Incentivized design makes the brain addicted to reading
Reading valuable content is a healthy lifestyle, but often the more valuable the content is, the more it feels like a chore to read, not only text but video as well. ReadON does not want to exacerbate the spread of “tittytainment” content. We believe people are not incapable of distinguishing between content of high and low value, but they need some help to secrete dopamine during the valuable reading process.
Fortunately, the use of gamified incentive design in traditional stories to enhance the thrill of using the product has been a successful path.
Back in 2016, a product called Qutoutiao successfully combined gold incentives, tasks, and achievements from games with content reading. And in less than two years, it gained a staggering 30 million+ daily active users and completed a record IPO on NASDAQ in less than three years of the company’s existence. Qutoutiao has successfully replicated this model not only for its news client, but also for its novel product (Midu), and for the video products in its product matrix. By 2021, Qutoutiao eventually regressed to 5 million daily active users (which is still a significant number) under the competition of strong rivals, but this does not mean that this gamification design failed, on the contrary, what really caused Qutoutiao great trouble was the homogeneous design of its competitors, and it was the launch of an incentivized version of Toutiao by Bytedance that finally stole most of Qutoutiao’s users. Gamified incentive design has been successful across the industry.
We designed ReadON using a model called “Brain Hack”, which is a system of instant incentives, tasks, and achievements around the feedback, sense of accomplishment, and moments of surprise that the user’s brain needs to form a long-term habit of using ReadON.
The first step is to build instant feedback. An AI timer will analyze your reading behavior on ReadON. Every time you finish one cycle, you will get $READ tokens as an instant reward.
This AI timer is powered by an in-app algorithm to identity true reading behavior with the information from gyroscope and screen touch data. All the computation will not leave your cell phone or browser to best protect your privacy.
The next step: setup small achievable goals.
We design daily and weekly missions for users to set clear goals for themselves. These tasks follow a habit-forming time curve from easy to difficult. So that users have a clear goal to achieve each day, which is an excellent way to make reading “addictive”.
Another purpose of the task series is to serve as a guide for users to use ReadON in depth, including a path to experience the necessary features of the Web3 product. For the general user, the operations of creating a wallet, transferring and exchanging tokens, and buying NFT are not at all natural and discouraging. The goal splitting through the task system, and the corresponding prompts, which eventually provide incentives for task achievement, will be a good guide to enter Web3.
The third step: Team-up!
Just like a gym-buddies, users could invite their friends to read with them.
As a team lead, user could earn extra rewards when his buddies get theirs. In order to get these extra rewards, the user as a team captain will be motivated to interact with team members, including sharing, doing tasks, inviting new ones, etc.
By completing a series of reading challenges with friends, users will develop from a short-term habit into a long-term habit, which will unlock achievement system with various badges. We have designed a system of achievements, including hidden achievements, waiting for users to unlock them one by one. This is an “aha” moment for the user.
Unlocking all achievements means that the user is already a deep user of ReadON, not only is he an experienced reader, he has also completed the introductory tasks into the Web3 world. The tasks include token and wallet related operations, but also reading the necessary amount of Crypto content, so it’s worth awarding him an NFT as a celebration!
This NFT is the user’s equipment in the meta-universe world, generated according to the topic the user cares about, it is called Nucleus. Nucleus is not only the user’s collection and game props, it is also the proof of the user’s degree of knowledge accumulation and contribution to the content of this topic, according to which the proof of rights realized by different levels of governance on ReadON, and finally in the countless sub-topics of decentralized autonomy to realize a valuable content community.
