How to Integrate Steemit with Quests; or, a Million Tiny Bids

Last year, after the finale of the surprisingly popular Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, I was musing about what do for my next fictional adventure--ideally, it would involve me actually getting paid for writing.  It's not that I'm paid inadequately; it's just that for somebody raised in a money-positive household, there's something a little soul-fatiguing about doing tons of work from which you are not allowed to profit.

So I envisioned a possible story I could write--a story where readers would control the protagonist.  A "quest", in the modern vernacular.  And then I asked my thousands of loyal readers if anyone wanted to develop a new online fiction forum that would let readers bid money on how the next chapter of a story would continue.

Steemit is this close to being the system I dreamed about.

It needs two more features to be that system (and both of those features would be generally useful).  Or four more features, if you really want to target the online fiction space.

...but first, let me back up and describe a new literary form that the modern online world has created, the Quest.  The author posts a chapter (or microchapter, more commonly), and offers the readers zero or more options for what the protagonist should do next.  The readers vote on those options, or propose their own if the author allows that.  Then the author writes the next minichapter, and the process repeats.

Letting readers bid money on the next option is an obvious extension of this form.  It even fixes the common problem with sock-puppet voting.  Creating 33 accounts won't help you win the vote, and if you care that much, you can just bid some damn money.

Right now, quests are exclusively the province of unpaid volunteer authors... and even so, some quests are incredibly popular with thousands of readers.  Patreon is the closest thing those popular authors have to financial support; and that's rare, and a big step for the casual reader.

Imagine if there was enough money flowing through the system to incentivize the next Game of Thrones to adopt the system.  Imagine a hundred thousand readers frantically bidding on whether Ned Stark should try to invade France (sorry, I don't actually read Game of Thrones).  Not everyone will want to read stories in that form; but I'd like to see it exist as one option among many.

In the finale of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, I gave my readers 60 hours to come up with suggested ways for the protagonist to get out of the final crisis... and a lot of readers came up with ideas much cleverer than the solution I'd originally had in mind!  We could see some truly interesting protagonists if they had the wisdom of crowds behind them, and top-class writers incentivized to write those stories.  I'm not saying every story should be written that way; but I do want it to exist as a fictional form.

Steemit is almost the first and only forum that supports that form of literature.

Here's what more I think it needs.

Feature #1:  Bids, or refunds.

Is there a simple button I can press to refund all the Steem that went to one of my comments?  (Maybe there already is, and I just haven't spotted it; this is my first post.)  It would be a crude hack, but it would let me line up 4 comments containing 4 options for the protagonist, and then just refund 3 out of 4 comments after I selected what the protagonist would actually do.

If you go a step further and create a more formal system to support competing bids--and you can see how that might have other uses besides quests!--then be careful not to make that system too simple.  To be competitive with the implicit features of forum readers commenting to vote, and the automatic tally systems that already exist, you need to support at least this:

• The author can add new options after the vote starts.
• Readers can suggest options, and authors can veto those suggestions.
• People can change their votes (move their bids).
• The author can say whether this is a multi-option vote (pick many) or a single-option vote (pick one).
  • In the multi-option case, since more than one bid might be accepted, you as the reader must have enough Steem in your account to pay for all the bids you make.  In the single-option case, you could bid different amounts on different options to account for your weighted preference, and you'd only need enough Steem to support the maximum bid.
• The author can give the readers time to suggest options first, before actual voting opens.  (You can't start bidding until N hours after the chapter posts, where N is an author-specified timer, so that people have time to discuss their options first.)

With money at stake, you may also need a designated arbitrator, maybe with mods backing them up, in case somebody's like "Hey that author just took the money and posted 20 kilobytes of EEEEEEEEE and ran away!"

Having 10% or 15% go to a reader that suggested a brilliant option would also be nice; you might need to let the author determine a split between multiple readers, though.

Feature #2:  Simply visible, well-targeted notifications.

Every forum for fiction must solve the following technical problem:  Let me know when a story I'm following updates, so I can head over and read it.

Here are some ways you CANNOT solve this problem.

You CANNOT solve this problem by letting the reader know every time the EliezerYudkowsky account posts a new post.  See this post here?  This is not a story post.  The readers who are reading The Common Sense of Earth or Precisely Bound Demons and their Behavior do not all want to see this post.

God help you even more so, if you think you can solve this problem by telling the reader every time anybody posts a new comment in a watched thread, so that there are 100 false alarms for every real chapter update.

In my opinion, this problem has been solved.  Correctly.  There is no reason to solve it any differently next time.

• In the upper right-hand corner of the page there is a little envelope.
• If nothing has happened that requires the reader's attention, the envelope is pale.
• If a story has updated, meaning the author has posted something that is a new chapter, the envelope turns red.
• Clicking the envelope pops up a list of updated stories that the reader has not yet visited.
  • There is a 'clear all' button at the bottom of the visible part of the popup list (which must not go off the bottom edge of the window).
  • The most recently updated stories are at the top of the list.
• When I click on an updated story, the link takes me to the first new chapter that has posted since the last time I visited that updated story.  So if the author posts a new chapter on Friday, then another chapter on Saturday, and I click on the notification link on Sunday, the link takes me to the new chapter posted on Friday.

This means that whenever somebody visits your site, they can see right that second whether a story has updated via a system that does not frequently generate false alarms.  If your notification system does not have both of these properties, the users will run away.  (It's okay for comment replies to that user's comments to also go into the same notification envelope; the point is you shouldn't raise the user's hopes that 'something interesting has happened' and then disappoint them.)

Email notifications don't scale well to dozens of frequently-updating stories, but they're still good options to have.  Some readers may start out following only a couple of stories on Steemit, which don't update that frequently.  You want to keep them coming back while you go on seducing them.

This matters for nonfiction too--fiction isn't the only kind of work that comes in chapters and can benefit from financial support.

(Personally, in the absence of feature #2, I could in principle write stories here and post notifications to my Twitter account.  But that only works for me and my existing readership, not new authors.)

Bonus feature #3:  Threadmarks.

So long as you're already marking explicitly inside the system whether a post is inside a particular 'story' that readers are following, have Threadmarks too.

• As an author, I have a list of Threadmarks I personally control.
• I can add a post (or a comment?) to a particular Threadmark.
• That post then acquires the Prev (<<), Index / TOC, and Next (>>) buttons.  Though << and >> don't exist unless there actually is a previous or next post.

Trying to write a story that updates regularly kinda is a living nightmare without this feature.  If I'm being paid enough, I might update all the links manually.  But this is work that a computer can do and a human should not be doing it.

Bonus feature #3.1:  Many stories have occasional volunteer authors who write 'Omake'.  You might want to let the main authors add Omake comments or posts to their Threadmark too.

Again, this matters for nonfiction too.  Not just stories have chapters etcetera.

Bonus feature #4:  Sort stories by money per kilobyte.

One of the life-or-death problems faced by modern story problems is the incredible difficulty of finding good stories.  The good stories are there, it's just that finding them is a nightmare.

There is no current forum that has an adequate way of filtering stories by quality.

Total pageviews?  Those simultaneously measure, not just how many readers are revisiting the story, but how many microsections the author posted (and how small those sections were).  Sorting by total pageviews gives me very long stories more than it gives me the best-written stories.

Number of followers?  Again, that gives me long-running stories as well as good stories.

Sorting by money has the potential to make tremendous progress on this issue.  Likewise Steemit's brilliant idiom of rewarding the earliest reviewers.  I'd expect money to filter on quality more heavily than votes or follows or just about anything else.

But offer me the option at least--even as one option among many--of seeing stories sorted by money per word, or Steem per byte.  That way I can find the short and beautiful stories, the medium-length and moving stories, not just the longest-running stories.

I cannot emphasize enough how quality-sorting is a critical problem to the whole online literary ecosystem.  Why should I bother putting a tremendous amount of work into my story, if there's no way for the discerning reader to find it among a hundred less-carefully-written stories?  It's a classic lemons problem: if the only readers who stick around in a forum are the readers who are okay with the average quality on that forum, and there's no way for a standout work to do better among a discerning subset of readers, then authors are not incentived to put in the extra work.

The Steemit system can make progress on this issue--but only if it's done right!

Critical decisions:  Fanfiction, erotica, and non-public-domain illustrations.

If you're targeting the online fiction space, you need to decide in advance what to do about fanfiction, erotica, and non-public-domain illustrations.

My impression is that Steemit already bans non-public-domain illustrations.  Okay, but be aware, there's a lot of stories whose authors like to toss in random anime illustrations from online.  Can they offer links to the illustrations, instead of including them inline?  "No" isn't a dealbreaker for me, but it might be for others.

Earning money on fanfiction is a whooole social landmine--at least in America, it's perfectly fine in Japan.  Some authors get away with having Patreons that don't look quite so directly connected to the story material itself, but even that is controversial among fans.  Steemit's best bet is probably allowing only original-world fiction, for now.

And finally, if you do not ban erotica, you will get tons of erotica in this format.  So if you go that route, make sure you include bonus feature #5 of being able to tag things nsfw, or that is all your front page will ever look like.

...and that's how I think Steemit can target, and create, this particular portion of the online literary space.  I hope you enjoyed reading!