What if you could own equity on someone’s credibility?
In the quest of improving the information diet, one of the biggest challenges is who to follow or who to subscribe to.
Before, as media was very centralized (newspapers, TV) this problem didn’t exist. They were arbiters of which people had more credibility by allowing them to express their opinions to the public. As there were not so many information sources that was what we had.
Right now, we’re inside the decentralized journalism explosion where individuals in parallel with those media companies are generating influence, opinion, reporting, etc. But, how do you know who is worth following or trusting?
Usually you check to see if someone you trust is following him, or you see some metric that is available for you. We all know that metrics are not very good for signaling value provided nor for credibility. But that’s what we have.
Recently I have discovered ideamarket.io. First of all, I’m not even sure if the idea will work or not as it’s still very early, but it’s so refreshing and -in my opinion- so in the good direction that is worth mentioning.
As stated in their docs:
Ideamarket aims to replace corporate media as the arbiter of public credibility. To help achieve this, Ideamarket offers creators a new income stream based on trust, without dependence on ads or paywalls.
This sounds very similar to donation systems like Patreon. You fund the work that you want so they can continue doing what they do.
Ideamarket approach is quite different. You don’t give away your money. You buy stock representing the credibility of the author. And that stock price increases with new purchases following an algorithm.
This subtle change is a huge mindset shift:
- You’re not just supporting this author, you’re getting equity on the valuation of their credibility. You’re also betting. Skin in the game.
- You have a voice. If you don’t like what they’re doing you can cast your penalty by selling the stock and recovering some money.
And of course, they author is being compensated by depositing the stock into a lending market, in this case compound.finance. I’m not fully aware how this works but in the end it gives you an interest rate of what you lend. This covers the donation function, so the author is supported.
This project is focused on credibility and trust but I don’t see why this can’t be applied to plain support to independent people that does other things. For me, it looks like an improved version of Patreon, an equity version of it I would say.
As I said before, I’m not sure this is the way to do so, but at least it looks close. The time will say. In the meantime, I fully support this idea and I wish the best to its creator.
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