To help prevent the mindless sharing of content and promote the sharing of thoughtful content, a socially acceptable “stamp of approval” was created, backed by distributed ledger technology (DLT) that would integrate itself into a post. These stamps of approval are social indicators to one's network that the person sharing the content (and receiving the stamp of approval) has reviewed the content before sharing.
DLTs, specifically blockchains, have the architectural benefit of providing a public ledger platform where all recordings/transactions are immutable and verifiable, thus being an excellent platform for audits and verifying provenance—even though this isn’t what we care about. In traditional blockchain architecture, miners perform a computational intensive process called PoW (proof-of-work) in order to prove to the complete blocks that maintain the network. Using “patience” as a variable to allow a user-defined block completion algorithm for every assertion made, we created proof-of-patience. A user defines the level of patience—time and computational resources they are willing to give up, from a scale of one to three and then they mine their block.
When the user is done mining for their block, we created PoPBot ("Proof of Patience"-bot)to tweet at the user the content they want to share with a badge that is representative of the work/patience they put in and the user can then retweet it to their network.