Nice write-up.
I'm still convinced that we can use objective measurements of value rather than relying on rank orders.
The easiest objective measurement to use is the US dollar. (Note: Our current hegemonic US dollar once represented 0.822 troy oz of fine silver and allowed people to compare the dollar (ie. a specific amount of silver) to other goods & services. Nowadays the dollar is the global hegemonic standard. These objective measurements will allow contributions to be compared across groupings.
Other objective reference points are: time-wage rates or piece rates. In 'A Measure of Sacrifice', Nick Szabo wrote about the history of the clock, industrialization and the advent of time-rate wage (ie. hrs spent) and compares that to piece rates (ie. amount produced). There are deficiencies in using either time-rate wage or piece rates and these tend to be better for evaluating commodified goods & services, but nonetheless these are well-understood measures. For example when measuring my fractally blog post contributions I keep track of # of words (piece rates) and # of hrs (time-wage rates). These measurements focus on cost and cost is a 'proxy' of value. The dollar is more useful to measure subjective value than costs because people are used to the dollar as a measurement of both value & cost. For example people can come up with 'million dollar ideas' and people can relate to the value of innovation. We can even put dollar values on priceless art for example when that Van Gogh painting sells at Sotheby's. So the dollar is the best current reference of value and it's easily understood by most people around the world.
In the future we can probably use Bitcoin as the unit-of-account because it is the modern form of money & has energy as the unit-of-account.
Measuring the value of this comment:
Number of words: 292
Time spent: ~30 minutes
Value: ??? (How many views did this get? Was this educational? Did it help the fractally team? Did it lead to improvements in the fractally measurement system?)