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> I believe it has solutions that don't rely on exclusivity. Does that mean you have a solution in mind, or you have some particular reason to believe a soluti

by srl 7y ago

> I believe it has solutions that don't rely on exclusivity. Does that mean you have a solution in mind, or you have some particular reason to believe a solution exists? Or is it just a general expression of optimism? The latter is fine, but if you have either a specific idea for a solution or a reason to believe one might be possible, then I'd love to hear it! Every time I think about this, I give up, concluding that the current system is more-or-less optimal. Ideas are shouted down not for being bad in any objective sense, but mostly just for being too far from what is currently believed to be true. This is a cheap filter, which kills a lot of really bad ideas at the price of making it hard and slow to move the needle when really necessary to do so. But any alternative I can come up with seems to require re-litigating the holocaust, every single day.

lisper 7y ago
In between. I have some half-baked ideas but not enough time to implement them. But in a nutshell the idea is to do a pagerank-type calculation to compute people's reputations so that not all upvotes and downvotes are weighted equally. Upvotes from people who have more upvotes count more. There are additional details to prevent some of the more obvious ways to game that system.
- ssivark 7y ago
  > Upvotes from people who have more upvotes count more. While this will avoid the problem of "junk opinion democracy" (each voice gets one vote, whatever the expertise), this still wouldn't avoid the problems attributed to the scientific establishment, where authority is roughly proportional to impact/prolificness/citations.
  - lisper 7y ago
    The difference being that in what I have in mind, anyone can publish and anyone can review, so it would be more like Arxiv and less like Nature or Science. In the scientific world there are stringent filters in place before you are allowed to play the game at all. Also, scientific communities tend to be small, and they are dependent on each other for funding. That introduces politics and perverse incentives. (I used to be a researcher. The politics and incestuousness is one of the reasons I quit.)
- abecedarius 7y ago
  Are you familiar with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advogato https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advogato and similar work from the early 2000s? I still think this kind of thing has potential.

by srl 7y ago

lisper 7y ago

In between. I have some half-baked ideas but not enough time to implement them. But in a nutshell the idea is to do a pagerank-type calculation to compute people's reputations so that not all upvotes and downvotes are weighted equally. Upvotes from people who have more upvotes count more. There are additional details to prevent some of the more obvious ways to game that system.

ssivark 7y ago
> Upvotes from people who have more upvotes count more. While this will avoid the problem of "junk opinion democracy" (each voice gets one vote, whatever the expertise), this still wouldn't avoid the problems attributed to the scientific establishment, where authority is roughly proportional to impact/prolificness/citations.
- lisper 7y ago
  The difference being that in what I have in mind, anyone can publish and anyone can review, so it would be more like Arxiv and less like Nature or Science. In the scientific world there are stringent filters in place before you are allowed to play the game at all. Also, scientific communities tend to be small, and they are dependent on each other for funding. That introduces politics and perverse incentives. (I used to be a researcher. The politics and incestuousness is one of the reasons I quit.)
abecedarius 7y ago
Are you familiar with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advogato https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advogato and similar work from the early 2000s? I still think this kind of thing has potential.