Oddbean

I will have to bow to your decades of experience in this field. I couldn't care less about most of what you mention, too be honest. As an aspiring author, and one with strong opinions and also the tendency to put very unpopular ideas into my writing, I expect that my books won't be popular with certain (woke) subsets of readers, and could expect bad reviews from many people. I just don't care. I suppose it is still wise to take prudent steps to mitigate scripting attacks. One stupidly easy way is to have a simple "freemium" model where you can use the entire app for free, but if you wish to push your reviews to others/in public, you would need to pay a significant but not egregious amount of sats in order "go public." This would also help fund development while simultaneously preventing tons of new bots from ransacking the system like the Goths in Rome. If someone wanted to spend that much to leave bad reviews, cool. It's funding the app. I would still consider that a win for the overall system. Thoughts?

I thought of the same thing, or even something simpler, like zap-to-rate, so that you have to pay the author, in order to post a rating. Then only someone highly-motivated would bother. Freemium would have the advantage that malicious raters could get their contract cut and their ratings removed, so that would pressure them to be behave and stay constructive. But I don't know. I understand that some users like giving the ratings, but others find the pressure to rate really irritating and refuse to do so (which reduces the signal of each rating, as it's a self-selected subgroup giving the ratings), and I question whether other users benefit from the ratings on-net. They seem to mostly be a way to press the advantage of big players (number of ratings leads to higher average ratings, in addition to their natural advantage of simply having lots of reviews and customers/users/bookmarkers), and reduce the visibility of newcomers, as everyone sorts the results by stars. I'm not saying that I'm 💯 against it, but I'd be very cautious in implementing it and I'd be aware that the implementation burns all data bridges. You put it in there, you have to leave it in there forever. No take-backs.

I can't stand Micro-transactions. One and done for me, thank you very much. You did bring up an interesting twist, though... If somehow an author of a book is verified (my goodness, that hurts me brain thinking about), them getting a cut of review sats makes sense. So now I'm conflicted. 😅 Thank you.

Well, I mean... would you mind people giving you bad ratings, if they had to pay you for the privilege of doing it? Authors could even determine their own price, right? Half a Bitcoin for a 1⭐ and you can put whatever crap in the comment and we're good. 😅 Two comments and I retire. https://c.tenor.com/_rafdjAM5zIAAAAC/tenor.gif

That's, again, a lot deeper than I was thinking. But, that could also be a bad thing. I don't think that it should be possible to set a minimum price per star rating. It would be better to have one price to rate at any star. If that's the system to go with.