Optional payment to vote?  Witcoin required a payment to vote, so there was very little voting.  And thus very little content posted because there was very little financial reward coming from those very few who actually did vote.

After spending a decent amount of time studying the concept, I suggested making it essentially a quasi-gambling website.  The way I proposed it would work made the social voting task to be a form of gambling because there cost to vote was basically a wager.  If you voted and were in the early third of votes for the post, you would profit ... nearly doubling your money.  If you were in the middle third, the amount you paid to vote is returned ... i.e., you broke even.   And those in the bottom, later third got nothing returned.  

So that makes an incentive for voting on the good stuff (profit as some of those votes will be in the early third) and a disincentive to vote on the bad stuff (likelihood that you will lose money as fewer people will be voting).  

If then the winners (those in the early third) get profit of, let's say, 90% that was lost by the later third then the remaining 10% goes to compensate the content poster and a little bit to the site as well.  This profit potential creates an incentive for better content to be posted.

The problem I couldn't figure out at the time was how easy it would be for an algorithm to game the system.  Instead the rewards should only go to those who truly read the content and vote because the content is good.  At that point it became a problem harder than I wanted to figure out and lost interest.

Main point:

The problem with tweet forum, witcoin, etc. is that there is no nucleus of content. People are not going to start writing stuff just
because of the voting mechanism. They need something that interests them to write about. Thus the idea of hijacking yahoo's content.

Free vs. Pay:

By free, I meant that you could post for free, but then you wouldn't be able to earn anything.
You could also vote on free posts, but they would get low priority for display.

Voting would also be free. Standard use of a login such as openID to limit voting manipulation.
Also people who pay to post should be able to vote with more weight (say 5 times as much weight as an unpaid vote).

Flippro, don't get irritated. I'm a friendly.    If you can get input, then you should try to run with it. The last thing you should do is take a combative attitude with potential users.

I think you should consider a more targeted approach (e.g. give people 5 possible stories to comment on, with accompanying pictures, and change them every week.) People do not like to have to consider too many options simultaneously. Make a contest for best comment on the five articles. To start, subsidize the entry fees heavily, but charge something so people get used to interacting with the site.

Here are some questions to consider...

PRODUCT
What type of content does tweetforum aggregate?
What message about content does the tweetforum main page convey to users?
Are there better sources of this content?

ACTIVITY
How do tweetforum users interact with content?
How does this differ from interactions which could occur on another forum?

USERS
Who are the target users of tweetforum?
Where do these users hangout and how can you get their attention?

COMPETITIVENESS
What advantages does going to tweetforum have over an alternative venue?


Ideally, answers to these questions should be short and obvious.

I would rather integrate stack exchange and reddit -especially the bitcoin ones than the craphole that is yahoo, but using virtual currency so your status on those third party sites affects your earnings on witcoin which would rise and fall as your status does. Then let people earn bitcoins for "consulting" sessions regarding coding,cyptography,security and other things,with the site performing escrow etc.  Im sure people would like to hire experts in these fields whose knowledge is perfectly clear by the levels they've reached on other sites. The site might take a cut from that...or something. There might even be a section of the site set aside as a gambling/quiz section.

Ive been out of the loop for ages without much internet and witcoin lost all development awhile ago. Some good ideas in this thread worth chewing on.