#6: Simon de la Rouviere on Curation Markets

3 min readJul 28, 2017

In podcast episode #6 of Creating a Humanist Blockchain Future (Youtube, Soundcloud, iTunes), we focus on the Attention Economy by diving into Curation Markets with Simon de la Rouviere, the Engineer of Societies at ConsenSys and a lead at Ujo Music. My two favorite quotes:

“Is it worth it to tokenize one candy bar?”
“r/memeeconomy is a prediction system on the popularity of information.”

Show notes below:

Why Work on the Attention Economy?

Studied social informatics and information overload. What are the effects of IRC vs. Forum vs. Feed? (1:30)
In parallel, learned about DogeCoin, a tokenized representation of the community and network effects. (2:30)
Can we do this with other communities? Can we do this around other entities like people? (3:00)

Memetic vs. Utility Value

Utility tokens like Bitcoin and Ether don’t just have utility value. Bitcoin and Ethereum communities have cultural/memetic value too. (4:00)
Memetic tokens don’t need to exist forever, like nation-state fiat. Dogecoin and other memes represent the community at a given point in time. See Robert Putnam’s “social capital”. (6:00)

Curation Markets as a Design Pattern

Curation Markets have 2 core features: 1) Token and skin in the game to direct attention towards something. 2) How do they spawn? Continuous token instance. (8:00)
2x2 grid of implementation: curation alone, continuous model alone, and curation + continuous model together. (10:30)

Current Implementations of Curation Markets

1Hive Funding Platform (part of HiveCommons, built on district0x), a way to offer a standardized and accountable crowdfunding on top of a curation market. Alignment between funders and creators. (11:30)
district0x’s 2nd district: Meme Factory.
Emergent Ethereum Stack: Ethereum, Aragon, district0x, HiveCommons/Decentraland/AdChain. Status? (12:00)
Many of the community incentive models use a curation market/continuous token model. See these models: district0x, Decentraland, Status. (13:00)
Other Design Patterns: Giveth’s MiniMe token (used by Aragon, HiveCommons, etc.)

r/memeeconomy

After DevCon2, 1st “Hashtag Markets” blog published at same time as r/memeeconomy started. (16:00)
250k subscribers now. Prediction system on popularity of information using reddit karma as currency. (17:30)
Enabling new professions like “meme trader”. (18:30)
From LEAN/Early Adopter perspective, this is the perfect community for something like curation markets. Rapid growth. Mods already monetizing (at $300/month) a “Meme Insider” magazine through Patreon. (19:30)

Macro Transition to Attention Economy

New age of knowledge work and cultural contributors. Instagram, etc. enable a massive long-tail of cultural and collective commons. (21:00)
But in the future, you’ll earn the value you create. (22:30)
Right now, the [value generated | value captured] fitness function isn’t a great fit. More value generated than captured. See reddit. (23:30)
Decentralized Nature of Coordination (awesome recent blog post by Simon on this). More direct stakeholders in a given coordination system (see Liquid Democracy). (27:00)
How granular will it become? Is it worth it to tokenize one candy bar? Probably not. But maybe. Would we have predicted an Instagram like? (29:30)
The key question—does it provide systemic benefit? Maybe not for humans, but for AI? (30:30)
Information Superhighway! Vaporwave! :)

Call-to-Action:

Just starting? See my overview post on the blockchain-based Attention Economy.
Be part of distributed crowd working on this! Join the Curation Markets Gitter or the Slack’s for projects outlined above (district0x, etc.).

Thanks to Keith Klundt, John Desmond, Colin Wielga, Harry Lindmark, John Lindmark, Veronica Stamats, Jacob Zax, Katie Powell, Jonathan Isaac, Ryan X Charles, Chris Edmonds, Ramsay Devereux, Ned Mills, Kenji Williams, David Long, Scott Levi, Peter Rodgers, Kenzie Jacobs, Jon Frechin and Kash Dhanda for supporting me on Patreon!

About Me: My name is Rhys Lindmark and I’m a social entrepreneur. I’m creating a humanist blockchain future by writing, speaking, and advising at the intersection of Effective Altruism, UBI, the Attention Economy, and Blockchain. I lead the Colorado chapters of Effective Altruism and the Blockchain for Social Impact Coalition. I’m an alumnus of Techstars Boulder 2015. Please reach out if you’d like to connect or have feedback! I’m curious about what you’re working on. You can support me on Patreon, follow me on Twitter, or connect on LinkedIn.

Disclaimer: I own less than $100 of any given cryptocurrency, so my monetary incentive is not directly aligned with Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc.