Here’s my practical question — what’s the MVP version of this reputationally-fueled group idea. (My attempted and ultimately bad shorthand of the concept might be an even better way of asking the question.)
I’ve done some thinking around the hard problem of incentivizing pro-social behavior on social media platforms, and have reached a lot of the same fundamental conclusions. It has to be tangibly reputation based. So the trick will be to “gamify” (a dirty word, I know) the acquisition of reputational merit. That means it has to be worth money or (real) status or both. Preferably both. It’s frankly a universal embarrassment that, this deep into the Internet Age (or whatever we’re calling it), a person still has trouble getting rich and famous just by consistently being trustworthy. It’s the opposite! What have we even been doing?! That’s rhetorical, obviously.
It is indeed quite interesting. I'll sprout more considerations as I mull it over. But off my hat...
You'd make a great King of America, young fellow. I especially like the red and blue and white buffalo and that she is a cow. Besides, I think that you folks parting from the Crown was a huge mistake. Pity that done is a stone, but a chap can dream.
The structure of your proposal needs, after the many fascinating words, a diagram. Several diagrams, actually, so that the structure is clear. (A ==> B; B ==> C; follows that: A ≠≠> B) this kind of thing: on how the interaction of individuals and groups would work in the system. Since this system would be implemented through algorithms, it needs a graphic rendition of the processes involved.
(Here, get in reward for your efforts a random item from my bag of holding: the word algorithm, which appears like it should have rhythm in itself, has none. It is in fact what early Mediaeval scholars -- people at the court of the Norman kings of England, who all spoke exclusively French until after King John -- called the numeric system that we use today, 0 to 9, which is the Arabic system: Algorism originally, and originally capitalised... as it is the Latinization of the surname of an Uzbek mathematician of the 9th century, Al-Kwarizm, whose works were translated first in Spain and then in France, and since his mathematics used those numerals, those numerals took his name. Here you go)
You should define how the groups are formed. Referred to Substack, would a group be the readers of a newsletter?
After which, immediately to my mind come problems due to medium.
Substack is a platform for authors, and a subscription business model. The interest of the business model and of the authors is to be accessible and visible as much as possible, so as to increase subscribers. Anything that limits visibility of content, except for whatever may violate the TOS, goes against the workability of Substack as a business.
A form of reputation system exists on Reddit, with upvotes/downvotes, but only internal to subreddits. Reddit being mostly based on ads and perk plans, it promotes the subreddits with the most users. The attempt of redditors to steer the company away from decisions that damaged a large number of them amounted to nothing despite several blackouts. Any form of democratic management appears very hard to implement on for profit platforms that subsist on advertising.
A form of reputation system for editors also exists on Wikipedia, which is non profit. Of course it is not comparable to a community of people who produce discourse, but editors that mess up are policed by the community of editors, with several levels of recourse involving decisions taken by groups of editors of increasingly higher reputation.
Again, I think that this is only possible because Wikipedia was not created to make money.
I need more convincing on:
1) How to implement the structure of groups in a place like Substack. Who gets to be part of a group and how, on what basis. Who gets to vote up or down what -- as this is not a community of subreddits, and it is also a very loosely connected community, and also every author owns the Substack they write.
2) How to sell the idea to the company owning the platform.
3) How to convince the readers, and especially the authors, that this is a good idea -- since most tend to write for their own audience and when getting into fights with readers in comments have the power to do whatever they want with that -- the "reputation" incentive is against losing subscribers, also economically, yet a great number moderate the comments.
4) How does this deal with the problem of people who go around purposefully looking for content they disagree with in order to get it banned. This kind of people, who engage in the same behaviour not just on platforms on the internet, but in real life in offices and universities and other public spaces, setting up complaints to get real people kicked out of their jobs, their work removed from journals, etc, how do you make this kind of people agree to stand by the rules set by others? Anonymity works decently on the internet to prevent intimidation when upvoting/downvoting, but IRL anonymity is impossible and the fear of mobs reigns everywhere the final decision makers cave in to mobbing or support mobbing. I doubt that people would accept to do online what they refuse to do in the real world.
5) Should it work, how do you save interesting ideas that are outliers or uncomfortable from the gag orders of a conformist majority?
Later, I may have more, but this is already a lot.
Here’s my practical question — what’s the MVP version of this reputationally-fueled group idea. (My attempted and ultimately bad shorthand of the concept might be an even better way of asking the question.)
I’ve done some thinking around the hard problem of incentivizing pro-social behavior on social media platforms, and have reached a lot of the same fundamental conclusions. It has to be tangibly reputation based. So the trick will be to “gamify” (a dirty word, I know) the acquisition of reputational merit. That means it has to be worth money or (real) status or both. Preferably both. It’s frankly a universal embarrassment that, this deep into the Internet Age (or whatever we’re calling it), a person still has trouble getting rich and famous just by consistently being trustworthy. It’s the opposite! What have we even been doing?! That’s rhetorical, obviously.
Contractualism for social media. Love it.
I love this. All of this. I love it all.
It is indeed quite interesting. I'll sprout more considerations as I mull it over. But off my hat...
You'd make a great King of America, young fellow. I especially like the red and blue and white buffalo and that she is a cow. Besides, I think that you folks parting from the Crown was a huge mistake. Pity that done is a stone, but a chap can dream.
The structure of your proposal needs, after the many fascinating words, a diagram. Several diagrams, actually, so that the structure is clear. (A ==> B; B ==> C; follows that: A ≠≠> B) this kind of thing: on how the interaction of individuals and groups would work in the system. Since this system would be implemented through algorithms, it needs a graphic rendition of the processes involved.
(Here, get in reward for your efforts a random item from my bag of holding: the word algorithm, which appears like it should have rhythm in itself, has none. It is in fact what early Mediaeval scholars -- people at the court of the Norman kings of England, who all spoke exclusively French until after King John -- called the numeric system that we use today, 0 to 9, which is the Arabic system: Algorism originally, and originally capitalised... as it is the Latinization of the surname of an Uzbek mathematician of the 9th century, Al-Kwarizm, whose works were translated first in Spain and then in France, and since his mathematics used those numerals, those numerals took his name. Here you go)
You should define how the groups are formed. Referred to Substack, would a group be the readers of a newsletter?
After which, immediately to my mind come problems due to medium.
Substack is a platform for authors, and a subscription business model. The interest of the business model and of the authors is to be accessible and visible as much as possible, so as to increase subscribers. Anything that limits visibility of content, except for whatever may violate the TOS, goes against the workability of Substack as a business.
A form of reputation system exists on Reddit, with upvotes/downvotes, but only internal to subreddits. Reddit being mostly based on ads and perk plans, it promotes the subreddits with the most users. The attempt of redditors to steer the company away from decisions that damaged a large number of them amounted to nothing despite several blackouts. Any form of democratic management appears very hard to implement on for profit platforms that subsist on advertising.
A form of reputation system for editors also exists on Wikipedia, which is non profit. Of course it is not comparable to a community of people who produce discourse, but editors that mess up are policed by the community of editors, with several levels of recourse involving decisions taken by groups of editors of increasingly higher reputation.
Again, I think that this is only possible because Wikipedia was not created to make money.
I need more convincing on:
1) How to implement the structure of groups in a place like Substack. Who gets to be part of a group and how, on what basis. Who gets to vote up or down what -- as this is not a community of subreddits, and it is also a very loosely connected community, and also every author owns the Substack they write.
2) How to sell the idea to the company owning the platform.
3) How to convince the readers, and especially the authors, that this is a good idea -- since most tend to write for their own audience and when getting into fights with readers in comments have the power to do whatever they want with that -- the "reputation" incentive is against losing subscribers, also economically, yet a great number moderate the comments.
4) How does this deal with the problem of people who go around purposefully looking for content they disagree with in order to get it banned. This kind of people, who engage in the same behaviour not just on platforms on the internet, but in real life in offices and universities and other public spaces, setting up complaints to get real people kicked out of their jobs, their work removed from journals, etc, how do you make this kind of people agree to stand by the rules set by others? Anonymity works decently on the internet to prevent intimidation when upvoting/downvoting, but IRL anonymity is impossible and the fear of mobs reigns everywhere the final decision makers cave in to mobbing or support mobbing. I doubt that people would accept to do online what they refuse to do in the real world.
5) Should it work, how do you save interesting ideas that are outliers or uncomfortable from the gag orders of a conformist majority?
Later, I may have more, but this is already a lot.