>You can publish, share and vote for entries, similar to Medium and other modern publishing platforms, with the difference that your content is actually published over a decentralized network rather than on our servers. Moreover, the votes are bundled with ETH micro transactions so if your content is good you’ll make ETH from it – in a way, mining with your mind.
Does it have to be my content? Is there anything to stop me writing a bot that looks for popular Medium/Reddit/HN/whatever articles and post them to AKASHA under my name to harvest ETH?
That's exactly what people will do if they believe there's money to be made.
Sounds good except for only using microtransactions for voting (it is also easy to inflate your own votes).
I'd prefer to see something closer to a federated system for voting / popularity tracking (however unlikely it may be). To detect spam bots and similar manipulation methods you need trusted humans to filter out the bad votes by spotting the trends.
And being able to see the differences in average votes between various voting clusters (different sets of users) would probably be an improvement (through seeing the varying rankings across servers with different userbases).
We are using a quadratic voting system for the microtransaction side with weights between 1 to 10. Basically this enables people to easily support their authors/artists/cause via votes/likes with amounts from 1 cent to 1 dollar.
Quadratic voting is also quite interesting as it allows people to express "how much they like/dislike" a particular thing - which is not possible with the traditional 1 like/vote per 1 person mechanisms.
We are aware of the potential problems that might emerge from this model and this is why we are very interested in exploring various solutions such as Proof of Individuality and reputation systems that can bring both local and global rankings into the mix.
These areas are still in the early days of pioneering but we are determined to experiment as much as possible in the search for the best solution.
Anyone that is interested in this sort of things is more than welcome to join the discussions on our slack at http://akasha-slack.herokuapp.com/
>You can publish, share and vote for entries, similar to Medium and other modern publishing platforms, with the difference that your content is actually published over a decentralized network rather than on our servers. Moreover, the votes are bundled with ETH micro transactions so if your content is good you’ll make ETH from it – in a way, mining with your mind.