The Tributary is an online chat group (via Slack) comprised of people interested in improving the nature of online social media.
The Tributary hosts in-network contests. The overall goal of these contests is to explore alternate ways of defining value on social media platforms. Instead of using "engagement" as a metric for value (which tends to reward click-bait, enraging media, shallow memes), what if users defined the value they received in a more deliberate way?
Contests use Tributary Water — an in-game digital currency that measures the value you are providing the social network. The contestant with the largest pool of Tributary Water at the end of the contest is declared the winner.
At the beginning of a contest, all contestants are given a pool of 500 Liters of Tributary Water. This pool represents how much value you provide others in the network.
During the contest, you can send the /account command to the @accountant to get your balance:
/account
Your balance is 500 L
All pools are connected to a Runoff system. Twice a day (at noon and midnight Pacific Time), the Runoff system will take 10% of each pool and redistribute this Runoff to other contestants.
Your pool's runoff will be directed to other players according to Tributes, which proportionally dedicate your Runoff to others as a reward for social media activity you are grateful for.
Let's pretend user @celeste posts an article called "How YouTube Polarizes Teens" and organizes a structured discussion around it. If you found this article and discussion valuable, you can reward @celeste by making a tribute for her good deed.
To do this, send the following command to @accountant:
/tribute 20% to @celeste for discussion on how YouTube polarizes teens
The next time the Runoff system activates (the next Noon or Midnight), 20% of your runoff will be transferred from your pool to her pool.
At any point in the game, you may review your list of tributes by using the /tributes command (with an 's' at the end):
/tributes
Your Tributes are as follows:
1: 35% to @kandobando for helping me with my resume
2: 25% to @jason for advocating irreverent art work
3: 20% to @celeste for discussion on how YouTube polazes teens
4: 10% to @jason for pork bbq recipes
5: 5% to @anders for advocating movie discussions
You have 5% unassigned
This displays all your Tributes in a numbered list. You can use these ID numbers to cancel or modify these tributes using the following commands:
/cancel [Tribute ID] - cancels a specific tribute
/change [Tribute ID] to [number]% - Changes the percentage allocation of a tribute
/change [Tribute ID] to @[username] - Changes the recipient of a tribute
For example, if you wanted @celeste to receive 25% instead of 20%, you would type:
/change 3 to 25%
Tribute number 3 changed from 20% to 25%