How can we democratically govern the AI, social media, and online platforms of the future? Today, low participation is a major barrier to community governance online. We leverage a digital quasi-experiment that allows us to study the links between incentives and political participation at a scale and granularity not previously possible. We focus on a web3 startup called Optimism that distributed digital tokens worth roughly $28 million USD to more than 300,000 active participants in its gover...
