In psychiatric settings, a ‘token economy‘ is sometimes used as a system of behavioral incentives in treating severely psychotic patients. Tokens are given as rewards for good behaviors such as hygiene tasks, and they can be exchanged for things like (traditionally) cigarettes.
People say it like it’s a joke, but social media has a lot in common with mental health wards. Leaving aside the symptoms of any participant, there are emergent maladaptive behavior patterns in all these platforms.
What moodcoin does is measure a rolling average of a given mood in social media posts in real time1. It measures the sentiment and affect of each post, adjusting the value of a coin along with the entire website’s mood. The example code increases the value of the coin based on the level of trust in each post.
This can be any emotion that you want to measure. You can adjust the value based on the “positive-negative“ mood polarity, incentivize surprise, decrease the value in proportion to anger and so on.
Moodcoin is a method, not a single cryptocurrency. It can be derived from different content and used in different contexts.
It’s similar to an institutional token economy in that purchasing power is given as a reward, but it’s different in that the tokens themselves aren’t given as rewards, and individual behavior isn’t rewarded directly. This method of measuring and indirectly incentivizing population-wide affect and behavior has never been possible before.
I say “indirectly“ because the incentive is only held by investors who buy in, but everybody is subject to that incentive. So for example, investors may do things to increase the level of positivity on a platform. You can already see some ways that this could go wrong, but they might be interesting. You could get a Ragecoin deployed on 4chan and get paid when you piss them off. Here’s the business model though:
It’s the same one Elon uses on his website to incentivize lying. His subscription-based model is similar in terms of revenue but very simple, it rewards “views“ as opposed to any reaction people are having. There doesn’t need to be an underlying asset other than the userbase and a large commercial website’s own budget. It might even bring in ad revenue if it motivates civility.
1via firehose API, or in this case of the example code, scraping the Bluesky firehose RSS feed for English language posts only.
People say it like it’s a joke, but social media has a lot in common with mental health wards. Leaving aside the symptoms of any participant, there are emergent maladaptive behavior patterns in all these platforms.
What moodcoin does is measure a rolling average of a given mood in social media posts in real time1. It measures the sentiment and affect of each post, adjusting the value of a coin along with the entire website’s mood. The example code increases the value of the coin based on the level of trust in each post.
This can be any emotion that you want to measure. You can adjust the value based on the “positive-negative“ mood polarity, incentivize surprise, decrease the value in proportion to anger and so on.
Moodcoin is a method, not a single cryptocurrency. It can be derived from different content and used in different contexts.
It’s similar to an institutional token economy in that purchasing power is given as a reward, but it’s different in that the tokens themselves aren’t given as rewards, and individual behavior isn’t rewarded directly. This method of measuring and indirectly incentivizing population-wide affect and behavior has never been possible before.
I say “indirectly“ because the incentive is only held by investors who buy in, but everybody is subject to that incentive. So for example, investors may do things to increase the level of positivity on a platform. You can already see some ways that this could go wrong, but they might be interesting. You could get a Ragecoin deployed on 4chan and get paid when you piss them off. Here’s the business model though:
It’s the same one Elon uses on his website to incentivize lying. His subscription-based model is similar in terms of revenue but very simple, it rewards “views“ as opposed to any reaction people are having. There doesn’t need to be an underlying asset other than the userbase and a large commercial website’s own budget. It might even bring in ad revenue if it motivates civility.
1via firehose API, or in this case of the example code, scraping the Bluesky firehose RSS feed for English language posts only.