[theptip]

I don't think this would work for a normal social network (e.g. Facebook); as sibling commenters mention it adds a lot of friction.

However I think this is a great idea to explore for "exclusive" / "high value" forums, say for trade / special-interest groups. I'd be happy to put down a $10 stake to participate in something like Hacker News, for example, if that would help to combat astroturfing and bad behavior. (Honestly for how much I post on HN I'd be prepared to stake more.)

There's been a lot of research done in this area by the Ethereum devs under their migration from "Proof of Work" to "Proof of Stake", including research on the game-theory of "slashing conditions" (i.e. when you lose your stake). You get some cool community-policing possibilities by allowing any member of the community to collect a bounty paid for by claiming part of the forfeited stake, if they can present an example of a member breaching the rules. For something requiring review this would perhaps have less benefits, but could still be useful; rather than moderators having to watch every message go by, they would just look at the "flagged" queue, and users would now have a financial incentive to add something onto the flag queue, perhaps also having to pay a small amount to take that action as well, to disincentivise spamming "flag" entries. I'm sure you could build this all on Ethereum if you were so inclined, with "admin moderation" being a call to an external trusted Oracle service where the moderators live.

Of course there are also substantial risks in turning a system based on community goodwill into a financial game; people behave differently when they are purely optimizing for a financial game vs. when they are not.