How to crowdsource credibility for a taboo idea
As global tensions of all kinds increase, providing the best possible information to the largest number of people is one of the most important things we can do.
It may make the difference between a century of freedom and a century of authoritarianism.
Do I exaggerate?
In the COVID era, there’s been one path for an unpopular idea to gain credibility:
Say it over and over for 2 years until media corporations capitulate
Now, there’s another:
Credibility petitions
We’ve soft-launched the new version of Ideamarket, which is about crowdsourcing credibility without putting money at risk.
It looks like a social network, but it’s actually far more ambitious.
Each post acts like a petition — a nugget of information you can circulate for public intellectuals to affirm or refute directly, on-chain, without any trusted third parties.
This is an alternative path for information to become credible.
If this had existed a few years ago, we would have…
known COVID will be global by January 2020, instead of March
potentially saved millions of lives
properly investigated Jeffrey Epstein’s death by now
etc.
Now we have new high-stakes information, and the chance to try again:
Rising inflation
Impending food shortage crisis
UFOs are 100% real
etc.
Why keep waiting on corporate media to fail us again?
It’s time to act.
The biggest challenge might be showing that what we’re trying to do is even possible.
People don’t widely believe credibility can be crowdsourced, because it’s never been done before.
Sure, renegade intellectuals go on podcasts and say things, but that’s not the same thing as getting a huge pile of social capital all in one place — on-chain! — and saying, “We stand by this, we stand by you, and if you get weird looks at the dinner table, just point at this list of names.”
We can now create a decentralized, highly accountable, user-elected “supreme court” as an alternative to corporate media.
Try it out: https://ideamarket.io
This newsletter introduces just a single feature of the new Ideamarket.
It’s that important.
But there’s more, and we’ll explore the rest piece by piece.
We’re still iterating on the UX/UI, so please share your feedback by replying to this email or sending a message in our Discord or on Twitter.
Our goal is to achieve product-market fit by August, when the Arbitrum Odyssey event will be sending hundreds (if not thousands) of new users to Ideamarket to rate posts.
Fantastic!