[tor-dev] Proposal for improving social incentives for relay operators

[George Kadianakis]

Am 2014-06-10 02:26, schrieb Virgil Griffith:
> For a while I've been seeking to grow the Tor network in both size and
> goodput.  Towards this end, I've explored various avenues such as
> increasing user-awareness via tor2web.  More recently, I've been exploring
> financial incentives like TorCoin.
> 
> Not wanting to strictly limit ourselves to financial incentives, I began
> reading the literature on incentivizing volunteers.  The most relevant
> papers I found are:
> 
> * http://www-2.rotman.utoronto.ca/facbios/file/LMS2_ManSci-Paper-Final.pdf
>  * http://pareto.uab.es/~prey/gneezy_254.pdf
> * https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3308162/Slonim%202013.pdf
> 
> The most relevant of these papers (Lacetera 2013) cites the major
> motivations for volunteer labor are: "pure altruism, warm glow, self-image,
> and reputation".  Upon reading this I realized TorCoin's technical
> interestingness had blinded me to much easier to leverage motivations of
> "warm glow" and "reputation".
> 
> I propose the following system for harnessing "warm glow" and "reputation"
> for Tor relay operators.  I am willing to fund this in its entirety.
> 
> I propose establishing a subdomain on torproject.org giving each Tor relay
> operator (hereafter affectionately called "Torati") his/her own page using
> the information her machines provide to the Tor Directory Consensus.  The
> fields to show on her "Torati profile page" would be things like:
> ContactInfo, PGP fingerprint, list of server nicknames, date the Directory
> Authorities first saw her contact info, etc.  You can also imagine a
> receiving special "special recognition stars" for operating an exit or

Here are some ideas on various achievements/badges that could be
awarded to relay operators (in no particular order):

- You earned a flag (fast/hsdir/stable/named/exit)!
- Your uptime is over 9000 (seconds/days/months)!
- You are part of a family!
- You have the contact field set!
  - With PGP!
  - With a BTC address!
- You are part of an organization (torservers/etc.)!
- You are in an exotic location! (not many relays there)
- You have IPv6 enabled!
- You are running an experimental Tor version!
- You are a bridge with many clients from China!
- You are an obfsbridge!
  
You can imagine more special achievements, like:

- You were around during event X! (arab spring, etc.)
- You were the top guard during event X!
- You were the first big relay ever in Lithuania!
- You were in the top 10 exits.
- You survived an hour of anarchy! (awarded when the authorities fail
                                    to establish a consensus for an hour)
etc.

You can also imagine recurring (monthly) achievements, and more
one-time achievements that tend to really motivate people in
games. Also, some kind of point system and levels might be fun.

To be honest, I don't know if such a thing would motivate people to
start running relays, but it might motivate people whole already run
relays to run even better ones (or try to hack the system just to
collect achievements).