Incentives determine outcomes

I was an econ major in college.  As stuffy as some aspects of the discipline can seem, I was fascinated by trying to understand why the world works the way it does.  I always loved the behavioral side of it—how incentives shape behavior. If you can truly understand incentives, how people are being rewarded, you have a good chance of understanding how they will behave. Follow the incentive, and you can usually predict the outcome.

Which is why I think so much of the polarization we see online today isn’t some great mystery. We built an internet that rewards attention at all costs. As a result we got an internet full of outrage, noise, and content engineered to keep people fired up and scrolling.  

It started with search - if I get more people clicking on my story the search algos will reward me with more traffic. Then social media came along and poured gasoline on the fire. Suddenly, the easiest way to reach a massive audience wasn’t to be insightful, it was to be loud. Be certain (whether or not you’re right). Be extreme. Make people mad. Say something that gets your team fired up and dunks on the other side. That’s what the algorithms wanted. Keep people “engaged.” And nothing does that better than keeping them angry or afraid.

It worked. It still works. And it trained everyone to chase that reward. To post more, say more, dial everything up to 11. The goal stopped being “say something true” and became “say something viral.” And over time, we forgot how to disagree without turning every conversation into a brawl. Why would you bother?  Brawling was a great way to build a dedicated audience.

It used to be that if you had an outlandish opinion you’d have to explain that position around the water cooler or over the dinner table and get challenged by people you know to be reasonable.  But now when you have access to the whole world over your phone, odds are you can find at least a handful of people (or bots) to give every crazy idea some positive affirmation.  

The publishers joined in, too. Not because they’re evil, but because the numbers were scary. Ad revenue falling, subscriptions stalling. They figured it was better to double down on one side and keep those people clicking than try to appeal to everyone and get ignored. And so we ended up with a vicious cycle where even the places we used to turn to for facts became part of the attention game.

But I think people are finally tired. Creators are tired. Readers are tired. We’re exhausted from the noise. We don’t trust what we’re seeing. We crave honesty. Credibility. Something real. This comes up in EVERY SINGLE conversation I have with a writer who is having success.  The audience will reward you if they trust you to be honest.  You don’t always have to be right, you just have to shoot them straight, help them get smarter, and do your best to be objective.  

We built LedeWire because we think the incentives can change. If you reward people for writing something honest, something thoughtful, something that makes you smarter instead of just more upset, they’ll make more of that. If readers can pay for and easily share the pieces that actually resonate with them, we think that changes the whole dynamic.

It’s not about blowing up the old system. It’s about building a better incentive structure for this incredible information sharing tool that we have. One where quality gets rewarded. Where trust builds over time. Where creators don’t have to shout to be heard.  They just have to be good and honest. We need a platform that makes it easier to reward that honesty and where readers feel like they’re supporting the kind of work they actually want more of in the world.

That’s the bet we’re making. That credibility, honesty, and depth still matter—and that if we create a better way to reward those things, we’ll get more of them.

Seems obvious. But for a long time, it wasn’t even an option. We’re trying to make sure it is.  

Let’s see what happens when we give readers a way to reward something better.