You might have seen a thread recently for an app called Godwin. For those who didn’t, quick recap: the app is essentially an everlasting survey where the more polls you answer, the more accurate your profile gets. What makes the app quite special is that everything is in the hand of the community - be it for the proposal, selection, or mapping of the statements.
The first announcement is that my colleague and I conjointly decided (I mean she agreed under the pressure :D) to rename the app to Politiballs and the tokens to BALLs! These names better reflect what the app does and how the incentives work. Our theme has been updated accordingly, hopefully you’ll like it!
I also invite you to start reading our whitepaper which we will continue to update during the next days. Ideally, we would like to launch an SNS next month because we’re in serious need of cash and want to keep the ball rolling. We’ll put all the details in the whitepaper and keep you updated.
Our goal is to create a space where people can express their opinions and discover where they belong on the political spectrum.
Politiballs is organized in subs, each sub can have its own identity and political space. A political space is characterized by its dimensions: by example a two dimensional space could be defined by the civil axis (authority VS liberty) and society axis (progressive VS conservative).
On every sub, users can propose new statements. If it is selected, people can vote on it and attempt to map it in the political space. Once the vote is closed, user profiles get updated in accordance with the opinion of the user and the average mapping of that statement.
To prevent users from trolling or acting in their own interest, they have to lock tokens every time they want to propose, select or map a statement:
If you proposed a statement, the tokens will be refunded unless it gets censored. If your statement has been selected, you’ll also get rewarded with additional tokens.
For the selection or mapping of a statement, it is entirely based on how the other users selected or mapped it. It is pretty much like a vote, but if you’re the only one who voted something radically different than everybody else, you won’t get refunded. However, if there is a lot of dissent between the voters, you will get rewarded with additional tokens.
Overall Politiballs attempts at bringing together people who share a common belief framework in order to find what make them different as an individual inside that framework. Users who are just interested into giving their opinion can do it freely; others who want to participate into defining the frameworks have to risk tokens but are incentivized to speak what is on their mind, as long as it is judged appropriate enough. That’s why our moto is: to win BALLs, you have to grow some!
[edit: removed the link on return potential model in social contexts because was confusing: if the figure 1 the point of maximum return represents the amount of behavior the group likes the best, whereas in Politiballs the point of maximum is where there is the greatest dissent within the group!]
I like the website. However, I would advise you to seek funding via funded. Your project is going to be under a lot of scrutiny from the community and being a new project makes it even worse, especially with everything that has happened in the last couple months with many projects taking advantage of the SNS.
Thank you! For now it’s really only the website and the whitepaper - which we’re going to update soon with more information on the tokenization, technical architecture, market strategy and roadmap.
Thanks for your feedback. You’re right we might very well do that. I agree it is a bit early for an SNS: we have a functional app but we haven’t advertised for it just yet, we’d like to give more love to the user profiles before getting there. And we’d love to find early investors who share our mission and Funded might just be the place.
I was playing with the SNS testflight yesterday though, and the comments suggest that it is possible to do many rounds of swaps, such that we could start an SNS with let’s say 5% or 10% of tokens for the initial swap amount. If that is feasible that could also work for us, I just don’t know how the next round of swaps would work. Is it also through the NNS? Maybe @lara could tell? Has any of the SNS launched so far done that?
The community has had 2 sns’s rug in the last month.
I sincerely doubt the community would be up for another round of rugging over what sounds like a free 16 personalities test mixed with reddit-tier echo chamber for discourse.
Hi @sardariuss,
thanks for tagging! At some point the idea was to reuse the initial swap and potentially allow additional rounds of swaps. But this ended up never being designed nor implemented. It turned out that it was unclear if this was even needed and also that probably one could not reuse the initial swap as at a later time the dynamics are already different (the token is already transferred between users etc). Therefore the current SNS does not have this functionality and I am not aware that anything like this is planned.
It is of course not ideal if some of the comments in the testflight still mention this. Maybe you could point me to them? Then we can try to make sure to update them!
IMHO at this point in time it would be more wise to do a funded try and avoid SNS for now, while if possible continue building, sharing some code and engaging with community may that be devs or not.
Hey @lara thank you for the answer. It’s in the sns.yml generated with dfx sns config create, line 201 (I might not be up to date with my dfx, I got version 0.14.4):
# If only parts of the swap tokens are sold in the initial decentralization swap, the developer
# neurons are restricted by a voting power multiplier. This voting power multiplier is calculated as
# `swap_distribution.initial_swap_amount_e8s / swap_distribution.total_e8s`.
Thanks for your feedback Tromix and Zack. Yeah with all that’s been said Funded makes more sense.
@Tromix What element of the game do you think favor the emergence of echo chambers?
We think that the incentives are exactly designed to limit it, because if everybody agree with each others there is no reward. Ultimately, we could also monitor the degree of dissent in a sub and compute an “echo chamber” degree to give more of an idea what sub are “healthy” or not. We were also thinking at putting an indicator of “boldness” on the profiles, which would increase the more you vote against the crowd. IMO there is a lot we can do and want to do to prevent echo chambers.
(I think the link to the wikipedia article might have been confusing, I removed it see my comment above).