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I think it would be interesting if online personas worked a little bit like video game characters. For instance, in an RPG, no one would believe a character co

I think it would be interesting if online personas worked a little bit like video game characters. For instance, in an RPG, no one would believe a character could be equally effective at wielding heavy weapons and casting spells, or other tasks: you generally have to pick one or two key areas of expertise and be “OK at best” when anything else comes along. Yet somehow, in the world of online discourse, everyone’s an equal expert on everything? What are the odds that a person really has good knowledge of both nuclear physics and farming? If you could only post or upvote things that were considered relevant to a few limited areas of expertise in your profile, we would see a very different online world. Suddenly, seeing an article on the front page on a certain topic might actually mean that it got there due to “likes” from people with relevant experience, and not just whatever random definitely-not-statistically-valid sample of “friends” put it there.

csa 9y ago
That's an interesting idea, but it's also probably one that would be impossible to implement effectively. For example: 1. Who would determine any given person's area of expertise. This is a difficult and potentially difficult thing to do. 2. People who are ostensibly experts in a topic, even if they have a lot of experience with it, often have incredibly uninformed opinions. As a simple example, most people I know have a lot of experience with dating/relationships, parenting, and politics, but their knowledge of these topics is based on a bizarre and woefully incomplete combination of old wives'tales, anecdotes, and just-so stories. They fully believe they are experts and often have some paper evidence to back this up. Somethin similar can be said of programmers. There are plenty of people who can write a program that works, but are they experts? To a non-technologist, maybe (and maybe not). To the grande dame or grand homme of a field of programming, probably not. The range of defining an "expert" is huge. Do you have any ideas to address this?
- andromaton 9y ago
  ELO ratings.
- makecheck 9y ago
  The first issue is how to make sure that people aren’t creating 100 profiles each (something that’s a real problem on sites today). This is where I expect data breaches to “help”; as it becomes more and more ridiculous that our current identity schemes aren’t working, something better can be developed and act as a basis for a unique-by-birth profile that is as anonymous as you need it to be. Part of the problem of expertise would be solved by the natural upper limit on how much expertise is reasonable for one person to have. No one should be able to claim strong experience in more areas than they could have conceivably spent time learning/practicing. Therefore, if you’re going to make your profile claim expertise in something you know nothing about, you’d definitely be wasting your limited opportunity to comment and you wouldn’t be able to do that for everything. Also, if comments/votes/etc. on something are only permitted for people in related fields, an uninformed person’s ramblings might still be drowned out by the only other people commenting. Determining how to limit a profile is tricky. Some restrictions would be easy, e.g. a 14-year-old can’t claim 30 years experience in an industry. Some would be harder, perhaps enabled by webs of trust (e.g. as a side effect of employment, your employer adds credibility to your profile somehow in a particular area of expertise).

csa 9y ago

That's an interesting idea, but it's also probably one that would be impossible to implement effectively. For example: 1. Who would determine any given person's area of expertise. This is a difficult and potentially difficult thing to do. 2. People who are ostensibly experts in a topic, even if they have a lot of experience with it, often have incredibly uninformed opinions. As a simple example, most people I know have a lot of experience with dating/relationships, parenting, and politics, but their knowledge of these topics is based on a bizarre and woefully incomplete combination of old wives'tales, anecdotes, and just-so stories. They fully believe they are experts and often have some paper evidence to back this up. Somethin similar can be said of programmers. There are plenty of people who can write a program that works, but are they experts? To a non-technologist, maybe (and maybe not). To the grande dame or grand homme of a field of programming, probably not. The range of defining an "expert" is huge. Do you have any ideas to address this?

andromaton 9y ago
ELO ratings.
makecheck 9y ago
The first issue is how to make sure that people aren’t creating 100 profiles each (something that’s a real problem on sites today). This is where I expect data breaches to “help”; as it becomes more and more ridiculous that our current identity schemes aren’t working, something better can be developed and act as a basis for a unique-by-birth profile that is as anonymous as you need it to be. Part of the problem of expertise would be solved by the natural upper limit on how much expertise is reasonable for one person to have. No one should be able to claim strong experience in more areas than they could have conceivably spent time learning/practicing. Therefore, if you’re going to make your profile claim expertise in something you know nothing about, you’d definitely be wasting your limited opportunity to comment and you wouldn’t be able to do that for everything. Also, if comments/votes/etc. on something are only permitted for people in related fields, an uninformed person’s ramblings might still be drowned out by the only other people commenting. Determining how to limit a profile is tricky. Some restrictions would be easy, e.g. a 14-year-old can’t claim 30 years experience in an industry. Some would be harder, perhaps enabled by webs of trust (e.g. as a side effect of employment, your employer adds credibility to your profile somehow in a particular area of expertise).