[mnet-devel] Incentive enginerring

[Jim McCoy]

On Tuesday, March 25, 2003, at 10:57 AM, Zooko wrote:
> [...] Jim gave me some advice on this subject a few weeks ago which I 
> have taken to
> heart:
>
>     Implement the user interface first!

A payment and incentive system is one area where I would have to 
disagree with my advice to you regarding the FOAF issue.  One of the 
problems that we had with the MojoNation payments was that we wasted 
time and effort on various UI issues when, in fact, you don't want the 
user involved in this layer very much at all.  The "mojometer" was one 
of the worst things we ever added to the system, because it focused the 
user on how much mojo they had and not on how it may or may not have 
been helping their user experience.  There are few things about which 
Clay Shirky and I are in agreement, but keeping any sort of incentive 
system away from the UI is one of them.  If a user has to spend even 
five seconds a day with the incentive UI popped up then the system has 
already cost more than it will provide to that user...

> I think incentives for Mnet should be designed from the top down, 
> where the
> "top" is the user deciding whether or not to install Mnet, and whether 
> or not to
> leave his node running when he goes to bed, and so forth.
>
> I'm skeptical of the value of accounting code which tries to keep 
> track of how
> much value other nodes have given to you until I see some plan for how 
> the end
> user is going to be motivated by this.

While a grand plan may take some time to work on, I think there can be 
no question that keeping track of this data is a useful thing, if only 
from a network analysis and debugging point of view.  The advantage of 
basic accounting hooks is that they can be used for more than simple 
incentive engineering and they are also a minimum requirement for just 
about every possible incentive system that is worth considering.

Jim



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