During this week's AMA, Khal mentioned that he wants to incentivize more interaction on Threads, and particularly he would like the habit to drop the link to your post and never engage with anyone disincentivized.
I'm rather a long-form content creator, but I understand his point of view. In the beginning, I used to promote my posts on Threads (always with an accompanying text), but I tried to also engage with a couple of other threads as I went to the platform for this purpose. And I always responded to the replies I saw on my threads, even if sometimes a little later since I am not a regular user of Threads.
But I think it's been weeks since I stopped pushing most of my posts to Threads because I realized too many people push their own links and it became too noisy for the platform, and more regular engagement is desired instead.
So, it looks like the Leofinance team wants to tackle this behavior in two ways:
- by encouraging a change in the community behavior, to stop upvoting threads of people that don't interact
- by introducing a separate algorithm, potentially a different reputation system, based on the level of engagement people have on the platform
The first one makes perfect sense to me, in a social media environment.
The second one is a bit tricky, particularly if it's designed as a reputation system based on engagement.
Reputation scores are meant to be designed in a way that cannot be directly influenced by the actors to whom they apply.
Even the reputation scores we have on Hive - which many people consider unreliable - are not directly influenceable by the account holders to whom they apply. Their behavior or quality of content may influence their reputation score over time, but that's for others to decide, not themselves.
If reputation scores are based entirely on engagement (while I like engagement and I do engage myself consistently - even have a goal for that), this is something one can control by oneself, thus it is highly susceptible to getting inflated for a better ranking.
Even more, that increases the likelihood of mindless spam, and botting too, and I doubt this is something that is desired, even if higher engagement rates are a priority for the platform.
The other alternative, having a tab where recommendations are made based on who engages more sounds better. The effects are contained in that tab and the evolution can be observed over time. If things go in the right direction, and based on the data acquired, maybe the next step would be a separate reputation system for Leofinance.
How do you see things?