What is Dreamyth?
Dreamyth is an online society. At its core, Dreamyth is an attempt to test the limits of direct democracy over the Internet by providing a platform for content creators of all sorts to offer their creations to a democratically operated marketplace.
How does Dreamyth work?
Dreamyth operates as a platform where anyone can join and participate in generating and moderating content. The process of moderating content is controlled by the Glory system, which is like a forum reputation system on steroids, a kind of moral currency or social credit that allows users to democratically reward and punish in a distributed way.
What is Glory?
Glory is the unit of currency of Dreamyth, and the way in which Dreamyth differs from traditional reputation systems.
How does Glory work?
Whenever someone posts content, it becomes possible to vote on that content. Essentially, upvotes or “medals” are signals of approval for the content and act as a bulwark against rejection. Downvotes, or “strikes” are signals of disapproval towards the content, and if the strikes exceed the medals, the content is deleted or “rejected”. This may sound like nothing but the Reddit system with a bot that deletes sufficiently downvoted posts at this point, but there is an important addition, which is that users gain “glory” when they earn medals, and lose glory when they get strikes. If a user has less than zero glory, they can no longer post content at all. Furthermore, in addition to the single free vote that a user can make towards each piece of content, they can pay glory to add further medals or strikes. In effect, they can spend glory that they’ve accumulated to further protect content from or to push it towards rejection.
Why have Glory instead of weighted votes?
Glory is essentially a way to allow proven members of the community to have more effective influence and resist potential issues like invasions from 4chan or multiple account spam. However, in theory this could also be achieved by weighing people with a high reputation more voting power. So why make it a currency instead? Because systems with weighed voting power tend to go too far in the opposite direction, and lead to old guard members having the ability to simply bully new or unpopular members into submission. By making it a currency instead, we limit the extent to which old hands can dominate the proceedings, and also encourage people to use their earned power sparingly and only when they judge it necessary. It is about striking a balance between egalitarianism and meritocracy.
Who can join and how do you prevent multiple sock puppet accounts?
Anyone can technically join, but your account will initially have no glory and be unable to post content. In order to post content, you must have a positive glory amount, which can be given to you by existing accounts spending their glory to upvote your account. This cost is meant to discourage people from creating many sock puppet accounts for astroturfing. It also encourages people to only invite others who are likely to be responsible with their account. Note that in the process of creating your account, you may write up a profile that functions as an application of sorts that those with glory can see. This allows outsiders to join. Also note that people can instead downvote your account. This functions as a way to filter out bad actors such as spambots. If, after you’ve posted content that people downvote, your glory goes to zero or negative, you will be returned to the applicant pool and be unable to post until your glory becomes positive again.
How do you avoid farming for glory through trading back and forth?
A potential problem with setting the amount of glory received to be per upvote is that this can lead to a situation where two friends can simply trade glory back and forth to upvote their posts forever. To avoid this, medals and strikes cost two glory each, but are worth only one glory earned or lost, respectively. This makes farming as described impossible.