Topic: Digg/Reddit like News site. Voting is based on Bitcoins! (Read 8841 times)

There is a porn category

What about paying to see links or images which would also cover the bandwidth costs of uploading them ?

Protip - add an adult section

Nudge.

Site is still up and running, but no so much traffic anymore. Feel free to use it if you like.

Awesome, thank you.

Unremorsefully, bumping my favorite Bitcoin related site.

~Bruno~

It was a suggestion for a new section name change. First you had "Hated" but I suggested "Abhor" or "Loathe" which I was leaning toward "Loathe" but you changed it to "Disliked" (past tense) of which I'm now suggesting "FUD" (all caps).

This next idea is going to bite me in the ass (pocket book), but I'll offer it up anyway since I like you and your site.

You have been very receptive on changing your site after suggestions have been made. That's great! But what if you did what I'm about to suggest to you, for your site design would make an ideal candidate for implementing my next idea.

Anybody can change a design element on your site at the cost of 1 BTC (set a USD equivalent max). If I want "FUD" instead of "Disliked", I have to pay you 1 BTC to get it implemented. If another person wants to see Coin Smack as a logo in the upper right hand corner of your site, not only will they have to design the logo, but pay you 1 BTC to put it in place. If another person wants Bitcoin orange instead of blue as the background on your site, again it'll cost them 1 BTC to see the change. Of course, all the these changes must improve upon the site's overall looks and functionality, and you'll still have final say on the matter. If an element is implement, but a person doesn't like it, he can have it reverted back at a 1 BTC fee, and the first person can change it back, but now at 2 BTC, and costing an additional 1 BTC for all further changes from this point forward.

If you like this idea, all I request is having "FUD" replace "Disliked" at no cost to me, but any further ideas I have, it'll cost me 1 BTC to see them implemented.

~Bruno~

I don't understand. I know what FUD is though. How does that fit in to this project?

How about Hated > Dislike > FUD : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt


That seems to apply here.

Thoughts?

~Bruno~

added, thanks!

Why not make a hand cursor at http://coinsmack.com/submit?

Hated->Disliked

and by the power of css


I know that plenty of people don't dig the style for the site (I have no eye for design). If you have a keen eye for style, feel free to submit changes to the css on this forum. If I like the looks I will incorporate them.

All lists have a limit of 100. I might up the Top section to 500. The hot and the newest section are supposed to be a slug fest by design.

Not into drugs, but those two 500mg V's sure do knock the shit out of you. I can easily see how some folks get into drugs. The only three bad habits I currently have is smoking, coffee, and the other one I don't do in public.

That makes a big difference and is a great feature--having only 100 on the newest list, where all others drop off. What's the max for the active and Hated list? BTW, have you considered renaming the Hated section? I've offered up a couple suggestions.


Should you consider bolding the three hyperlinks above (underlined)?

~Bruno~

It doesn't really sound as smooth. I consider bitcoins money, so using the word money seems to work fine.


The more people post stuff, the more it will matter that they pay. The "newest" list is the only place unfunded stuff shows, and it will only show the newest 100 posts. If people spam the heck out of it, they will all just fall off the stream.

I consider newest to be just a holding ground for things that need funding.

Enjoy the drugs, and thank you for giving suggestions. I enjoy improving this site.

BTW, there is now a twitter feed:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/top-posts-on-coinsmack-twitter-61930

Stupid me! Got it! I just want to let you know again that I feel you have a great product here. Anytime I think of something that I feel will help you, I will freely share with you.

I think that later down the road as more people post stuff, you may have to go with that micro-payment-to-post aspect. Then again, maybe not. Just thought of something. If I post something and truly want it to get to the top of the ladder, so to speak, all I have to do is fund it. Forgive me if this has already been discussed but I'm high as a kite on Vicadins at the moment. (knee hurts)

pretty cool stuff  One thing you should change is " Put your money where your mind is"  shouldn't it be " Put your bitcoins where your mind is" ? just my 2 cents.

Just post something and down vote it. Anything with negative BTC will appear there.

I'm still having trouble posting in the "Hated" (hopefully, soon to be renamed) section.

~Bruno~

Can you add tags and languages support? ( I don't mean multilanguage pages, evn if this can be another feature )
So people will be able to search their own language news.

cunicula thinks that the hate section should be removed since, he claims, you're not sure of the concept. After seeing the first link, I went to the fence, but offered renaming it "Loathe". Also, how do can I list my links on the hate section?

I am afraid I don't understand what is being suggested.

Anyone want to explain it in sudocode.

Please advice on how to link in the Hated section (soon to be renamed, I hope). I just tried, but the process eludes me.

Bruno~

Now I'm in a pickle! Boy, that link sucks (in reference to the first link in the new 'Hated' section)! In a way, I agree with cunicula, but in another way I don't. Even if his statement "You don't seem to grasp the idea at all" is accurate, at least Rob is trying his damndest to make this a go. I would say he's still open for suggestion on this aspect, as well as any others related to the site. That said, I've never been too keen on the word 'hate'. Perhaps titling it 'abhor' or 'loathe' (no past tense) may be better suited for this section. I lean toward 'loathe'.

So, instead of simply deleting this section, let's explore, together, on how we can make this work. If it turns out to be a bomb, Rob's smart enough to rid that section, thus freeing up his time developing the sound attributes of this venerable website.

~Bruno~

You should probably delete this. You don't seem to grasp the idea at all, so it doesn't make sense for you to pursue it.

There is now a section in the site called "hated" which is all things that have negative BTC values.

We will see. After seeing a bunch of requests for this, I am going with the flow. There are now down-votes on the site. Down-votes count twice as much as up-votes.

I'll add the hated section tomorrow.

If this ain't a million dollar idea post, I will lick Matthews balls in front of the Cheomseongdae Observatory during peak visiting hour.


I hate eating balls!

Very clever, I like it. It will require a little block parsing, but it would make for a great weighting system.

Very good point.  +1, I agree with this formula change.  Make the time based on when payments were made, not when the post was made.

The current HOT formula is [total BTC / sqrt(time since post)] correct? This would mean something really old would be better off being reposted if there was a resurgence of interest.

It could be (payment/sqrt(time since this payment) + (payment/sqrt(time since this payment) + (payment/sqrt(time since this payment) + ...

So that if something starts getting paid a lot again it doesn't have the baggage of being old (which would just make someone make a duplicate posting anyway). In fact under the current setup (if I understand correctly) it would pay for someone to go around making copies of all content that was still getting paid but was somewhat old because their copy could get above the original somewhat cheaply and start earning the influx of new money on it.

Right, people are worried that new stuff will get burrieds in a deluge of "asdadjh" and "Eat my butt" and "xxxxxxxYYYYYY" spam postings. If you want to see the new, even the low ones without seeing the totally useless 0 ones a checkbox would be good. This would also give people (posters and others) incentive to make that first tiny payment to distinguish a post they like from the trash.

Posting is free, but will only show up under "newest" listing. For something to be "hot" on the front page, it needs to receive btc.

When will payments go out?

Is it easy to show the upvote address before the poster gives the payout address?

Or simpler, a checkbox for "send my payments back as upvotes". They you should not bother doing the payments in the chain and just give 5x credit and take the whole thing as fee.

You are completely missing the point.

When staring at the facebook "like" icon, how often have you wished for a "dislike" icon that might link to a "hatebook" instead?
If you are me, this occurs several times a day. I have no facebook page, but I am ready to sign up for hatebook right now.

Your site's potential profitability is directly proportional to the amount of attention paid to it. Hateful stuff attracts attention.

I propose that you monetize social network connections emerging from common hate. This is an under-exploited niche in my view.

I think charging even .001 for posting is bad. Finding great stuff and showing it to us is now a great way for someone to get their first coins. If spam gets to be a problem make a checkbox for "hide 0BTC items"

That makes sense.

For those that are interested, I added RSS feeds to all lists on the site.

So you can have your rss reader track the newest, hotest, or top items in any category.

Yes, that's a good point too.

This is not a good idea. Because it is impossible to prove who owns how many bitcoins, any person can split the 0.009 to 9 0.001 and send those smaller denominations. Unless a method to resolve this is developed, it probably won't work very well.

There really isn't a whole lot of maliciousness that can be done on the site. The db works on an insert only basis, so nothing is every overwritten, and there is no sensitive data on the machine (no passwords, private keys, etc).

Mostly users can only do some front end funkyness, and I think this is the only place I didn't sanitize what was entered (I built the select element directly from stuff from the db like a fool).

Clever.  At least it wasn't a more malicious attack.

Something awful user did a hack on the site where they injected a close tag into the category selector, preventing other users from posting for a while.

It isn't a meaningful site until something awful hacks it.

Great idea

That is a pretty good idea. I might not change the display (it is good to know the exact amount put in), but I may adjust the sorting algorithm for hot to do something like this (anti-exponent). Time is a huge factor right now as well. It is easy to spend a little to get on top of something from a day or two ago.

I am surprised that people are spending the equivalent of $1 to put dinosaur pictures up on the home page, but I like it. I was afraid it would just be ads.

One thought I've had as I've been watching this site...

It feels as though "votes" of 0.001 are rather ineffective/useless when several people seem to be voting with 0.1 (or more) instead.  I mean, if a single person can give an item 100 votes, then why even vote on anything with my own coins?  It'll be ineffective unless I spent like "the big boys" do.

What's the solution?  I haven't a clue.  You can't really raise the limit, or that just alienates more people from voting in the first place.  You could just say that each individual transaction counts as one vote, regardless of how much the transaction was for, but that kind of takes some of the fun out of it, plus people would use sendmany to send a bunch of individual transactions to pop up the vote count anyway.  Plus, it would lower the site/author revenue.

Maybe have the payments upvote in an anti-exponential manner?  So a vote with 0.001 BTC counts as 0.001, but a vote with 0.009 BTC counts only as 0.003.  Or a vote with 0.250 BTC counts only as 0.050.  This would discourage higher "spending" to an extent, but not make it impossible for people who really want to push a vote up to do so.

Just some thoughts.  I don't know that there's a real good solution to the above "problem", or even that it is a problem that needs a solution, but that's just my observations.

Why am I just hearing about this? This has potential

Holy cow! It is already #11 on hacker news!

1) Maybe wait til there is a problem with spam posts?  I agree that sending a small amount of Bitcoin would be a prime way to keep bots out though.
2) Agreed, can't hurt to have QR codes.
a) Eh?  You can vote something up for 0.001 BTC.  Less than a penny.  Is that really a lot?
b) Agreed.  All the serif fonts on the site need to be changed to sans-serif.  Serif looks terrible on webpages.
c) Agreed.

I love the #1 idea. Not too keen on the lottery idea, though. Sorry, dree12. +1 for b & c.

Keep the suggestion flowing on this service. I feel it has great potential for Bitcoin.

~Bruno~

I think there are two major problems and a couple minor ones.

1) There is no cost to creating a new post. This allows a submitter to add spam posts with no value. Minimum donation of 0.001 should be required.

2) The QR code is missing where one would expect it in the send-to address.

a) Voting things up costs a lot. If it is possible, maybe the owner's share can be reduced to 50% and the 30% be added to a lottery until it grows big enough to pay out to a random voter (proportionally, of course)

b) The X is the close button looks terrible, primarily because it is a serif font. ✕ or ✖, and even ✘ would be better replacements. If for some reason that is not possible, the font should be changed to sans-serif.

c) The website is missing a !DOCTYPE. This is the only thing preventing it from working in Internet Explorer, but is otherwise fairly minor.

Also, please vote up on hacker news:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3507448

Vote up at on reddit:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/ouw2q/redditdigg_like_clone_vote_up_posts_with_0001/

It does that already:
http://coinsmack.com/posts/Gaming/T-Rex-vs-Kong (has a nested comment)

Keep in mind it is like reddit/digg/hacker news, but it isn't using any of the same code and has some of its own quirks.

isn't Reddit open-source or something ?

The comments have to be branched to make it look like reddit.

I plan on giving them a cut of the action as well. Also, the widget would be to vote up their stuff, and make it more popular on coinsmack. This would benefit them (probably more than being a scammer).

I think it would be more of a reputation risk for them rather than a security risk for myself (I wouldn't lose much because of them BSing on their website).

With up only you'll get things that a small subset really like no matter what other people think. This is good for exposing people to new stuff instead of just stuff that a good number already know and like and no one really objects to. It seems bad to have things that a lot of people love and a lot of people hate get lost in the middle.

A neat way to not have to decide would be to Have "most up", "most down", "net" categories. I actually think I'd look at "most down" quite a lot.

This would be great, but it seems like a huge security risk. Is there some way to make sure the site hosting the widget doesn't switch out addresses? It wouldn't seem so.

Take it one step further. Vote a premium to have the story forked to the feature page. May have to implement restrictions like a story must have X votes prior to being allowed to fork.


I think this article may be related to your post, cunicula: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/9034883/McDonalds-McDStories-Twitter-campaign-backfires.html

There was in the original design a down button. Down votes were counted twice what up votes were counted, and nothing went to the poster. The down vote would be another address for the post.

Some of the code is still there, and I may institute it if people start voting up hateful stuff.

I took it out out of optimism. I would rather assume that people are just going to post positive stuff and let them prove me right.

Otherwise I reserve the right to lay the algorithmic smack down.

I am not sure what I would do with the 80% for downvotes (I don't think it is right for me to take all of it). I might just have it credited to the current hotest poster (but it wouldn't effect their post's ranking or points).

So much stuff to grit your teeth over.

Perhaps something like a hate ponzi would be good. I propose something to be hated, and people wishing to support the hatred can contribute to the hate pot. It works just like a regular ponzi, except that there is an associated news item, article, picture, etc. which acts as a signaling device. If I put up an effective signal which marshals mega-hate then my ponzi will do well and payoff. If my signal fails to mobilize hate then I will lose the money.

+1

A 2nd address should be added to vote down the topic.

Haha, I like that idea!

Hm. How about a site that allows you to pay to drive the item DOWN instead of up? Then you can monetize in both directions!

I can't stand all this liking and tweeting bullshit. Everyone knows that the internets feed on hate. Research shows that common hates produce stronger social bonds than common likes. But where is hate monetized on the internets. Like if I suggest something and gamble that everyone will think it is worth hating on. If they hate on it in sufficient number I get paid. If not I lose my deposit. Then a great repository of hate can be built. Sort of like the library of Alexandria.

If trolling could be monetized that would be good too.

This site is awesome.  Nice work.

I'd also like to throw out the idea that you can use www.dailybitcoins.org to send coins to 1 article per day that you would like to vote up.

The number one post right now is godzilla vs t-rex. I guess it won't just be used for self promotion.

Thank you all for your support. I have some other features I am developing:

* Top category list (sorted by the sum of btc in each category)
* Filtering by link domain - this will make it so all stuff posted to say youtube.com can be seen in one sorted list.
* Widget to add the coinsmack.com thumbs up to external websites
* Automated daily payouts (currently it is pretty manual and not daily).
* RSS feeds
* Creating a simple icon for the site (I am thinking someone smacking a coin down on a table). Designers are welcome to offer whatever they like.
* Hiding (but with the ability to reveal) hot posts after 30 items. I don't think I will do paging, and all lists will get cut off after maybe 100 items.
* Adding no-follow to any posts that have zero BTC to keep spammers from getting any google love.
* Hidden service on tor


I think that is it. You won't see coinsmack forums, chat rooms, or other bloat. I haven't decided if user accounts will ever be added. I was thinking that users with a history of getting more btc for their posts would automatically get more weight, and this might keep users more involved for their reputation. Does anyone have any desire for this feature?

Its similar yes, and I have different plans for witcoin 2.0

Nice site robkohr and we might even be in contact later to integrate certain things into witcoin 2.0 lol.

One of the issues we had with the first generation of witcoin was the percentage of generated income which goes to posters and or voters. If its overbalanced it becomes a pyramid of sorts unfairly benefitting different members. I hope it has a lot more success than witcoin did.

I guess you could say it's like that, but that was before my time. If I was around back then, perhaps it would have done better. Now that it's gone, there's a new kid on the block. I think CoinSmack's name is highly marketable, not to take away from the name of Witcoin which isn't bad by any stretch of the imagination.

~Bruno~

Isn't this just like https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Witcoin?

I think it's very fair for all parties. I hope Rob does will with this.

~Bruno~

Headline 2014: Twitter Buys CoinSmack for $20M

Headline late 2012: Justin Bieber Fan First to Earn $10K on CoinSmack

Headline 2015: Atlas Still Banned from BitcoinTalk

CoinSmack: If it ain't trending here, it ain't trending!

Cool, I think that's reasonable for now.  Later on, if you have a bunch of traffic, you might be called on to reduce it even more, but I don't think many will have a problem with 80/20.

We have a winner!

You have created a monster, robkohr.

If this doesn't win "Best Bitcoin Site" for 2012, I will lick Matthews balls! (I'm hoping nobody quotes me!)

I'll explain my thinking after I comment on FreeMoney's post.


On the surface, you are exactly correct, FreeMoney. The system, as it stands now, can easily be gamed. Also, down the road, but not as easy. As the site matures, I believe that Rob (robkohr) will have steps put in place to make sure that doesn't occur. He can do this by not even changing the back end. What I mean is that once the site has categories in place, topics will be easily found, thereby allowing the top stories to gravitate naturally, opposed to monetarily.

The following is how I envision this site becoming successful.

It'll be a new way for people to earn Bitcoin. Moreover, it'll be a new way for people to learn about Bitcoin. I'll offer up an example to drive my reasoning home. CAUTION: Justin Bieber alert!

Not a day passes that JB is not a treading topic on Twitter. It's been that way going on two years now. Yes, some of his followers are kids without a dime in their pocket. But all of them are more or less tech savvy, and sometime in the future they will become consumers. These same "kids" have older brothers and sisters, not to mention parents. Therefore, it's not outside the realm of possibility that some of them, with dimes in their pockets, will join the Bitcoin bandwagon. But let's forget about whether they have money or not. The fact of the matter is that they have time on their hands. Time to tweet, and use the other social media sites. They would be the vehicle to bring awareness to http://coinsmack.com.

(forget what I said about they kids not having money for they're paying $1.99 for this APP and I'm sure thousands more like it: http://itunes.apple.com/app/id445478040)

or this!

All it takes is one Bieber fan to post a story/link on http://coinsmack.com, then tweet his tribe to price it up. Now, you may be asking how the heck are they going to get their coins to do that. Answer: They'll figure it out! This is not a cop-out answer. They'll start figuring it out on their own, coupled with asking their tribe members. Before you know it, the best solution will manifest itself, whereupon that's what'll be passed on the twitterverse. Then they'll start asking themselves what else they could use this Bitcoin thingy for.

At any rate, I hope the above makes some sense, for I'm a tad tired but am excited about this site and felt a need to share with you all how I see it panning out. I have other ideas for this as well, but will refrain from sharing them, for fear of it getting lost in translation because of my tireness.

~Bruno~


"I've earned $1,294.57 so far tweeting your ass and posting your videos on CoinSmack."

The more interesting your ad/product/service is though the more that other people will choose to help spread the word. So there is probably not going to be a lot of "Buy Hanes Underwear" ads.

Good call. Now 80/20. Site text will update tomorrow.

The transaction fee is a big issue when dealing micro transactions.  I think that is why this is the perfect use for an altcoin.

yet another million dollar page? I'd like to have one

The problem is that you will end up running an ads-only website. Companies will literally pay to put their brand on top and the interesting content will probably end up at the bottom.

Great, clean and easy to use site! I wanted to do something similar too

Btw, I'd add something like ".submit_type_button { cursor:pointer; }" to the stylesheet.

Agree that your take is too high.  It should be something like 80/20 author/you, or 90/10.  50/50 is greedy, IMO.

Also, ditch the serif font - it doesn't look good on the web!

Awesome, good catch.

It actually takes in any decimal value, and uses that for sorting. The 0.001 is just for display convenience. Also, with the normal fee for transactions something around 0.0005, it seemed to be the most reasonable amount.

Also 0.001BTC = $0.0062 so it about half a penny.

One smaller problem, the link "Vote up links, images, and articles with bitcoins." goes to bitcoins.org, should be bitcoin.org.

There are three groupings: Hot, New, and Top. Hot is the default.

Hot = BTC/SqareRoot(time);
New = Time
Top = BTC

So stuff will decay on the hot page, and cost more over time to keep up there, but since it uses the square root of time, this effect is minimized on larger time scales.

Great idea.  But I think due to the high price of Bitcoin you may need to add one more 0 so more like: 0.0001 and your take waaaaay to high.  I wouldn't use this service unless your take was less then 10%.  Also,  This would be a great use of an Altcoin.  Could be VoteCoin.  

Just my 2 Bitcents  

I am working off of blockexplorer.com's api, so when it appears there, it shows up on my site. It doesn't appear to have any way of adjust confirmations.

If it appear on that site, just press the thumbs up button, and it will force a refetch of the status.

Another thought, I like that you can sort by Hot (most coin) and New, but eventually Hot will essentially mean old because they've had so much more time to get paid up.

You could rename Hot to something else (highest, most, richest?) and make Hot mean [Coins/age] so new trending things will spend some time on top but drop as they age faster than they pay.

And... I just went to looks again. This is what you do isn't it? Brilliant (aka great minds think alike).

Are you taking 1 confirm right now? I have one, but it isn't updated.

Updated.

Good question, maybe that's why many people don't take 0.

bitcoincharts.com/bitcoin and blockchain.info have a list of unconfirmed tx, I don't know how you'd use that info easily though.

Sweet service! I see potential here.

I plan on it, just in the process of reading through the documentation of how to do it.

Seals with Clubs is the winner of the first post (not by myself). I sent a vote up to it.

If the amount doesn't immediately show up on the up vote button, but is on the blockchain, just click the thumbs up button to force it to update.


Thanks, do you know of any web services that I can get an update for the balance of an address with 0 confirms.

Excellent.

I'm noticing a lot of situations where counting 0 confirmations as good has virtually 0 risk, but people aren't doing it anyway. This is one of those places.

You should open it as hidden service too

UPDATE:
Added RSS feeds to all lists

UPDATE:
Vote this up on hacker news:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3507448

==TODO list==
* RSS feeds
* Widget to add the coinsmack.com thumbs up to external websites
* Filtering by link domain - this will make it so all stuff posted to say youtube.com can be seen in one sorted list.
* Adding no-follow to any posts that have zero BTC to keep spammers from getting any google love.
* Top category list (sorted by the sum of btc in each category)
* Hiding (but with the ability to reveal) hot posts after 30 items. I don't think I will do paging, and all lists will get cut off after maybe 100 items.
* Automated daily payouts (currently it is pretty manual and not daily).
* Creating a simple icon for the site (I am thinking someone smacking a coin down on a table). Designers are welcome to offer whatever they like.
* Hidden service on tor
---

I created a site where you can post links, videos, images, and blobs of text (html allowed).

It works much like most social news sites where visitors can vote up stories they like to the home page in various different categories. The difference is that the voting is in bitcoins in increments of 0.001 units. 50% of the bitcoins received go to the poster of the article.

Posting and voting up articles is an anonymous process, and no login is needed (also IP addresses & sessions are not recorded). For those that are into Tor, onion links are welcome and are marked with an onion icon. Hopefully this will help with the discovery of content on the onion network.




You can check out the site at http://coinsmack.com . It is still unpolished (aka beta), and I would be happy to hear any feedback as to how it could be improved.