Sustainable information economies are possible.
To determine the price of information, you must know what it contains; but once you know what it contains, you no longer need to buy it. You can’t sell information – only its transmission.
Since digitisation eliminated most physical bounds on distribution, knowledge workers have been searching for sustainable economic models. Current approaches are desperate workarounds:
These distortions either concentrate power with owners of intellectual property or the carrier medium to extract ongoing rents from creators’ work, or force creators to split attention between their expertise and monetisation schemes to become rent-seekers themselves. And enforcing restrictions on copying requires making devices that are hostile to their users rather than empowering them, defying the core strength of digital microelectronics: perfect reproduction at scale.
The result of this systematic underinvestment in quality and innovation is a catastrophic signal-to-noise ratio outside of tightly controlled environments.
Let all stakeholders specialise on what they’re best at:
Using quadratic funding for payout allocation amplifies broad appeal while allowing individuals to back strong preferences. This ensures investors only profit when users are genuinely satisfied, users are in full control of expenses and only reward tangible outcomes, creators get predictable funding without business development overhead. And information stays free for everyone.
Let’s work with technology instead of against it. Join creators, investors, and users in making freely shared information the winning strategy.
Pluralloc is self-hosting: the platform uses its own funding mechanism to develop itself. Don’t wait for someone else to build the future you want:
Contact bootstrap@pluralloc.org to get started.
Crowdfunding requires creators to convince many financial contributors of an unfinished idea. And users typically lose their investment when a project fails, while a successful project in the information space can’t offer meaningful individual rewards to investors without inventing artificial perks or access restrictions that distract from making the actual product.
Pluralloc separates marketing and rewards (investors handle demand prediction and risk management, keeping profits) from development (creators focus on execution), and allows users to allocate their financial contribution to results that satisfy them, even if it’s not what originally caught their attention. For creators, investors become the single counterpart to negotiate compensation up-front.
Grant applications consume enormous time and require fitting a project into the priorities of a small group of influential people rather than the needs of a wide audience. Success depends on proposal-writing skills and institutional connections, not work quality – either funding organisations have little incentive or capacity for due diligence after the money is spent and results superficially meet requirements, or impose substantial reporting overhead on creators.
Pluralloc rewards production of freely accessible information based on actual user satisfaction rather than grant committee approval, with investors bearing the risk of up-front expenses and owning the profits of betting on successful creators.
Patronage makes creators accountable to wealthy sponsors’ preferences rather than actual user needs, creating dependency relationships where patrons can withdraw support based on personal whims or changing priorities. Creators must cultivate and maintain relationships with individual benefactors, at worst compromising their work to align with patron interests or values.
Pluralloc democratises funding decisions by letting users collectively determine what gets rewarded based on delivered results. No single patron can dominate outcomes, creators aren’t beholden to wealthy individuals’ preferences, and success flows from broad user satisfaction rather than maintaining favor with specific sponsors. Investors handle business risk but don’t control creative direction – that’s determined by user allocation after work is completed.
Consulting forces knowledge workers to optimise for billable hours and client visibility rather than creating lasting value for everyone, with clients having little incentive to make results freely accessible.
Pluralloc lets creators focus on building what a broader audience actually needs instead of selling expert attention, while investors handle the business risk.
Startups require operating a business, raising funds, and building revenue extraction mechanisms rather than focusing on expertise and quality. If a startup is successful, typically its constituting intellectual property is closed down and owned by shareholders – if it fails, most of it is abandoned and thus lost, or repurposed for the next startup of the same kind.
Pluralloc offers an incentive structure for creating freely accessible information, where investors can profit from successful risk management while users directly fund what they value, eliminating the need for traditional business models that pressure creators to compromise on their ideas.
While distributed applications (DApps) spearheaded quadratic funding of public goods, blockchains currently have a higher barrier to entry and much worse market penetration than conventional payment providers. More importantly, blockchains cannot guarantee unique identities – essential for quadratic funding, which is sensitive to Sybil attacks – without giving up privacy. A controlled centralised solution is much easier to build at small to medium scales, and still possible at large scales.
Gitcoin claims extraordinary success with enabling projects in the technical community it caters to. It’s primarily funded by wealthy individuals and organisations focused on a common interest of developing crypto-currencies.
Payment methods and transaction costs do play a role in coordination problems, but are not at the heart of the matter for Pluralloc, which focuses more on modeling interactions and balancing interests, and less on implementation details of the technical primitives such as identity management or collective agreement on facts and events.
That is to say, existing platforms could of course be used for implementations of Pluralloc.
The system creates incentives for participation rather than pure consumption:
Investors get paid from the user contribution pool based on project success, measured by actual allocation through user votes. They’re essentially betting on their ability to predict what users will value. Failed projects lose money, successful ones can be profitable – similar to venture capital but with more direct user feedback. Since the pool is collected in advance and projects are announced publicly, investors get to know the market before committing large amounts.
Quadratic funding balances broad appeal with intensity of preference. A project that 1000 people love can outcompete one that 10000 people find merely acceptable. Plus, creators get upfront funding to focus on quality rather than having to chase engagement metrics. It’s the investors’ responsibility to promote the results.
This is mitigated by identity verification based on explicit trust networks. Since the mechanism is not tied to any particular technology, in-person verification with manual data entry works just as well as automated systems. This scales well due to the small-world property of social graphs – most people are connected within a few degrees of separation. Each verified user can vouch for people they trust, creating expanding networks of accountability. Ultimately, business is built on trust, and we should leverage that where it helps.
Investors can pool resources for large projects, similar to current investment syndicates. The user voting mechanism actually provides better demand signals than traditional market research for big projects.
Investors can only profit when users actually value the results. Unlike traditional VCs, they can’t extract rents through artificial scarcity or lock-in effects. Wealthy investors funding unpopular projects just lose money. User voting determines payouts, not investor preferences. Successful investors imply creators got paid and consumers got what they wanted.
Most creators struggle with unpredictable income and spend significant time on business development rather than creation. Even successful creators often depend on platforms that extract large cuts or advertising models that distort their work. Predictable upfront funding lets them focus on what they’re good at. Also, since the funding pool and the competition is known in advance, they can estimate their bargaining position just as well as investors can figure their chances of success.
Users allocate funding based on value received, not necessarily novelty. Derivatives must be perceived as valuable to get funding. The first-mover advantage comes from user satisfaction, not legal protection. Bad derivatives get ignored; good ones deserve funding.
And filtering through the noise is also knowledge work that can be funded through the same system.
Investors bear the risk of non-delivery – that’s why they get potential returns. Users only allocate funds to work they find valuable. Failed projects mean investors lose money, but no user funds are wasted on undelivered promises. Market discipline through loss provides enforcement.
Social media optimizes for engagement and advertising revenue, not user value. When users directly allocate their own money to results they find valuable, incentives align differently. People can fund entertainment if they want; but they’re paying for what they actually value after they have it, rather than being the product sold to advertisers capitalising on natural curiosity.
Regulatory uncertainty is a real challenge requiring jurisdiction-specific approaches. But global operations are not required for the system to work well. Since the platform’s development is funded through the very model it implements, the results are free for anyone to use and adapt, and user contributions can guide figuring out financial and legal details on demand.
Unlike subscription models, users only contribute what they think is appropriate, and allocate it to what they receive value from, making spending more flexible during downturns. Quality content becomes more important when money is tight, potentially improving the signal-to-noise ratio. The system naturally scales with user capacity rather than requiring fixed commitments. But more importantly, past work always stays freely accessible for everyone to build upon.