Research in Public #13: Internal Department Feedback^[1]

Yesterday, I had a chance to present my research on Stacker News in front of my department. In the spirit of keeping the entire research process open, you can find the slides I used here.

As a reminder, the title of the work is "Financial micro-incentives and internet discourse: Evidence from a Bitcoin based discussion platform". In it, I use Stacker News data to test the following three hypotheses:

1. Higher posting costs leads to fewer posts in a territory, but higher quality posts.
2. The types of content that are better rewarded by zaps will increase in prevalence over time, as users learn that those kinds of content are better rewarded.
3. Consistently unprofitable users are more likely to exit the platform, while consistently profitable users are more likely to stay.

Without belaboring the empirical details (you can read all the past updates and results here), the short answer is that we find evidence consistent with each of the hypotheses, and that the financial micro-incentives are causal---that is, the posting cost and zap incentives on Stacker News are observably driving user behavior. Results suggest that even these small micro-incentives on the order of 1-100 sats are enough to drive behavior and post quality on the platform.

Overall, the presentation was very well received. They seemed genuinely interested in SN's market based mechanisms, and their interest was also piqued when I told them that the users on SN really love to hear about economics. As a bunch of econ professors, we're not exactly used to hearing that. One guy also got really excited about the idea of downzapping, and he said he might come on the platform just to start blasting people (while making gun gestures, he has a humorous rebellious personality like that). I told him he's welcome to come on, so if you start getting randomly downzapped by a mysterious stranger---it's my fault, sorry in advance.

There weren't too many critiques of the empirical methodology, which I was hoping for more of actually. But I did get some insightful high level critiques, most of which I probably won't be able to address. Here they are, since they offer some food for thought for all Stackers:

• Since the topic was internet discourse, one person straight up asked if we could have better discourse by requiring people disclose their real identities online. I told her that it's a possibility, but that the people on this platform would likely be ideologically opposed to that. What would y'all have responded?
• Another insightful critique was the definition of quality. One person pointed out that what counts for quality on Stacker News might not be considered quality in the general population. I had to admit that my evidence only shows how the incentives work within the highly selected subpopulation of Stacker News users.
• Same person asked about echo chamber effects. I had to admit that indeed these incentives could potentially produce an echo chamber of views. Does anyone have any thoughts, or a better response to this?
• Another person pointed out that 200,000 posts and 11,000 users is tiny (ouch, @k00b), and thus we can't say much about social media more generally. Again, I was forced to admit that was correct. But before I could defend the paper, someone else defended it for me, saying that even if it's not generalizable, this is still a novel dataset that can speak to the issue and is worth investigating. I think in terms of the paper gaining broader acceptance as a serious scientific study, the small size of Stacker News as a platform might be one of the biggest barriers.
• There were some questions about whether people also took the Bitcoin price into consideration when posting on Stacker News. I actually don't have any good evidence of that. I told them that I think most SN users anchor their mental calculations to sats while on SN, and thus the cost denominated in sats matters more on the platform than the Bitcoin/USD exchange rate. What say you all?

Despite these high level critiques, everyone thought it was pretty cool and there were a lot of questions. I had a chance to tell people about the Lightning Network, which most had not heard of before, and how it enables instantaneous, global, peer-to-peer transactions. I venture to guess that the people left the room with a better impression of Bitcoin than they had when they entered it.

Well, that's it. The paper got rejected from the University of Wyoming Bitcoin Conference that first motivated me to start the project, so that was a bummer. But I think the paper is inherently interesting and I'm gonna try to see if I can submit it to some other conferences. We'll see how it goes. This paper isn't in the subfield that I've spent most of my career in, so getting a foot in the door may be hard.

1. Note: This is a series in which I am publicly documenting the research process for an academic study into financial micro-incentives on discussion platforms, using data from Stacker.News. See here for a list of updates. ↩