how to distribute MU tokens is efficient. But if not, and this is the trade-off in building a massive community like Youtube that provides insane amount of knowledge to the world, then is worth it (imo).
>Imagine reddit where the goal was to earn upvotes. That would look a lot like spamming low effort memes. Maximum possible return for effort. If your upvotes are money, I think that's what you'll tend to get.
You basically described reddit as it is today.
On hypothetical crypto-reddit, on the other hand, spamming low-effort memes to farm hypothetical karma-coins would cause inflation; and if hypothetical crypto-reddit failed to combat spam, that would debase its currency in comparison with competing platforms, causing people to preferably post elsewhere.
Oh, and admins tampering with posts wouldn't be a thing, because they wouldn't own the only copy of the database.
Adding money to it commercializes things. Changes incentive. People start working to earn money rather than for the joy of contributing. Partly this is good - some of my favorite YouTubers work full time at creating the content I like. Partly this is not good - lots of content on YouTube for example is kind of cookie cutter attention getting spam type stuff.
Google itself is another example. Before, and in the early days of Google ads Google results were amazing. Nowadays Google seems to mostly return ads, top X lists, spam, and such.
Imagine reddit where the goal was to earn upvotes. That would look a lot like spamming low effort memes. Maximum possible return for effort. If your upvotes are money, I think that's what you'll tend to get.