Hi Milos,

Thanks for your comment and question. As there are two main targets to this proposal, I'll break up my answer:

1. In terms of the value of Media and Content creators, there's a lot of misinformation around what an NFT is. An NFT is just a verifiably unique token, which can represent anything in our world that is also unique.

For instance, an NFT could be used for digital identity, or ownership of a home, or medical records, or gaming objects. All of these are valuable to the average user and can lead to important use-cases. Even a DeFi Liquidity pool position on Uniswap is an NFT that represents your position.

Kusama and Polkadot and its parachains have some incredible technology in NFTs. I would argue that it's the most advanced of any chain. We've seen massive adoption of many chains occur directly due to NFTs, and it only makes sense that the most innovative NFT technology can attract the most use cases in the future.

But the problem is that few are aware of the innovative technology that projects like Phala, RMRK, KILT, etc are offering and what this could mean for onboarding new users.

Even without the technological innovation, the most common interpretation of NFTs is as art and games, which has resulted in volume transacted greater than traditional art, which is to say more than 50 billion in a single year, and has represented in many cases the majority of transactions on ETH.

Anyway, I hope that helps you understand the value of NFTs in general for driving adoption, because more NFT activity is directly equivalent to more users and more adoption of Polkadot and Kusama.

The point of the Guild in this regard is to raise up creators, influencers, and community leaders who can actively spread the word about NFT technology on Dotsama, not only between themselves, but to both blockchain native and non-natives. Essentially, we are raising up teachers for the broader population on why and how they could use blockchain more for tangible purposes beyond only finance.

2. In terms of the second part of the proposal, as creators are raised up, there needs to be a system of reputation. As I said earlier, NFTs can be digital identity (like a birth certificate, or graduation records, etc). By adding reputation to digital identity, people can have a track record to follow, to know that the source of information is more or less reliable. It's similar to how people trust amazon reviews. The more positive reviews, the more trust (in general).

To architect a system of digital identity and reputation through NFTs with the technology we already have built on Dotsama will be challenging, but important long term. The goal of this is to create a proof of concept of how reputation could be traced with NFTs.

Additionally, we are creating a system of Audits and Analytics, to track how impactful our work is so that individuals like yourself can see efficacy over time.

In Summary:

More Educators on Dotsama = More Adoption of Dotsama

Better Reputation of Creators = Better Trust in Information = More Adoption

Better Data = More Transparency = More Efficient Use of Capital

I hope that helps answer your questions. Let me know if there was an element of your question I didn't address.

Pnin

Dear Pnin, many thanks for your long reply,

However, it does not answer my question about the objetive value you pretend to give back to the network. Reading your other responses, I can see in them a glimpse of a promise however not much of a plan...

I am going to vote Aye on the assumption that this is a fun and adventurous project of Kusama (expect chaos!), and mostly motivated by the support and esteem that other members of the community have in you and in your delivery qualities.

Best of luck!!

regards..

Miloš

Hi. No worries on the questions. I'll do the best I can to answer clearly.

1. A large part (18k / 77k) goes to NFT Content Creation Incentives. Do I understand it correctly that you will pay NFT creators KSM tokens? Or is it media content about NFT like posted in the section Content Examples?

Yes, that's correct. Rewards are sent to creators through the prior Bounty 12 bot system that's already been developed for this purpose which makes it easily auditable.

2. Importantly, content that is done through AI, auto-translated, or is plagiarized will not be tolerated. This is far from trivial. Do you have an idea how this will be done?

You're right. It's quite a task. This is why skilled directors are very important.

There are a few ways. First, AI works mostly on generating content from available information. Since much of what we cover is new, there is little for AI to draw on. Superficial information, non-specific or non-applicable (and often incorrect information) is the result of AI at this stage of Dotsama content creation.

Additionally, there are GPT detectors that can add markers to predict likelihood of AI generated content publicly available.

Finally, for instance in written content, as a long-time editor of crypto content, I can become familiar with the writer's voice and style, and track that as the creator matures. Many "cheaters" have already been caught through my work and even small cues like a sudden change in word choice in a subsection, or an abrupt formatting change, can ring a bell for me to run various plagiarism checkers on segments.

3. Another large part (16k / 77k) goes to NFT Analytics Development (Samasystems NFTs). Do you have more information about this? A proof of concept, existing work or more concrete design on the software engineering?

I created a video for the Kusamarian on Sama Systems which you can watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OHf67209-U

The SAMASYSTEMS developer, Jobo, has agreed to expand the toolsets he'll be offering and is already working on in order to specifically target our uses. He's already finished proof of concepts to determine eigencentrality and network value amongst peers with integration of NFTs on his website here: https://anonsama.systems/index.html

There's a tutorial on how to use the existing tooling here: https://twitter.com/SamaSystems/status/1611481740723507201?s=20&t=dFuEjk968l4VVCgtw7U1Xw

4. Finally, for the existing work from Content Examples, do you have summary engagement statistics?

This is exactly a large part of why I would like to build with SamaSystems, in order to acquire easy analytics for questions like this, and to build reputation that can track a content creator's progress and influence over time--all without being able to bot it and fake engagement...it's a big task.

We've had to battle fake engagement where individuals were paying for fake engagement as we'd established engagement milestones.

I hope this answers your questions in the way you meant them. Let me know if I failed to address any concerns.

Pnin

Hi Pnin. Many thanks for your time to respond to my questions. I appreciate also the clarity!

I still have a few followup questions below (same numbering as for your reply).

(1) Since there is an easily auditable system in place for Bounty 12, can you give the results related to the current proposal?

(3) Looking at the visually pleasing demo, I see a graph of Dotsama Twitter accounts and rather standard centrality measures. How is this going to be expanded from a technical and user perspective? Will it be open source (as virtually all building projects that get treasury support)?

I do not doubt the usefulness of Social Network Analysis for Dotsama, Parachains, NFTs, ... (and personally, I quite like such data-oriented projects) but the proposal is quite sparse with its explanation. Wouldn't it be better if this is split off as a separate proposal? It has a quite clear aim and it looks more like a builders project than a media one.

(4) It is my understanding that this proposal is the continuation of work done under bounty 12 of WagMedia. Hence, you should already have some raw data about the twitter feeds and youtube videos. That is easy to scrape nowadays.

I apologize for being blunt but I am rather skeptical that the proposed SNA of SamaSystems will allow you to track fake engagements, given the difficulty of this issue and the lack of information. Is the hope that the eigencentrality will capture this?

It looks like I'm having trouble with the formatting but in reply to your follow up questions:

(1) Since there is an easily auditable system in place for Bounty 12, can you give the results related to the current proposal?

Yes, you can see the current bounty results in the report that I linked in the proposal, which I directly acquisitioned, myself, for the sake of integrity.

Raw data is here: https://report.wagmedia.xyz/ and the report that makes it easily digestible is here: https://vampsy.substack.com/p/preliminary-analysis-of-wagmedias?sd=pf

You'll see that I'm one of the most frugal directors, historically, and that I also continue to have high participation in my channels. Part of this proposal is to continue audits through Vampsy's efforts with his PHD background as an economist to pull and present the data in an easily digestible format.

(3) Looking at the visually pleasing demo, I see a graph of Dotsama Twitter accounts and rather standard centrality measures. How is this going to be expanded from a technical and user perspective? Will it be open source (as virtually all building projects that get treasury support)?

I do not doubt the usefulness of Social Network Analysis for Dotsama, Parachains, NFTs, ... (and personally, I quite like such data-oriented projects) but the proposal is quite sparse with its explanation. Wouldn't it be better if this is split off as a separate proposal? It has a quite clear aim and it looks more like a builders project than a media one.

The first graph is based on NFT holders of SamaSystems, and the second is of the larger Dotsama community. With this combination of on-chain identity linking social media platforms (twitter) that is already being accumulated, it can already be heavily utilized.

For instance, you can see how integrated an individual is to the Dotsama ecosystem, and thus, determine how valuable their engagement is with a post from a Content Creator.

Possible other use examples would be seeing one Creator with a large following in the Polygon community, and guiding that creator towards creating crossover content to attract them into Dotsama.

In terms of expanding tech, for instance, by having points in time that you can "snapshot" in order to acknowledge a creator's current sphere of influence and engagement, you can track their growth over time and provide that data to bounty participants (ie, a parachain like Astar who wants specific content creation around a particular subject), and they could select that content creator based on their sphere of influence and historic reach. Then, building these markers into a visual way onto the NFT would be the design challenge.

In the prior example, the user was the parachain trying to hire a Content Creator, however, for users in general who are seeking reliable information to determine their involvement, we can expand this into exposing what NFTs the user is holding and use that to show possible over-bias in content created.

The trick will be designing these, and more, into a technically feasible way that is achievable and clear for users. This in part answers your next question because we'll need "test dummies" to play out these designs to see if they can be gamed and manipulated, or, if they will even carry reputation as hoped. This is why it's built into the current proposal.

Simply said, it really just makes sense to have an NFT division that is incentivized to create content to have an NFT reputational score that anyone can see. Splitting up the two would only fragment the efforts and slow progress down IMHO.

There's a heavy element of collaboration between the many parties, so the undertaking is pretty ambitious and I'll be the first to admit that the goals will need some flexibility. While I'm heavily researching NFTs all day every day, I'm not a developer so I will always need to default to the more technical minds in what is possible versus the vision I've presented.

(4) It is my understanding that this proposal is the continuation of work done under bounty 12 of WagMedia. Hence, you should already have some raw data about the twitter feeds and youtube videos. That is easy to scrape nowadays.

I apologize for being blunt but I am rather skeptical that the proposed SNA of SamaSystems will allow you to track fake engagements, given the difficulty of this issue and the lack of information. Is the hope that the eigencentrality will capture this?

The data can be manually scrapped at this stage, yes. Is this what you'd like me to do? Otherwise, no, there is no non-manual method at this stage that's been developed as easy tooling to scrap the data, as easy as it might be for a technically minded individual (which reinforces the need of the proposal herein).

At this point I'd like to re-emphasize the point that the goal of this is to yes, organically expand the reach of Dotsama, but we are not a marketing division.

Our goal is to incentivize the increasing quality and skill of content creators. Think of it as an educational program, similar to developers when they attend various workshops. You aren't asking developers to necessarily show proof of viral popularity in order to participate in schooling.

We would love them to become highly influencial individuals in the long term, but in the early stages of creation, the goal is to give them the skills to be able to attract viewers and also greater work for their abilities.

To track fake engagement, there is no silver bullet. You're 100% right. Every system has a loophole, and we've seen everyone from twitter, facebook, instagram, etc all struggle to quench this problem and even with their billions, they fail to do so on a monumental scale.

In our case, we at least have on-chain identity that can be tied to twitter, email, etc right in Polkadot.js. While that isn't perfect, the ability to track knowledgeable accounts ie, if Alice und Bob engages with an individual post vs an account that has no history of engaging with dotsama ever before or any cryto community at large, that can help mitigate the manipulation of data.

Additionally, NFTs that are rewarded specifically to individuals can't be mass produced, and that reputational system will absolutely improve the information we can acquire over the course of time, especially as it represents a "ranking up" whereby if you choose to try to game the system and are caught in your career, you may essentially destroy any prior effort and spinning up a new account is essentially the same as having your reputation destroyed as you'll have to start from the ground up again.

Hope this helps answer your questions and even if you choose to vote against this proposal, I appreciate your inquisition and sincerity and definitely respect whatever opinion you emerge with.

Pnin

Thanks for your kind words, Adam, as always. As for the media being the best--to be clear, this is for community generated content, and not Kusamarian content (only saying this because people often confuse the two). That said, I sincerely hope we can have a decentralized army of high quality reporters and creators in the ecosystem that is unmatched in crypto.

Thanks for your recap of concerns:

In terms of per spend per creator (not sure what you mean per NFT), did you look at the link I gave?

"I believe the burden is on you," being said to the single director who obtained all the data for everyone else felt a bit misleading. As it's been linked in my last replies and in the original proposal itself, I have to assume there's an additional interpretation of data that you'd like beyond the dozen or so detailed breakdowns available. Seeking a specific interpretation of data, however, is different than "no spending history".

https://vampsy.substack.com/p/preliminary-analysis-of-wagmedias?sd=pf

You can find how much I've rewarded on average, how many rewards, and how much each creator has received within Bounty 12 clearly listed.

Please do take a look. The "1343 tabs" are there to back up the data presented in the charts and summaries above, and not for you to go through unless you really want to.

The Samasystems current build of tech is already free to use and open source. Gephi Studio is a graph analytics desktop app and ouestware is a visualization tool built on top of react & sigma.js all of which are open source. The twitter API is also open source to the extent it’s utility is open and documented. In terms of what we are developing further, that will also be open sourced.

In terms of concrete plans, there will be several stages. The first stage would referencing the graph in the proposal, hiring Samasystems for the services within. Costs would be around 400/mo would be for cloud tech infrastructure, though that cost could be reduced in time as we discover more about what is absolutely necessary as services can be turned on and off.

Phase 2 would turn tweets into nodes themselves, with links to accounts through interactions. Two phases of analytics would construct a network graphed based on community follows or interactions, which then would score the nodes.

A separate graph using tweets as full nodes would gauge the value of the tweet to its connectivity in terms of total reach and connection to “high value” accounts based on scores from the first graph.

At this stage, it would be Dotsama accounts only, but could expand beyond.

Further stages are indeed still under consideration but taking things in steps while remaining flexible is something I've come to value in life and Twitter analytics are interchangeable with any DotSama protocol utilizing Twitter Identities from RMRK, Moonbeam EVM, Astar EVM, etc. Solidity tooling for tracking NFT smart contracts would need to be built, but some of this might cross over into need for other grants by the SamaSystems team and doesn't necessarily cover the direct proposal herein.

Most of the other development on the NFT side is related to the art style, the composable NFTs, and participant psychology, not to mention the soulbound nature of certain elements, and the game theory behind everything which yes, does come with some faith that I know what I'm doing.

Hope this helps. Pnin

PA is not the best platform to have a detailed back-and-forth. So I apologise for the wall of text below: first your answer in italic, below mine.

In terms of per spend per creator (not sure what you mean per NFT), did you look at the link I gave?

Yes, the report.wagmedia.xyz seems extremey detailed but I do not know what relates to this proposal. How do I filter? With Treasury = Bounty 12, I still have 1074 pages of content. My issue is that the data is there, it is very transparant, but it is not presented to the reader of the proposal in an accessible way.

"I believe the burden is on you," being said to the single director who obtained all the data for everyone else felt a bit misleading.

Well, I have no knowledge of this reading the proposal. If you were pushing for spending transparency (with WagMedia) and did the legwork for it, then that is fantastic! Why not mention that in the proposal! That said, my point above remains.

As it's been linked in my last replies and in the original proposal itself, I have to assume there's an additional interpretation of data that you'd like beyond the dozen or so detailed breakdowns available. Seeking a specific interpretation of data, however, is different than "no spending history". You can find how much I've rewarded on average, how many rewards, and how much each creator has received within Bounty 12 clearly listed. Please do take a look. The "1343 tabs" are there to back up the data presented in the charts and summaries above, and not for you to go through unless you really want to.

Sorry for ignoring your earlier report but there is no need for "additional interpretation" from my part. While the vamspy page gives a good overview of WagMedia and its spending, I would like it to be specialized to this proposal. This can be as easy as highlighting the parts that relate to it: Table 3 lists 15% to NFT and Metaverse, and Table 5 says that you did 350 payouts with 1.1 KSM on average. Reading it now, these are good numbers. Thanks for that!

PS: The vamspy page is behind a subscription wall. It is free content but that is not very "Dotsama".

The Samasystems current build of tech is already free to use and open source. The tech is Gephi Studio is a graph analytics desktop app and ouestware is a visualization tool built on top of react & sigma.js all of which are open source. The twitter API is also open source to the extent it’s utility is open and documented. In terms of what we are developing further, that will also be open sourced.

Thanks for the confirmation that the end product will be open sourced. Would be nice to mention in the proposal ;-)

In terms of concrete plans, there will be several stages. The first stage would referencing the graph in the proposal, hiring Samasystems for the services within. Costs would be around 400/mo would be for cloud tech infrastructure, though that cost could be reduced in time as we discover more about what is absolutely necessary as services can be turned on and off. Phase 2 would turn tweets into nodes themselves, with links to accounts through interactions. Two phases of analytics would construct a network graphed based on community follows or interactions, which then would score the nodes. A separate graph using tweets as full nodes would gauge the value of the tweet to its connectivity in terms of total reach and connection to “high value” accounts based on scores from the first graph. At this stage, it would be Dotsama accounts only, but could expand beyond.

All great stuff. I wish it was in the proposal from the start.

Further stages are indeed still under consideration but taking things in steps while remaining flexible is something I've come to value in life and Twitter analytics are interchangeable with any DotSama protocol utilizing Twitter Identities from RMRK, Moonbeam EVM, Astar EVM, etc. Solidity tooling for tracking NFT smart contracts would need to be built, but some of this might cross over into need for other grants by the SamaSystems team and doesn't necessarily cover the direct proposal herein. Most of the other development on the NFT side is related to the art style, the composable NFTs, and participant psychology, not to mention the soulbound nature of certain elements, and the game theory behind everything which yes, does come with some faith that I know what I'm doing.

To some extent, much of what we fund is based on trust. But the more this can be showcased, the better. In your case and looking back, I find it a pity that your proposal did not explain it better. I understand now why you are valued member of Dotsama WagMedia & NFT space. This is not something I follow closely, but as a token holder and delegator of votes, I like to do some due diligence. I can only do this by reading the proposal.

All the best with the NFT Guild!

Thanks for your re-evaluation. I agree that PA's formatting is quite difficult, at times. It's great to do your due diligence, and as I mentioned at the beginning, whatever the outcome of your final decision, I respected the sincerity of your questions.

In regards to lack of detail, distilling information down to as simple and digestible a format is something I've always prized in my writing as there's a balance between attention and intimidation--so perhaps it worked against me in your case; I'm sorry it added more friction rather than less.

Thank you for your support, and your questions.

Pnin

Hey!

Apologies for jumping in, but it seems there is some issue that is being faced due to interface for editing in Polkassembly as you have mentioned

PA is not the best platform to have a detailed back-and-forth. So I apologise for the wall of text below: first your answer in italic, below mine.

Please let us know how we could make it better. Feel free to write to me at parambir@polkassembly.io or post a comment on our GitHub Issues here - https://github.com/Premiurly/polkassembly/issues. We can also hop on a call to discuss this.

We will resolve it at the earliest and improve based on your feedback. Cheers!

What would happen if the price was to crash and he'd get 15-20% less value, would the Kusama treasury give him the difference in a separate referendum ? I think that's the risk with a volatile asset. You can try and request a guesstimation and if you're lucky, your requested amount will be worth more and can put that extra money to good use !

I would prefer to hold it as an extended runway. Most frequently, the market has tumbled after any proposal I've been part of, and while right now we may be up, I think the opposite is not only as likely, but more likely.

Keep in mind the teams I've been part of have always returned excess funds as a sign of good will, and I'm open to that possibility. That said, these teams have never asked for additional funding where the market tumbles.

I want to ask you to consider some psychological results of building a standard of expectations where the proposer takes 100% of the risk:

If we want proposers to return funds if in excess, but not compensate them in the situation that the market tumbles, then we are essentially asking them to sell immediately because all risk is taken on the proposer's side. With proposals often being of significant value, are we really asking everyone to sell all their tokens immediately? Isn't the impact of that to the price possibly more damaging?

If we compensate them on the downside, and also expect them to return funds in a bullish time, what time frames are we talking about where assets can be renewed or re-seized?

If we give funds at the time of request, and leave it as responsibility on the proposer to mitigate risk and balance their budgets themselves--especially with the uncertainty of the markets-- as long as it's used to achieve the original mission, isn't that the best option to incentivize proposers to not only manage their funds wisely but to possibly hold their funds rather than sell their treasury immediately?

In general, my experience is that the value of holding (as I've majority chosen to do out of ethics and loyalty to the mission) ends up with me receiving about 50% as much as the proposal originally asked for, long term.

So, I'm open to whatever the community expects, but I do caution on the standardization of increasing downside risk for participants in an already volatile asset.

Finally, I understand the logic that this is based on the value at the time of receipt rather than beyond that. I still believe this encourages immediate selling to protect from downside, but within that rational, I am 100% open to returning the excess funds despite the negative long term precedence I think it will lead to.

I invite you both to check out the forum discussion on the topic.

I do think that as a community we should move towards some sort of "norm" around the volatility issue. That being said, we are not talking about negligible amounts here and personally see a payback as an act of good faith and transparency that could just be the deciding factor in my vote.

For what its worth: My general stance on the issue is that proposals should include a price buffer in their proposals to cover the downside and return any excess funds (including their buffer) to the treasury on payout.

The buffer model makes a lot of sense, and I would generally agree with it. Thanks for the link. I'll see if I can contribute to the conversation sometime tomorrow.