Save the rhinos

It should work for phone calls, online accounts, and other things. Option one: if a person acts badly, they must forfeit some money to another person or company. Option two: if either party acts badly, they must both forfeit money to some other party who has no interest in a dispute.

Consider 'gold sellers' in a massively-multiplayer, role-player game. If someone has to pay $50 to buy a game, and forfeits that investment if their account is banned because they violated the rules by selling in-game gold for real-life money, there will be fewer 'gold sellers' than if account creation is free.

This works for other things:
https://screenrant.com/valves-dead-artifact-game-gets-nasty-extreme-trolling-twitch/

Suppose you lost $1 if you broke the rules of a streaming site by posting irrelevant or illegal content. $1 is not much, but it is more than $0.

But this isn't supposed to be an extra revenue source for a company if everyone follows the rules.

What you do instead is have a third-party site. This lets more sites use this system without further proliferation of financial payment information, which many people are reluctant to do because of such information being stolen from companies.

So, to start streaming content, a user must put $1 in escrow at the third-party site. The streaming site now controls this $1. If the user wants to get this $1 back (possibly less processing fees, which might be $0.10 or $0.50 or even most of the $1), they must notify the streaming site. After determining that no irrelevant or illegal content was streamed, the streaming company releases the $1 and suspends the user's streaming privileges.

If the user did break the rules, the $1 is given to the streaming company, less processing fees. This lets them pay for more people to investigate reports and moderate content.

Sites could have the option of either requiring a unique deposit, or letting users share their deposit with different companies. With the latter, if a user is banned from one site and loses their deposit, other sites would be notified and the user would have to replenish their deposit to continue streaming on other sites (or whatever activity that requires a deposit).


A little bit related, user-driven reports like the 'right-click reporting' in World of Warcraft. All reports should be investigated by a human instead of having automatic action, but if a company doesn't do this, it can still investigate appeals from accounts that have been affected. Spurious reports should influence the trustworthiness of the accounts that contributed to the report.

I had thought about this a few years ago, and it was in the context of "players randomly interacting with a small number of players in another match", where the system determines who interacts with whom. There was something about having people who act in a 'bad' way being made to play with each other, and detecting who is 'bad' based on reports of bad behavior, even though some of these reports come from people who act in a 'bad' way and can't be trusted (maybe they report others out of spite). You don't want new players to be trapped with 'bad' players with no way to escape. It might have been about creating an environment where young people can interact with each other safely. A lot of this may not be relevant when players or users choose who they interact with, instead some kind of matchmaking system.

https://pastebin.com/WpcA837S