Boosting Mechanics
A few ideas on boosting have been discussed so far.
Speculative Boosting
- Boosting promotes downstream engagement, but boosting also increases the cred that will flow to the booster. This creates a prediction market on ideas. Community members are incentivized to boost content that they feel is “valuable,” where “value” describes content they think people should (or will) explore. It’s a signalling mechanism for content curation with economic incentives built in. If a mechanism was created that rewarded early boosters/commenters more than later ones, it would incentivize more people to comb through the depths of the community discourse to surface the most interesting stuff.
Bounty Boosting
- Boosting can also act as a bounty mechanism. This is possible via the initiative system. People can boost things that they want worked on, and then as people contribute to those things they will get lots of cred. This would be great for things like working on documentation or research/design related things. How these initiatives connect from Discourse threads to GitHub Issues is an open question, but it’s being developed. This will flow cred all the way from ideation to the shipment of an idea, rewarding everyone who contributed along the way (I specifically made a comment on this and a discussion ensued, but I can’t find it atm because there’s so… many… conversations… lol).
Threshold Boosting
- This idea was just brought up in the Champions and Heros thread. Essentially, there’s a dichotomy between declaring championship and earning championship. Boosting allows someone to signal intent towards an initiative. From there, however, we want to incentivize ongoing and increasing participation. Threshold boosting would give a boost to contributors who pass the threshold contribution of an Initiative (say 20%). This incentivizes people to keep contributing as more people also contribute. This allows people to both declare that they intent to champion an initiative through boosting, but then also earn “champion rewards” for following through on that commitment and contributing throughout the lifetime of that initiative.