Aligning Incentives for Writers
We need mechanisms to realign tech, media, and society. One concept is if your article or film inspires someone to found a great company that solves a social problem (e.g., fusion energy to address climate change), as the media creator, you get a share in cash or equity.
Inspiring journalists, filmmakers, and authors could be integrated into the financing pipeline to receive their fair shares. Some examples: Nicholas Kristof's article inspiring Bill Gates to create hygienic rural toilets in Africa, the Minority Report movie sparking Microsoft's Xbox Kinect, and the Ready Player One book inspiring Oculus.
If you, as a writer, add value to your reader, you could earn a fraction of that value. Many startups have been inspired by a piece of writing. Imagine if writers were to receive some equity in the companies they help start. This would change the writer's incentive structure from quantity to quality. Now, it doesn’t matter how many pageviews you get. You’re trying to find, say, the next Zuckerbergs or Vitaliks of fusion energy, attract them to your blog, and help them build.
You may have only 10,000 readers in the world. These may be the only people who care enough about nuclear fusion energy to consider it “news you can use.” But some people using your work could create extremely valuable companies.
The nepotists of New York versus the founders of the world?
I know who I bet on.
Another piece of the solution could be to directly incentivize correctness. Imagine a new media outlet where every post is accompanied by a prediction market bet, and thus writers have personal skin in the game. This kind of news would be by investors, for investors. You might not even use the term reporter.
The closest we have today are VC blog posts on investments and crypto journalists with disclosed crypto holdings. A prediction-betting feature would align reader/writer incentives.
Prediction markets may not actually predict the future, but they do keep pundits accountable and put them on the record. Starting a media company where all writers are hired on the basis of their prediction track records would be interesting. Making public bets in prediction markets puts pundits on record in a timestamped, quantifiable, unfalsifiable way. (A number of the smarter journalists are becoming venture capitalists, which is a related trend.)
I want a tool to parse tech journalists’ predictions and convert them into a public record of picks. We could backfill previous years from their existing writing. The resulting rank ordering would let you know who correctly called the future. Then we could uprank the authors with early positive sentiment toward winners, especially if writers’ predictions were early and contrarian.
And then we could expose all that data in an API (application programming interface), which we could use as a novel input to media outlets. Journalists with good long-term prediction accuracy would earn more traffic and better reputations. It would be like star ratings for authors/bloggers/tweeters, which is probably also useful for Google. It would totally counter the snarky clickbait-for-traffic trend. You skip YouTube videos with clickbait titles and 1-star ratings, but we don’t have that for news articles. Ratings of articles is an obvious missing component in media.
