The Interledger Community 🌱: Matthew Linares

CommentX — Grant Report #2

Matthew Linares — Tue, 01 Jun 2021 20:21:33 +0000

Project Update

User comments can bring immense value to web content. Whether a comment appears under an article, video, or something else, it can bring rich research, important perspectives, or humorous relief.

Our project, CommentX, allows comment authors to receive micropayments for comments that have been highlighted by the article author.

The feature is live on our site, open-source on GitHub, and being actively explained and tested on openDemocracy.net.

However, whilst we have deployed the MVP, we faced issues with the user onboarding flow, namely users getting wallets so they can receive micropayments. The average user needs to sign up with a wallet provider (e.g. Uphold) and get an ILP wallet before they can receive micro payments, which is a lot of friction for a process focused on onboarding users who may not be familiar with the technologies in question. We have therefore focused our efforts on reducing that friction by working with partners to simplify the user wallet acquisition flow. This is not straightforward; the problem is also being tackled by others working in the micropayments ecosystem e.g. developers at Coil.

We want to improve this user experience before pushing forward with onboarding, to remove barriers for enthusiastic users. We are currently working on integrating the Uphold API to try creating a wallet on a user’s behalf so that they don’t have to deal with that admin before seeing the benefits. We hope to have progressed on this in the coming weeks.

Progress on objectives

Given the difficulties noted above, our objectives below have not yet been properly tested as we sought to ensure those were resolved before attempting to onboard new users.

Objectives

Increased engagement with our articles from authors and reader-commenters, with better quality comments.
Revenue raised through monetised content when readers, including commenters and authors, visit our pages.
Software developed doesn’t affect site performance, and the design gels with user experience.

Here it is live on our site: opendemocracy.net/paycommentauthors

Here are all articles that currently have the feature active on them: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/digitaliberties/rewards-comment-authors/

We are still testing the functionality and iterating before proceeding with activities likely to help further the above objectives, as noted below.

Key activities

Aside from the development work described above, we have commissioned authors who write on subjects related to the future of money. This is partly due to our own interest in the subject as well as to connect with possible early-adopters from relevant networks to test the functionality.

Some of these pieces are nearing publication though we are keen to simplify the user flow before publishing these, as described above.

Communications and marketing

Our communications phase is just starting since, as above, we are improving the technical implementation before doing so. This is because we intend to test out our feature as part of the articles that we write and commission for the project and want to improve UX before starting to publish.

The first article, which introduces the project and showcases the comment monetization feature, is live now.

What’s next?

Continue improving UX and testing, then more publishing on the subject and other planned outreach activities to bring on partners who may help spread the word.

With more people using the feature, we can find ways to improve the feature and explore the idea of sharing micropayments to bring value to different web users.

What community support would benefit your project?

We need supporters of micropayments to help us test this, so please comment on articles that have the feature, listed here: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/digitaliberties/rewards-comment-authors/

We are looking at other ways to get feedback from new users. Anyone interested in featuring this, having us on for a podcast talk or anything else, please reach out to us. :)

We are also looking at creating opportunities for contributors who have useful ideas for the codebase.

And of course, you could earn cash from doing so!

Micropayments for authors of good comments

Matthew Linares — Mon, 08 Mar 2021 11:37:23 +0000

User comments can bring immense value to web content. Whether a comment appears under an article, video, or something else, it can bring rich research, important perspectives, or humorous relief.

Our project, CommentX, allows comment authors to receive micropayments for comments that have been highlighted by the article author.

Try it here: https://opendemocracy.net/paycommentauthors

Quickly join our comments system (Coral Talk), add your wallet payment pointer, and make a comment. The best comments will be highlighted (an existing highlighted comment can be changed).

We hope that this will lead to new ways of supporting commenters to bring facts and opinion that enhance the debate.

We imagine that micropayments will allow new incentives to emerge online – our experiments can expand in future to create new pathways connecting readers, authors and commenters to unleash novel circuits of value.

Give it a try and suggest ways for us to develop this: https://opendemocracy.net/paycommentauthors

Project team

Matthew Linares is project lead and technical manager at openDemocracy.net. Alasdair Blackwell is a full-stack coder working on innovative civil society software.

Project overview

We extended the open-source Coral Talk comments system to let users add wallet payment pointers, and then attach those wallets to article pages where a user's comment had been highlighted. The code repo is soon to be published openly.

We are just starting testing it in the real world, and asking questions about how this technology fits into the wider question of digital money.

Join us in doing so!

What we are doing

Having deployed the proof of concept, we are now testing the feature, finding ways to improve it, and seeking ways to increase adoption.

We are also commissioning writers to discuss Web monetization in the context of the future of money and how open-source projects like these are so important with the future of digital currency being uncertain as it is. This is all to come,

What community support would benefit your project?

Please try the feature out – as well as helping define the future of the project, you could be rewarded with micropayments: https://opendemocracy.net/paycommentauthors

Link Round Up!

Try the features, leave a comment: https://opendemocracy.net/paycommentauthors

Political context of web monetization: https://opendemocracy.net/newmoney

Project lead: https://twitter.com/deepthings

Adoption: Quickest way for users to get payment pointer?

Matthew Linares — Wed, 10 Feb 2021 09:51:20 +0000

We are building features for our website that allow post authors and commenters to receive payments. We are therefore trying to make it as easy as possible for them to get their own wallet/payment pointer and get started. The wallet providers we've looked at so far have fairly slow/indefinite KYC periods, patchy support/documentation, problematic user interfaces – all in all, we find this is likely to be one of the biggest blockers to adoption.

Can anyone recommend a very fast and smooth way for users to get a payment pointer that they can then use on our platform? Something like Metamask for Ethereum addresses would be better.

Thanks,
Matt