Hey @Malkazoid, thanks for the response. I guess it comes down to this: Allowing the posting of content to ownerless Niche's diminishes ownership in general, since you have content that is potentially not contributing rewards to any owner. Maybe that's OK? My other concern is seeing the Niche's / content categorization become too cluttered if ownership isn't a requirement.
If they create a general mod pool to manage these 'unowned' niche's perhaps the quality could be managed. As you stated earlier, I agreed with this before, and still do agree with this idea, but it sounds like it doesn't really line up with the @Narrative team's vision for the system.
Narrative's vision for the system is evolving and will continue to evolve, inevitably as we progress through launch and many years into the life of the platform - I see our role here as being faithful signals of our truths regardless of what the status quo is.
I disagree about allowing posting to unowned niches. People can tag three niches. They will tag the three niches that best describe their content. Some of them will be owned, and sometimes, one or two of them will not be owned.
If the formulas are well designed, if you are the owner of the one niche that is owned out of the three, the fact that a piece of content is also posted to two unowned niches should have literally zero effect on the beneficial activity and rewards your niche receives for having that content posted to your niche.
Also, until advertising comes online, the only revenue feeding into the system is from Niche ownership fees, I believe? Someone feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. Perhaps some transaction fees also feed the rewards pool. I'm not entirely clear what cut of the 'publications' if any would feed into the rewards pool. Given that, you would potentially have a ton of content in ownerless Niche's paying out content creator / mod rewards and being subsidized by all of the other ownership fees, without anything going back to those owners. Ultimately, the pie chart break down presented originally becomes problematic. Owner's would no longer get 10% of the network rewards if content can be created which maps to unowned Niches.
The system is already being subsidised in the early years by minting NRVE tokens. What that should be buying us is the ability to launch without worrying so much about the immediate sustainability of the model, if doing so is to the huge detriment of making Narrative an intuitive place that people gel with. All platforms before us have put primacy on making their platform a place that makes sense to users, and have figured out how to profit from it as they went.
When advertising arrives, that is traditionally where all funding comes from on social platforms. The primary concern is, when we launch the advertising functionality, will we have hundreds of thousands of happy Narrators worth advertising to, or will we have only you and me and people like you and me: early adopters who keep hoping the Team will make the place more accessible, and who use up all their energy arguing about whether they should or not.
I don't want to have to explain to people I invite here, why they can't post to a niche that has been approved by the community. I don't want to have to argue endlessly with them that Narrative is not a scam, despite the condition for them to be able to post to the niche that best fits their content is that they or someone else has to pay at least 75$. Nobody on this blue planet expects tags have to be paid for before they can be used, and nobody will react remotely positively to that. You really need to forget everything else for a moment, and place yourself squarely in the shoes of the average social media user, and how they are going to react to that. Everything else will just cloud your appreciation of this primordial reality.
This is something literally worthy of delaying Beta over, if that is what it takes to fix it. Because you don't recover from a PR disaster like the one we would have if we go live with the system the @Narrative Network Team currently has before us. Not even with the likes of Henry Kissinger do you spin yourself our of that sort of cluster*uck. We'd probably be looking at a complete rebrand to try to recover, if we allow thousands of people to come here and experience that.
I hesitate to say this, being a Niche owner, but I'll say it anyhow. Narrative created a very interesting idea / economic model with Niches and ownership. But if you allow posting to unowned Niches, I think it really throws a wrench into that model. The question becomes, if we want Narrative to simply reward content creators and moderators, then why have ownership of Niches at all? Why not simply make them an elected and paid position, more akin to head moderator, if they are 'ensuring' quality anyhow? I think the answer is rooted in the fact that the Narrative economy is going to be dependent on those ownership fees for quite some time until advertising really gets going.
I'm going to try to put this in a way that cuts through the fog of extraneous considerations.
NOTHING matters more than adoption. Without it, there is no economic model, there is no content economy, and there is no future for Narrative.
The goal? For people to buy niches, and renew them, and grow them.
We will have thousands of unowned niches at launch. If people can't post to them, they are effectively dead.
By its very definition, the launch of a new platform is in proof of concept mode. Users will want to be shown that something works before they invest much time in it, let alone money.
You can't show someone a dead niche works, if it is dead. Users will look at them - with only a foggy idea of what niche ownership means, for the most part, since it is such a new concept - and they will think: this thing is an empty shell among thousands of empty shells that nobody seems to want. Why should I pay 75$ for it, just so I can post content to it? What kind of fool do you take me for???
The proof of concept is so simple, it is staring us in the face. Life is proof of life. Life is the antithesis to the aura of death surrounding a dead niche in a pool of thousands of dead niches. And life is posting. People posting content. Community, no matter how small. That is the start of a niche finding an owner. I don't know the exact amplitude of the enhancement effect this creates, but we should all intuitively know it is significant. How many people do we see flocking to build a store front in the middle of a desert? And how many people are flocking to build a store front in a neighbourhood that has activity, and a growing number of residents?
But please - I ask you all to forget about the content economy for a second: that will materialise if we survive launch. I sincerely doubt we will survive launch if thousands of users come away stumped by something as simple as using tags. Let them use tags the way tags are supposed to be used. Let the system efficiently use tags to best describe content. Don't reinvent the wheel on this. Don't fix what isn't broken. Don't be so in love with a clever new concept that you ignore how it clashes irreconcilably with people's expectations (and unnecessarily so, since with a simple tweak that we are discussing right now, it can both be a clever new design AND fulfil people's expectations).
We won't even know what the reality of the wisdom of the crowd is, if we impede people who want to post to certain niches. We'll have a skewed understanding of what they want, because we only offered them what we dogmatically thought was best for the economy to offer them. That is a fundamentally flawed approach, and one I think many people are ignoring the dangers of.
I've already devoted too much energy to this issue, and if I continue pouring my time into a bottomless pit, it will cause me to start reevaluating the viability of this project. I want to avoid that, so I really hope some folks start putting themselves in the shoes of people who have no ties to Narrative, no commitment, and who need to be convinced we're pragmatic people with their user experience in mind. There are a thousand different ways to not do that, and each one of them is a way to fail.
