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I had never heard of it, and I am very dubious that my guesses would be anything but dumb. It does seem to me that the "skin in the game" part, even though it's just a couple of sats, would discipline the upvoting and give a better signal about shared interests. And the ability to upvote means that good questions will gain momentum. You don't have to ask the same question, you can just endorse an existing one. A lot of my work is about transaction costs, including my pod "The Answer is Transaction Costs." Having a decentralized but fast way of mobilizing a query is very interesting!
The transaction costs here seem to have gotten fairly low. Sats are sent by clicking the lightning bolt link. And since most users have an attached bitcoin wallet (or use the built-in one), there isn't any further step than this.
Where we seem to have encountered the biggest challenge with using money as the moderator is that people are willing to spend surprisingly large amounts to put their opinions in front of others.
Since there truly is no other moderation here, outlier opinions that most of the community finds unpleasant or boring sometimes get quite a bit of visibility.
I was thinking that last night, watching MNF. A bunch of really stupid political ads. I had not considered that the "upvote with sats" feature elides seamlessly into what are in effect "ads" for stuff I don't want to see. And since the amount to be paid is small, I can see that is a problem. Thanks for clarifying, I didn't know!
There's also a tremendous amount of sats spent, burying opinions, that people want buried.
Don't talk about The Greater Israel Project!
This forum has no moderators. Instead, the relative ranking (visibility) of any post is determined by the total amount of bitcoin "invested" in the post. Invested in this case means money that users tip to the author as well as fees the author pays. The result is that the front page is an auction of sorts, where users spend money to change the visibility of posts according to what they would like to see.
What are some problems you might guess such a forum has?