JayJayWords

In a nutshell

1. You go to an article and tag a word. Tagging means telling the app that you think a word is (for example) Spanish, a noun, and means 'house'. Like casa. That word is saved as having been tagged by you (using your wallet address, to be precise). We'll come back to it.
2. Other users (and you) then validate each others' (but not your own) tags. That just means users approve or reject other users' tags. Careful, though - the Proof of Attention algorithm will keep you on your toes by serving up some fake tags to validate, which you have to spot. Once you have succesfully validated a batch of tags, you earn some $JJ coin, which is the native (fungible, ERC20) token of JayJayWords.
3. Once your tag for casa has been validated by a couple of users, an NFT representing the word 'casa' will be minted to your wallet's address.
4. With the $JJs you've already earned from validating tags, you can invest a little to fit out casa with a picture (of a nice Spanish villa, hopefully) and earn rent on it. Rent accumulates on a word when other users translate a paragraph (in a Spanish article, in this case) containing that word.

A little background

A few years ago the word 'gamification' started appearing in relation to websites which used badges, stars, high scores, streaks, social competition, unlockable achievements, or any sort of points-based reward system traditionally more familiar to gamers than website users. Remember that? Duolingo, the language-learning supersite, even coined its own 'tokens', called lingots.

A lingot [ling-guht] is the Duolingo virtual currency. The more you learn on Duolingo, the more lingots you'll receive and be able to use in the store!

You get lingots for answering questions correctly or for using the app every day. When Duolingo came out, being interested in languages I hit it hard and racked up a good score. When the mobile app came out in 2013 I was one of the beta testers. Before long I'd completed the Spanish and French trees, accumulating lots of lingots along the way. In the site's store I found I could spend them on ... giving Duo, my pet owl, a tracksuit. Seriously. Or buying a streak (successive days using the app) freeze.

What do I care about my streak? If I feel like practising French today, I will. If not, I won't. Voilà. And anyway, the very idea of paying to atone for a missed day of language practice smacks of the indulgences racket run by the Catholic Church in the middle ages. The only other items in the Duolingo shop, 'Double or Nothing' and 'Weekend Amulet', also relate to artificially restoring one's streak. There was absolutely no reason for me to care about lingots. Their currency was, and still is, worthless. Talk about a shitcoin.

StackOverflow (SO), the developers' Q&A uber-site, was another one of the first (even earlier than Duolingo, in fact) to make a big thing of gamification. Its two-dimensional system of both points (reputation) and gold, silver, and bronze badges made the site addictive to developers. A certain type of dev, at least.

The SO rewards exist more to encourage people to adapt to the particular system Atwood and Spolsky, the site's creators, came up with, which may not always be obvious, and so an incentive system, no matter how nebulous, makes sense. And as a developer, I can tell you that status matters. IT types respect expertise. The site's creators cleverly tapped into that by creating a currency with a credible meaning attached to it. Furthermore, unlike many a website's virtual currency, Stack Overflow repution sometimes transcends the site itself. If you have a good SO reputation in a particlar area of expertise you'll want to draw recruiters' or interviewers' attention to that, as it probably betokens hard work and knowledge in that area.

Of course social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are gamified too - what else to call the follower count, or the like/retweet/heart count of an individual post or tweet? When you level up on Twitter you get a blue check mark. If you go to any of the newer social media-type sites, like Instagram or Bitclout, you'll observe that variations on the iconic 'like' and 'retweet' buttons, and authenticity (blue, or otherwise) checkmark are just part of the grammar of those sites. They're a standard, like the icon of a house, to denote 'Home', was for an early generation of websites.

Done right, tokens and points can serve to motivate people to carry out the actions a site wants them to take, such as create content. Stack Overflow wants you to tag your questions, so after tagging a couple it rewards you with a 'tagger' badge. You're being trained to use the site like you'd train a horse or a dog - with a pat on the head and a treat. Don't underestimate the power of doling out meaningless tokens, though. In the grubby depths of my Foursquare addiction I would go out of my way - in real life, mind - to claim mayorship of some wretched, long-since-disappeared café, just to get a Barista or, if I was really lucky, Swarm badge.

The problem

Tokens, lingots, and rep can only get a site so far. For instance, at the moment I have over 60000 XP (experience points), 226 crowns, and 655 lingots on Duolingo. The only reason I can see for me to get any more of any of these is if I want to a) dress up my owl, b) leapfrog one of my friends in the scoreboard, or c) buy a streak freeze. That's a solid a) no, b) no thanks, and c) hard pass. If you're interested in learning Italian, for instance, unless you're in school you most likely don't need childish inducements to make you practice everyday. Maybe that's why the gamification layer in Duolingo feels so weak.

And despite Stack Overflow's clever incentive scheme, most devs I've seen seem not to feel bound by it. When they have a bug, as far as SO is concerned they just hit it and quit it. Let others do the hard work and get the badge or the occasional ten points - they couldn't care less.

So, if owls' tracksuits and spurious notions of 'reputation' don't motivate people to use a site, what does?

Take it to the bank

How about money? That tends to motivate people, have you noticed? Now cryptocurrencies can be plugged into websites it's possible to reward users with native internet money.

If I had a website and I wanted someone to do some work on my site, say...help translate foreign-language articles, shouldn't I offer to pay them? Or at least create the chance they might get paid?

So how would that work?

Game mechanics

JayJayWords (JJ) takes articles from foreign-language sites, for example Le Monde, the French news site, and presents them in such a way that each individual word in the article functions as a button that can be clicked on and tagged. Tagged means the user supplies some or all of:

• the word's translation (into English)
• the word's part of speech (e.g. 'noun')
• In the future whether the word is shown in singular or plural form, is feminine or masculine (where appropriate), etc.

This tagging of a word is the basic unit of work that JJ is asking the user for. It's the value a user who knows German, Italian, or Chinese brings to the site.

Why would a user tag a word? Well, under normal circumstances they might well do it just to engage with the site and support it. Earlier incarnations of JJ relied on this. But in the current site, tagging a word will entitle a user to (eventually) own the word as an NFT, and from that NFT earn rent on that word. Hopefully, people will be incentivised to tag correctly since they can see that spammy tags are unlikely to ever get validated.

Proof of Attention

What if a user makes a mistake in tagging a word, such as translating la as 'teh' instead of 'the'? Or worse, enters complete nonsense, such as translating la as 'sffsjfsdfs'? That's where validation comes in. In a self-conscious homage to Bitcoin's consensus mechanism, JayJayWords gets users to validate blocks of tags at a time in return for some JJ coins. Each tag in the block can be accepted, rejected (in the case of 'teh'), or marked as 'dont know'. This allows JayJayWords to smuggle in a couple (or is it one?, or none?) of fake tags each block. If the validator isn't paying attention, just rubberstamping the validations, well, the Proof-of-Attention algorithm won't let the batch through, and there'll be no 'mining' reward.

But let's assume the batch is correct, which just means that whether or not the genuine tags were accepted, rejected, or passed over, the fakes were rejected: then what happens? First of all, the validator gets rewarded with newly-minted $JJ coins. As for the individual tags: after 3 successful acceptances (by 3 different users), it's minted as an NFT to the original tagger.

NFTs

Ownership, of tags/words is a large part of the JayJayWords game. Each NFT represents a unique combination of a word, its language, and its part of speech. The French article la is not the same as the Spanish article la. They can be owned by different people since they're different languages, despite being the same word and part of speech. However, once someone owns the French la, no-one else can, except if it gets transferred to them (see below).

As stated earlier, rent accrues to owners of word NFTs when the word appears in text and a (different) user opts to see a translation of that text or looks the word up in the dictionary. Because of the way the blockchain works, the rent (in $JJs) isn't transferred automatically (i.e directly to the owner's wallet) since that would be an awful user experience: the user, simply by browsing the app, would be liable for Ethereum gas fees every time they translated some text, punishing them for using JJ. Rather, JJ keeps track of which words have earned rent and credits those words' owners. N.b. this is done in a 'centralised' way: stored on the JJ database, off-chain. I know: sue me.

The success of JJ will ultimately be due to it being a game/experience that motivates people interested in languages to spend some time in the expectation of earning a return in the forms of ERC20 and ERC721 tokens which will eventually be tradeable in exchanges such as Uniswap or Sudoswap.

Benefits of NFTs

Since the words are minted as ERC721 tokens, they could in theory be traded independently of JJ itself. At the moment, they do not have any image metadata attached so, unlike the current crop of collectible, or even art-based, NFTs on marketplaces such as Rarible and Opensea, they have no visual appeal. They would function more as utility tokens, where ownership entitles users to the rent on that word. Common words, such as French or Spanish la should be worth more. (In the future users will be able to embellish NFTs with images, giving them more of an artistic value, and contributing more to a sense of ownership of that NFT).

Challenging a word

In the future players can challenge other players' words and win them.

Phases

This will all take a long time to build. So it makes sense to break it down into phases, and accept that certain things won't be available until a later phase. For instance, only nouns are available for tagging in phase 1. Many word types have different flexions (e.g. walks, walking, walked) that resolve to a common stem (walk). Getting that flexion system right is easier if there's only one part of speech to deal with, hence only nouns are in for phase 1.