In an Attention Economy you build or create content or art, and then try to get attention for your work. The better you are at getting attention the more successful you are.
In a Creation Economy users seek to fairly value your work in an Impact Market. More impact means more success, curators get rewarded for their effort, and the ecosystem grows.
Here is the mechanism that can help transition Farcaster from an Attention Economy to a Creation Economy:
We want to start with a group of curators who are highly aligned with the community. For different communities that can mean different things; maybe they own an NFT, Hypersub, or tokens associated with the community. Maybe they are frequent casters in a channel, and so on. /impact allows different ways to select curators based on their community alignment.
The next step is to make sure that curators have the incentive to look for the highest value casts and for them to fairly value those casts. The way /impact achieves this is by giving each curator an allowance of points they can “stake” on casts. If they overvalue a cast other curators can downvote it. If they stake it fairly other curators would want to upvote it. If a receives more upvotes on balance they will get a bigger daily allowance, and vice versa. Since /impact distributes rewards proportionately to the overall points staked, the best strategy for every curator is to try to accumulate as many points as possible, and to fairly stake those points. Trying to game the system by overvaluing some casts is only likely to lead to downvotes which leads to a lower allowance.
Why should curators bother to up/downvote other curator’s staked casts? At a basic level, they want the curation market to appear credible. If the community thinks the curation market doesn’t fairly reflect the value of people’s contribution, why would they want to fund it? Likewise, if contributors don’t think that their contribution is fairly valued, why would they contribute as much to the community? So curators benefit (monetarily) not just from fairly curating content, but also from making sure that the market appears credible. A community can also add point incentives to up/downvoting curations to further improve the quality of this process.
Now what happens if one curator stakes points on a cast and then another curator stakes points on it also, thus making the cast overvalued. Obviously it makes no sense to penalize the first curator if the curation gets downvoted. Impact App solves this issue by penalizing the latest curators first.
This way curators have an incentive to always look for the most valuable casts and not, for example, try to copy the strategy of successful curators by adding points to their casts.
In this system we can see how the interests and incentives of users, curators, and the network as a whole align; creators benefit from being rewarded for the quality of the work they produce (and not having to spend precious time promoting their work). Curators benefit from being rewarded based on the quality of their curation. The network as a whole benefits from the proliferation of quality content, and from becoming a hub for the Creation Economy, where new users can come and thrive by creating great work.
