Appreciate these comments and feedback! Yes, the cold start problem is legit for sure. I hope we can raise a lot of support from whales in the eco system to vote for Signal Scouts / Signal Miners who are really adding great value signal to the web2 content. It is an opportunity to direct resources to create great content consumers, rather than only focusing on bloggers as we have done traditionally.
The idea here is that the signal inbox is one of the main products. each inbox has a feed of creators that the user follows and we can anonomise it and keep track of how often that inbox feed is visited by the user.
this means we can clearly see demand for creators, and then we can inform the Signal Scouts / Signal Miners that that is where they can go to add signal and thereby optimise their rewards, system credits and reputation. So the system may be able to self bootstrap this way.
But i do agree, at the moment we are starting with youtube, twitter, tick tok and instagram who all have their own nuances for bringing in data. but we ahve done some work to enable import of wiki articles and scientific journals and publications to the eco system. i think this is where a great focus should be. however, im more inclined to let the community direct us primarily based off of signal inbox usage, follows and visits.
The whale support model makes sense for bootstrapping -- directing existing curation power toward Signal Scouts creates real incentive without requiring external capital. The tricky design question is how you prevent the incentive from attracting low-quality annotation once the rewards become visible. That's what killed the Steemit blogging reward model; the signal degrades as soon as the payout is large enough to attract gaming.
A few mechanisms worth thinking through: time-weighted curation (annotations that hold up over days/weeks get more weight than ones that spike immediately), and some form of staking that gets slashed if annotations are consistently ignored or downvoted. Neither is easy to implement, but without something like that, the Scout rewards will attract the same dynamics that plagued early Steem.
The distribution constraint is still real regardless. Even with good incentive design, you need a critical mass of readers on the same URL who have Signal installed. What's the current activation strategy for that layer -- is the bet on organic Hive community adoption first, or is there an external reader acquisition angle?
Personally i think this will be mostly external to Hive. Hive is the main "preservation and rewards model" for this and wil be a great bootsrap, but we are updating to web2 login in phase 2 (post beta) and hope to attract many people with normal web2 logins to participate. we will discreatly show them that hive accounts earn more rep and more rewards, and so hope to convert many that way.
this will allow us to take on marketing angles like "help identify fake content", "be part of identifying real content in the age of internet uncertainty" and "give your take on content" and "build your reputation as a Signal miner" as an approach to normal web2 and other web3 community users. The data ingress system is also a proof of human, as its really really hard for bots to replicate that. so we will be more easily able to identify humans, and their expertise and increase their standings in the trending feeds and more heavily weight their signal, particularly if they are renowned in the field. by attracting and having web2 creators verify their youtube and hive accounts, we can easily ingress people with strong reputations in their relative fields based on their respected web2 histories as well as just using their more recent web3 history.
this then changes the narrative to "use your expertise to mine signal and increase your reputation outside of the web2 platforms"
The web2 login funnel makes sense strategically -- lower the entry barrier first, then surface the Hive reputation/rewards advantage as an upgrade path. The "help identify fake content" framing is well-timed given where AI content saturation is heading. That's a problem most web2 users already feel without being able to name it.
The persistence question I'd push on: what stops a coordinated actor -- media company, political campaign, or well-funded community -- from flooding Scout slots with aligned annotations once the system is live at web2 scale? Hive accounts have skin in the game through staked HP. Web2 logins don't carry the same cost structure.
That's not a reason to avoid web2 login -- it's actually the right growth path. But the slashing/reputation mechanism probably needs to be tuned differently for the two user types. A Hive account losing curation reputation is a meaningful cost; a web2 throwaway losing the same costs nothing.
Curious how the staking design handles that asymmetry.
FYI, this is one of the account associated with the First Context and Signal Mining projects @bitmoving, so i also echo this sentiment