If you offer cash for the "best" content, people will just start aggressively sabotaging everyone else with downvotes.
SSRN · March 18, 2026 · 6429679
The Takeaway
When platforms reward top contributors, winners often pivot from creating quality posts to downvoting rivals to protect their own ranking. This 'strategic sabotage' distorts quality signals, suggesting that monetary incentives can inadvertently destroy the reliability of community-driven rating systems.
From the abstract
Tournament schemes are increasingly adopted to incentivize the production of user-generated content (UGC) on digital platforms. Identifying the causal effect of tournaments is challenging due to self-selected participation. We address this challenge using a proprietary data set from three European deal-sharing platforms that implemented a daily tournament, which rewarded the top-voted contributions in each category. We leverage the scheme's undisclosed rollouts-users became aware of it only afte