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

Project Update

We have done the following so far :

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

Progress on objectives

We have made considerable progress on the following 2 deliverables :

1. 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.
2. 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

1. We have gotten approval from the IRB at Monk Prayogshala.
2. 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
3. We have also started writing a literature review for the final report and eventual publication
4. 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?

1. We will finish conducting the data analysis based on our pre-registered hypotheses.
2. We will also conduct follow-up exploratory analyses.
3. We will write a first draft of the paper that is to be published.
4. We will also write popular press and blog articles to discuss the projects.
5. 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)