For the past few years I have been toying with the idea of an idea/thought market—one where ideas (and more generally thoughts as a whole) are somehow assigned some economic value and traded as such (for everything and anything that means). In lieu of that I have recently been thinking about Internet comments and what it would mean to add monetary value to comments on the web.
I'm a huge fan of Hacker News and love reading comments on the website. Earlier in my career (circa 2016) I'd spend hours on the website reading and debating comments to form opinions of my own. At some point I read a brief comment about FUD in software engineering and more generally on the Internet as a whole which led me to focus less time on the comments and more time on the content of the posts themselves. I can't find that particular comment but consider it to have been helpful for myself for learning to deal with the abundance of user generated content on the Internet. Put generally, understanding FUD helps me personally filter good user comments from bad.
I consider money to be a universal language that can be used to bridge gaps between a variety of factors or biases—one such use case obviously being to assign quality to things (or to differentiate good things from bad). Internet comments however are sorted by upvotes or downvotes—and sometimes just upvotes. Adding some universal monetary value to these comments could make it easier to discern/qualify good and useful user commentary from bad and useless user commentary, both on individual websites and also comparatively across different services. The currency could take just about any form—standard USD, an Internet currency like cryptocurrency, a browser provided metric, a custom Chrome extension value, or anything else. I haven't thought about how money/currency creation would work here but I'm sure it's not a difficult problem, especially if bidders are using standard USD to vote on content. Comments could even receive value based on simple user impression or AI-generated sentiment.
This could also give lieu to some sort of Internet comment database which would serve collections or dumps of comments from across the web. It'd be able to use this universal monetary metric to sort and classify the most valuable user comments for any given time period and then showcase top content or interesting finds. I think it'd be an awesome addition to the Internet.