Better believing for better markets

How credibility fixes the market of information and engagement

This is the third blog in the series that introduces our new platform credo. So far, we provided a brief overview of the reasons for the platform and highlighted some of the issues with incumbent platforms that credo aims to address. Today’s blog switches the perspective to the future, describing our vision for a more equitable ecosystem made possible by the adoption of credibility forecasting. We strongly recommend you read the previous blogs for full context.

Social wants your love but gives you little in return

In the last article, we’ve established that one of the core issues with most of the current social platforms is the inherent and unavoidable conflict of interests of the ad-revenue-based platforms that market themselves as social and content utilities. We’ve concluded that the addiction-forming content selection algorithms (aka force-feed algos) are an inevitable product of the industry optimizing for the said revenue model.

Exploring potential solutions to this problem, we’ve postulated that the existing pay-for-content subscription models are too rigid for the dynamic world of social content. While pay-for-access social fails at the quality hurdle since quality and popularity aren’t the same thing and there’s just so much junk in the existing platforms which are not for users’ utility, but for their engagement.

What exactly do we mean by credibility?

Before we dive into how credibility enables a radically different economic dynamic, let’s briefly recap what credibility actually means in our platform.

Credibility is defined as the quality of trustworthiness or believability.

In credo, we define it further:

Credibility is a measure of confidence in the expected quality or outcome, expressed as a percentage, in a given topic of interest or expertise (e.g. “Philosophy”) and applicable to both content and people.

When applied to people, credibility means confidence not only in the expected quality of their content but also in the quality of their assessment of the credibility of content and people. In other words, how you creed someone is how you creed their creeds.

For example, a credible-in-cooking chef is likely to produce a good dish and is likely to know a good dish or a good chef. A credible-in-running athlete is likely to do well in a run and likely to know other good runners.

This definition allows us to apply the concept of credibility to a wide range of situations, yet in a manner that allows us to build a logical framework of algorithms around it.

Margin note: credibility could be used to express confidence in the negative outcomes as well, e.g. a journalist credible in *clickbait* will produce attention-grabbing fluff pieces. This might be necessary because there are occasions where a negative-value topic (ie clickbait, fakenews) is not invertible into a positive topic for the purpose of the forecast. However, we believe such situations are exceptions, rather than the rule, and are considering having a distinct UX for such situations.

With that context, let’s get back to the topic: building an equitable economic substrate.

A nickel for your time

Let’s review the relationship between the three core elements of the social content economy: content, attention and money. Thus, we can consider the actors in the economy as buyers and sellers of attention and content.

• Users are sellers of attention and buyers of content
• Creators are sellers of content
• Promoters are buyers of attention

Win-win factor

As in any market, the price of content and attention is determined by the supply-demand equation, which juxtaposes the buyers and the sellers over the price. Yet there’s a factor that benefits both sides: credibility.

• Higher credibility of content creators means users get more value (insight/entertainment/etc) for their money.
• Higher credibility of users means promoters can get more value (brand engagement, purchase motivation) for their money spent on users’ attention.

The virtuous cycle ensues and benefits all users, not just transactionally but structurally — establishing credibility as the optimization axis of interactions in the system.

• Credible content begets more credible users
• Credible users beget other credible users that bring credible attention
• Credible promoters create better businesses that bring more capital to the platform
• Credible creators distribute broader and make more money, create better content because of credibility feedback

Credibility as the predictor of quality enables payment models that would otherwise be unviable:

• Pay-for-content becomes effective because it’s possible to tie payment to the credibility of content
• Pay-for-access becomes viable because the credibility of content and participants can be ascertained. Imagine expert communities which can charge access fees because of the high credibility of participants.
• Pay-for-attention becomes possible because promoters and researchers can target specifically skilled (credible) participants and pay higher fees since the quality of their results is higher.

Establishing credibility as an effective quality predictor finally allows much more naturally collaborative business models to evolve and displace the adversarial ad-revenue-based dynamics.

The promise and the risks of the economic entanglement

As excited as we are about such prospects, it would be naive to imagine that any rating-reward system would be immune to the nefarious ingenuity of the human enterprise.

After all, in all current systems, influence can be bought. It’s possible to buy followers, likes and retweets on Twitter, hearts and follows on IG, and even ratings on Amazon.

Linking economics to credibility will mean people will try to game the system in ways we can’t predict, so it would be disingenuous to say that it won’t happen here.

However, we believe credo is inherently resistant to at least some of the methods used for manipulation, owing to the unique features of the credographs and, perhaps even more importantly, to the economic model that values quality over quantity. More on this topic in future blogs.

This is just the beginning

Our individual and collective ability to improve forecasting of this measure has profound implications far beyond social content.

Consider funding startups or grass-roots charities. In both cases, traditional empirical-evidence-based evaluation approaches are often impractical, so how does one develop confidence in the outcomes? The answer is the same: it’s not what you know. It’s who. You find the “experts,” often by word-of-mouth, and you hope they’re not conflicted in giving you their honest appraisal. You’re trying to establish credibility the “analog” way. One day, this could be possible in a social credibility platform. If this sounds far-fetched, I remind you how crazy the idea of buying something online from a stranger was — until eBay introduced simple star ratings.

We believe there’s enormous potential for positive value through the adoption of credibility in social and professional networks. We also know it’s way bigger than us.

And that’s when we’ll talk blockchain ;)

We always envisaged a credibility protocol that can enable countless different types of workflows and applications that build on the concept of credibility. Just imagine the personalized credibility lens on the search results, product recommendations, code repos, investments, and charity allocations!

We also believe that despite our best intentions, if the business’s profitability is what we optimize for, it will eventually lead us to compromise in ways not too dissimilar to the incumbents. This is why our vision is to have a non-profit foundation oversee the open-sourced development of the protocol and fund new projects while a for-profit businesses that will create useful tools and help other companies adopt the protocol.

Getting all this done will take far more than our small team and we first need to prove the first use case utility, but if this sounds exciting to you and you’re credible in protocol development, sign up and get in touch!

Where do we start?

Personal, immediate utility. We chose to build credo as a content-centric social network because we believe this is the most immediately useful application of the credibility lens.

Here are some examples of how you can put it to immediate use:

Bring in content from other networks to get the real feedback

Identities and profiles so often get in the way of people being real, so clip your boss’s LinkedIn post into credo and get the real conversation going.

Read the news and share your takes and views

Credo comes standard with auto-populated communities that relay news articles from the internet based on popular topics. Join these with some friends and repost/comment, and, of course, creed the pieces.

Mark yourself to reality

Join as a group of friends and commit to creed each other for the skills you all have. Since no one can see how everyone rates one another but can see the aggregate result, you may find some surprising truths.

Create a forum to discuss controversial topics

One of the features of credo is to create “credo-only” communities, which do not allow real-name profiles (ego).

These are just some immediate ideas for using credo in these early stages. As the platform grows, we’re hoping you’ll surprise us with where you will take it!

We hope that throughout the pilot, you will suddenly realize that the added dimension of credibility enhances your content selection and discovery. While the ability to interact with people based on their credibility and not their ego positively rebalances social dynamics.

The pilot’s goal is simple: showcase the utility of credibility and verify that it is useful.

One week to go, so please sign up if you haven’t already and spread the word — bring your crew to credo!

To thank you for getting this far, here’s a bonus section!

What are we launching?

We will expand on this next week at the pilot launch, but here’s a sneak preview:

• Fully featured iOS and Android mobile apps
• A basic Webapp
• Support on discord