We're living in a digital world. This generation spends more time online than ever before, and parents often think of it as a waste. But instead, what if spending time online connecting with your friends was a way to earn money? Think about it. You post videos to Youtube, say funny things on Twitter and upload amazing pictures to Instagram. All these are examples of things that add value to society- yet we don't get paid a penny for them. I'm sure you're laughing right now. "Me retweeting that funny cat video isn't worth anything" you think. But it does. Facebook and Twitter make millions because of the community we built, but an artist who spends hours painting pictures on Deviantart doesn't make a dime.
Why? Doesn't creativity count? Tsu is on the right track by giving their users a portion of the advertising revenue they bring in, but why not take it further? In today's world, views and likes are a new form of social currency. They're a status symbol and a harbinger of digital wealth, a quick snapshot of what the world thinks of you. No longer do we look to see if you have fancy watches or cars, we check how many subscribers you have on Youtube, or how much karma you have on Reddit. What if we could take this snapshot with us, wherever we go?
This is social capital- the inherent value found in what you do and who you know. Until today, there was no direct way of measuring it. Thanks to the internet, that's changed. We have the ability to harness massive amounts of data and gain insights into a person's trustworthiness, responsiveness and more. It's a near future where your reputation is gold- giving you access to free goods and services from others. Your social capital will allow other people to trust you, and it'll let you trust other people. We already are starting to see baby steps towards reputation-ranking services such as reputation.com and trustcloud, but we're still waiting on something that will bring all your data together. Today, your Ebay seller score, your Airbnb trust ranking and Uber score are each separated into walled gardens. Tomorrow that won't be the case- your reputation and social ranking will be easily accessible on a single page, and constantly grow each time you "buy" a good or service from someone else. Of course you won't actually need to buy anything, because thanks to automation everything is free in a resource-based-economy.
In order to directly calculate how much social capital someone has, it's necessary to use an algorithm. This formula will evaluate the depth and strength of a person's human relationships, along with how widely their influence reaches. While using social media to determine the amount of social capital someone has can never capture everything they do, currently it's the only way to directly measure how much society values someone without resorting to intrusive surveys or subjective value judgments.
Keeping in mind what social capital is (the collective value of a human's social networks), we can separate this value into two broad categories:
"Depth"- The strength and intensity of someone's relationships.
"Breadth"- How many relationships someone has or how far their influence reaches.
A great example of this difference would be comparing someone who has a few, very close friends to an internet celebrity who has millions of casually engaged followers she rarely speaks to. In order for a relationship to be "deep", it needs to be reciprocal- I have to return your favors. Measuring depth is much harder than measuring breadth, because while you can easily count the followers or unique views a person has to see how widely their influence reaches, it's a lot harder to measure how intense a relationship is. Both are equally important when it comes to evaluating social capital.
The four types of online relationships.
Deep + Narrow: Someone with a small circle of friends who are deeply engaged with each other, or highly interested in a single topic/range of topics.
Shallow + Narrow: All new website users start here- with a shallow or nonexistent circle of friends, and a microscopic influence.
Deep + Broad: Comparatively rare, this is a person with a large following who regularly interacts with their fanbase.
Shallow + Broad: The initial example of an internet celebrity who rarely "Gets into the comments" and talks to fans.
These can apply to communities as much as they can apply to people.
Social capital is earned whenever someone likes, views, shares or otherwise positively interacts with content you produce on the web. It's also produced when you form deep friendships with other people. It's lost when these friendships are broken. This isn't limited to social networks as we know them today, but specialty websites such as art portfolios, design catalogs and even video games can all count towards your earnings. In order to distinguish actual views from fake activity, only activity that's done while a user is "signed in" with a specific account will be counted. Needless to say, a person can only have one "money" account per website that's connected to their true identity.
1 point- a like or a view.
2 points- an add (to a collection) or favorite.
5 points- a share or a comment.
10 points- a new subscriber/friend/use of a product or service.*
Each time something you create is used in a new invention or product created by someone else you will earn 10 points. For physical inventions this reward continues each time the product is bought, for virtual products it only occurs once. So if you create a new kind of component used in a smartphone, and 10 million of those phones are bought, you then earn 100 million points. If you create a song and it's used in 10 million other videos (unlikely, but it happens), that counts for 10 million points.
Some notes:
The total value of all social capital is limited to twice the value of the basic income provided to everyone each month. The percentage of social capital each person earns monthly determines how many BI credits or T-Notes it's worth.
*Partial Social Capital will never be given, the amount will be rounded up or down.
One somewhat important aspect of social capital is that it accumulates- but not over time. If you get people with a lot of Social Capital to talk to you, it will increase your social capital too. In general this means that if a person with a lot of followers follows you your social capital will grow as if their followers followed you as well. If someone with a lot of favorites favorites your tweet, the effect will be the same. This will not show up publicly on your profile, and you will not be able to transfer this effect to others. Still, this will be a big help to smaller accounts just getting off the ground.
While that's fine for measuring the breadth of someones' social reach, it's not enough for deriving the depth.
To do this, we must consider what makes a good friendship. Time is definitely one thing- You generally get to know people better the longer you know them. Frequency is also nice to have- You'd like a friend to contact you often so you can talk to each other and have real conversations. Reciprocity is the third and arguably most important- if you do something for a friend, you would like if they did something for you at some point in the future.
Keeping this in mind, we can devise a simple scale based on reciprocity and the average amount of it found on a specific network. "0" will be the average amount of reciprocity, while "100" will be complete reciprocity (every time someone watches you, retweets you, you watch and retweet back). If your levels of reciprocity are less than the average, your score will be negative and it can actually take away from your social capital. No "friendship" will begin until those involved have mutually followed each other on any platform.
Here's how we will handle each of these three quantities.
Time- How long have you been mutual friends with someone? This one is very straightforward. We would just measure the amount of time it's been since you followed someone, and use it to compute the next value. Time is not measured on it's own 0-100 scale.
Frequency: How often do you speak to your friend? How much time do you spend communicating with them? This includes the time spent typing messages and voice chat. Compare this to the average on the 0-100 scale.
Reciprocity: How often do you return the behavior of others? This is in general, not just for friends. If someone leaves a comment on your post, do you comment on theirs? If someone watches you, do you watch back? How much time do you spend on your friend's profile compared to how much time they spend on yours? There are many more possible questions, and reciprocity could be applied to any social behavior.
Zero is average reciprocity, and 100 is total reciprocity. Most people will fall somewhere in between.
Engagement: What percentage of your audience regularly interacts with you? If that interaction is reciprocal, it's value is doubled. 0%-100%
What do we do with these values?
Simple. "Depth" acts as a multiplying factor that levels the playing field between those with a lot of social capital, and those with little. It screens out people with a ton of followers who do nothing, while rewarding those who have active and devoted followings of any size. It can have a value anywhere between -100% and +100%, and this percentage is multiplied with your "breadth" score in order to increase or decrease it. For example, if you start off with a breadth score of 23000 and have a "depth" score of -17%, your final score will be 23000 -(.17 x 23000) = 19090. Only negative depth scores lower your total, zero or positive percentages will have no effect or increase it, respectively.
Depth is calculated by adding your Frequency, Reciprocity and Engagement values together, then dividing them by three.
Distributing and Tallying Social Capital
Social capital is measured and distributed on a monthly basis. In order to prevent rampant inflation, unused social capital from a previous month cannot be used next month. There's a simple reason for that: Likes and views aren't scarce. Me liking your tweet doesn't mean there are less likes in the world. If these likes accumulated, existing social capital would rapidly decrease in value. It's the change in social capital that truly counts, and while the total amount of social capital you've accumulated throughout time would be visible on your reputation profile, you would only be allowed to access the amount you earned in the past month.
There is one way to cash in your excess social capital though, and that's turning it into T-notes issued by tribes. Unlike SC, Tribes can be saved over time by using them to buy tangible objects. If you want to buy more stuff, you can simply offer your social capital for sale, and someone will give you other things in return. Remember, everyone receives an equal amount of good credits monthly but the amount of social capital you can earn is unlimited.
Calculating the amount of social capital someone has earned is easy, and will be done automatically: Just add the total views, watches and shares they received across all platforms they use, plug in their relative market values and multiply this by the "depth" score. Tribes are in control of this process and run the markets.
The total value of all social capital does not change in a month, rather it exists as a "pool". This pool of wealth is always equal to the value of all basic income and tokens added together. This pool is then split up according to who earned how many points that month.
If the pool of wealth to be distributed sat at "100" credits/month, and there were only two people in the economy with one earning 50 points and the other 200 points, the first would take home 20 credits and the second 80.
Today's social networks are inadequate for this purpose, so new ones would need to be created. They preferably would follow this charter:
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