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Or, this could lead to the birth of a decentralised web-of-trust review and recommendation system. Imagine if something like this works: When a person reads a b
by saljam 15y ago
Or, this could lead to the birth of a decentralised web-of-trust review and recommendation system. Imagine if something like this works: When a person reads a book, he rates it according to his taste. He would also rate how much he "trusts" the opinion of any of his peers. Then, for any book, he could ask the question "How good do my peers think this book is?" or "How good does the faculty of University of Manchester School of Computer Science collectively think this book is?" This then propagates the ratings of this group, and the ratings of the people they "trust", to come up with an answer. The amount of trust can act as some sort of a coefficient at each step.
Now, instead of saying "a group of well-read professionals, picked and chosen by Random House, thought this books was good enough," you can say "a group of people, whom I trust to be well-read professionals, or to have good taste, or to be accurate, or to be knowledgeable in their field, thought this books was good."
The technology is there, and frankly I won't be surprised if someone already wrote something like this.
BTW, this isn't limited to books. You can substitute "book" with academic paper (and you get peer review!), films, music, or pretty much anything provided by a social-web recommendation service,
- cstross 15y agoOr, this could lead to the birth of a decentralised web-of-trust review and recommendation system. Imagine if something like this works: When a person reads a book, he rates it according to his taste. He would also rate how much he "trusts" the opinion of any of his peers. Unfortunately what you get with this system ends up looking like Amazon's reader reviews, because most readers are neither perceptive nor trained in analytical reading. Viz: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/01/faint-praise.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/01/faint-pr...
- saljam 15y agoThat's not what I was proposing. The whole point is that you select who you trust and how much you trust them for any given subject. A random reviewer like the one on Amazon wouldn't have much influence on my rating unless I "trust" them personally, or some one I highly trust in turn highly trusts them. I'm saying trust too much now.
- sedev 15y agoThat, however, throws the effort from publishers to readers without lessening it as much as one would like. I can see specialized audiences investing the time required to get a web of trust going, but not mass audiences. Mass audiences, when contemplating "is this any good?", don't usually go for "I know, I'll rate how much I trust a bunch of people that I know or know of and algorithmically consult their opinions!" They go for "probably not." This is the parallel to how, when you're creating a new web site, your enemy is less the competition and more the Back button. So there are serious network-effect problems with this proposition - it has big barriers to entry. I would love to partake of its benefits, because they sound awesome, but I think that you're underestimating how difficult it would be to get this off the ground. See also: http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt