Final Report for Using Web Monetisation for Incentivising Sharing of 'Good' Content

Denny George — Thu, 24 Nov 2022 06:33:24 +0000

Project Update

The initial steps of study included:

Getting approval from an Institutional Review Board for the experiment.
Testing our prototyping payment from one payment pointer to another using the Rafiki Test Net Developed platform to conduct the comparative study.
Recruiting Users for our study via our community networks and Ads on Facebook and Twitter
Creating and piloting tested content that is to be shared on the app
Starting the data collection process
Drafting an academic pre-registration for the study and hosting it on OSF (Open Science Framework)

After surveying past literature in the field, we began drafting the manuscript for academic publication. This was simultaneously done with the analysis of our collected data which included running codes on RStudio and STATA. We interpreted the results and reported the same in the manuscript.

One of the roadblocks we faced during the course of the study was not having enough people pass the inclusion criteria. Despite this we crossed our initial goal of studying 790 users. Out of the 2464 participants who filled out the initial onboarding survey, data from 908 of them could be retained because the others did not pass our inclusion criteria (being at least 18 years of age, an Indian citizen, passing the attention checks, and completing all 3 days of the experiment).

We also briefly faced some payment snags with razor pay which we were able to resolve in time. Despite the hiccups, we managed to successfully complete the study and are now looking to send our manuscript to a journal for publication.

Progress on objectives

Our proposal outlined the following objectives:

To understand whether and how web monetization technologies can incentivize people to share accurate information.
To understand whether there are differences between social incentives and financial incentives when choosing to share information

Results showed that incentivization, regardless of the type, encouraged people to share more true information although they also indicated that the type of incentive (monetary or social) did not influence the participants’ sharing-behavior on the platform. Although we did not achieve the result we were expecting, we discovered interesting insights on how people react to posts using emojis and how certain individual characteristics influenced their engagement with posts. The results show that people with conservative political beliefs were more likely to react to posts (using the happy, sad, and/or disgust emojis). Men and women did not differ in their sharing-behavior; however, in terms of age, older individuals were more likely to share posts than younger participants. One’s political ideology was also related to sharing of true, plausible, implausible, and wholesome posts, as well as whether they chose to ‘read more’ about a given post. We also found that individuals who ‘read more’ about a post are more likely to share it.

Results from the follow-up survey (conducted after the participants completed all 3 days of the study) showed that individuals spent time contemplating the posts shown to them (over the 3 days) and also thought about the consequences to their friends/family and others, and people they disliked, if the messages were true. On average, the individuals in both social and financial incentivised groups were aware of how they gained and lost their followers/money. However, it was interesting to note that more individuals from the social incentive group thought about their incentives (gaining/losing followers) while sharing messages than from the financial group (gaining/losing money).

Key activities

We published a blog on Tattle which talked about the process of content creation for the Meshi Platform for this study.
We published a second blog on Psychology Today’s non-WEIRD Science platform which talked about the motives behind people’s information-sharing behavior.
We completed drafting the literature review for the manuscript.
We successfully ran the analysis on data from 908 participants.
We interpreted the results and reported them in the manuscript.
A preprint of the manuscript has been uploaded on the PsyArxiv

Communications and marketing

Pre-registration

We were actively recruiting participants for the experiment via social media channels and had been boosting posts as well.
A sample post on Twitter can be seen here

Posts about the two published blogs were made on our social media platforms.
Link to the blog published on Tattle: https://tattle.co.in/blog/content-creation-for-the-meshi-information-sharing-experiment
Link to the blog published on Psychology Today’s non-WEIRD Science: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/non-weird-science/202210/do-you-share-because-you-care

We have also uploaded our manuscript as a pre-print on PsyArXiv: https://psyarxiv.com/nykxz

What’s next?

We aim to send our manuscript to Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review for publication.

What community support would benefit your project?

We aim to continue to do this kind of research on incentives and content creation/sharing. Anybody who is interested in this research area/scope or just keen on getting to know more about this field or willing to support us in any other way can contact us.

Relevant links/resources (optional)

Monk Prayogshala IRB
Pre-registration
Qualtrics Form 1
Qualtrics Follow-Up (Money)
Qualtrics Follow-Up (Followers)
Data Dictionary
Preprint

Interim Report for Using Web Monetization for Incentivizing Sharing of ‘Good’ Content

Denny George — Mon, 25 Jul 2022 05:22:50 +0000

Project Update

We have done the following so far :

Get approval from an Institutional Review Board for our psychology experiment
Tested our prototyping payment from one payment pointer to another using the Rafiki Test Net
Developed a platform to conduct the comparative study
Finished recruiting Users for our study via our community networks and Ads on Facebook and Twitter
Created and pilot tested content that is to be shared on the app
Started the study collection process and collected data from 915/980 participants (as on 12th July 2022)
Drafted an academic pre-registration of the psychology experiment and hosted it on OSF (Open Science Framework)
Surveyed past literature in the field to prepare for a subsequent academic publication
Facilitated monetary payments in INR to study participants

Progress on objectives

We have made considerable progress on the following 2 deliverables :

Open source code to replicate study We have been documenting all progress on our study here - Github Repository. The psychological study part of our project is complete. We are analysing the collected data now.
Open Source Software for self hosted feed based social network with web monetization built in. We've prototyped payments via the Rafiki testnet.

The 2 remaining deliverables include publications around our study which will happen after we have analyzed the results of our study.
We did face a higher attrition rate amongst study participants than what we had planned so that has led to this delay. However, now that data collection is nearly complete, we will hope to achieve these objectives soon as well.

Key activities

We have gotten approval from the IRB at Monk Prayogshala.
Accounting for an attrition rate of 25%, we aimed to recruit 980 participants for a sample size of 784. Currently, 915 users have finished the study out of the 1077 who logged into the platform and reached various stages (as of 22 July 2022). The total number of people invited to participate in the study via email was 1556. We have started creating analysis code on R
We have also started writing a literature review for the final report and eventual publication
We have pre-registered the study

Communications and marketing

We have been actively recruiting participants for the experiment via social media channels and have been boosting posts as well.
A sample post on Facebook can be seen here
A sample post on Twitter can be seen here:

What's next?

We will finish conducting the data analysis based on our pre-registered hypotheses.
We will also conduct follow-up exploratory analyses.
We will write a first draft of the paper that is to be published.
We will also write popular press and blog articles to discuss the projects.
We will incorporate inter ledger protocol based payments in our forum platform

What community support would benefit your project?

We are still unsure how we can use the real rafiki network after having prototyped transactions on the testnet. Our goal is to be able to pay users of our forum software for good contributions. The direction of payment would be from the publisher’s to the users. Once the publisher and the reader both have a payment pointer on a provider like Upwork, any pointers on how we can use the Rafiki payment gateway to enable payments between them would be helpful.

Relevant links/resources

Monk Prayogshala IRB
Pre-registration
Qualtrics Form 1
Qualtrics Follow-Up Form for the Monetary Group
Qualtrics Follow-Up for the Vanity Group
Data Dictionary

(Documents like Qualtrics Form 1 are confidential and not available for public viewing. These can be made available upon request)

The Interledger Community 🌱: Denny George

Final Report for Using Web Monetisation for Incentivising Sharing of 'Good' Content

Project Update

Progress on objectives

Key activities

Communications and marketing

What’s next?

What community support would benefit your project?

Relevant links/resources (optional)

Interim Report for Using Web Monetization for Incentivizing Sharing of ‘Good’ Content

Project Update

Progress on objectives

Key activities

Communications and marketing

What's next?

What community support would benefit your project?

Relevant links/resources