Buzz: Gardens-based media publications

Building on the Gardens Overview post that @burrrata started, I wanted to share some additional specific ideas for DAO designs within the gardens pattern/family where slight modifications/variations/frontend changes create novel applications. This post assumes some basic familiarity with the Gardens design pattern which is designed around open/permission-less communities, so if your unfamiliar check that post out first!

Gardens-based decentralized media publication, blog, or zine

Media publications produce and/or curate content for a specific audience, they monetize via ads or subscription revenue. These businesses are ripe for disruption by DAOs, a DAO turns the model upside down creating overlap between users and publishers.

As an example of how this would work, let’s image a media publication which curates interesting articles and content from around the web and highlights it for their audience, similar to sites like digg.com. For simplicity lets just assume our DAO has a similar simple interface where a rotating stream of articles with images and short description are displayed on a front page.

To succeed, we want the content to be fresh and interesting. So we need people to find and submit interesting content, and we need to bubble up the most interesting content at any given time. We can use the basic gardens template to facilitate this…

Users who want to participate in the curation of the publication (and possibly profit from its future success) buy tokens on a bonding curve, giving them influence in the curation process. Anyone can submit posts, these submissions are “conviction voting proposals” where the amount requested is always the amount with corresponds with the “minimum” threshold value. If the post gets enough support to reach that threshold they submitter will get paid, if it doesn’t they wont.

Curators are incentivized to stake on the proposals that are most relevant or interesting, changing their conviction as content gets stale.

Monetization strategies

While it may be the case that people are interested enough in the collectively curating a publication together as a community that this would work with out monetization (see subreddits as an example), its much more compelling if we can monetize the publication and share that value effectively with the community.

Looking at traditional publishing models, you are likely to pick from either “ad-supported”, or “membership” models, or some combination of the two. From the ad-supported perspective, we could explore having one or more “sponsored” post sections, which can be rented using a “harberger tax” mechanism, where the payments are used to buy and burn tokens on the bonding curve… using the marketplaces “buy fee” feature, the organization can determine what split of this revenue should end up in the pool used to reward submitters versus rewarding curators (token holders).

Moderation

While this basic model probably works okay by itself, its likely useful if we can impose some expectations for the type and quality of content that is submitted. For example we might want a rule against not-safe-for-work content, or reposts… The “disputable” version of conviction voting which is being worked on would allow for this type of subjective constraint to be placed.

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