I was originally going to draft this as an email and tag some of the fabulous editors I’ve come to be familiar with @ HN. Instead, it’s probably a better idea to write a little public letter!
I noticed that most sponsored competitions here at HN are web3 and/or blockchain-related. I wondered if we could gamify the overall processes and include the readers much more substantially in the competition (but probably not those in the USA).
Consider that entrants and winners must be some folks repeating entries - whether it be known or they be a pen name (and Thank God for Hackernoon for allowing anon winners :) )
Consider that we all know, love, and support some of these titans of the industry that are winning HN writing competitions.
Consider the fact that @StrataProtocol builds a product where anyone can create a liquidity pool in a given quote currency and the new pool token that’s launched. Anyone can create a social token, bounty, collective of other tokens, or whatever else they please - for about $3 ($SOL is king). When people buy into these pools, in most configurations, the value goes into the pool and all the tokens increase in value.
I propose that sponsors look deeper into their coffers (I recognize some $$multimillion raises in this list) and pledge more $ (indeed if we took a fraction of the winnings and redistributed it - but please, let’s extract more value instead). When someone submits an entry to a given competition they will create a social token. I’ll rewrite your metamask integration and give you a faster and cheaper solution using Solana wallet adapters (service is free for HN)
The readers can buy into / sell out of these social tokens at will, and it becomes a contribution to the secondary user-centric competition - and prospectors can stand to do well (not in the USA, anons).
When someone wins, the associated portion of the prize is used to buy-and-burn the token (or maybe buy it and give it to the writer who won that competition). Now, the writer continues and enters more and maybe wins more - until HN stops doing competitions - it’s basically a predictions market on talent.
Abstract from here if you want, but it’s a pretty darned cool set of gamifications that will inspire millions of people.
Anywho, thanks for reading, and chat soon.
Btw in the spirit of rapid prototyping and rapid iteration, all this has been mainnet(-beta) for a long time - you can see these social tokens overlaid on your Twitter interface and integrated with Twitter via single sign-on as a proof-of-concept right here: https://wum.bo (by the same team that writes Strata itself) and review top-secret secret sauce as it develops (mainnet(-beta)) by some of that team here: https://github.com/glasseaters/hydra.
Hierarchical organizations and inheritance will win at web3. If you know, you know.