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It's a very interesting design space. How to design public forums where people can share ideas and eventually improve their knowledge collectively. There are v

It's a very interesting design space. How to design public forums where people can share ideas and eventually improve their knowledge collectively. There are very successful instances of that, for instance MathOverflow. But I don't know what can be achieved when a good chunk of participants don't agree on some basic rules beforehand, such as logic and good faith. It's a bit like consensus with byzantine failures, maybe there's an impossibility theorem here and large social network should be limited to cat videos.

randysalami 2y ago
I’ve had an idea for a while called DoubleSign except it’s for political beliefs. It resolves the agreement issue by indexing users with other users that believe the same thing as them e.g. socialists are grouped with socialists, fascists with fascists, etc. but on a more granular level. By making it transparent and obvious unlike algorithmic echo chambers, people know where they are, and immediately achieve consensus and can organize for productive aims rather than bicker and in-fight. There are many more mechanics and concepts but that’s the high-level.
- patrickTs 2y ago
  This actually seems cool, but it would be difficult to exist as a tech company that explicitly exists to organize extremists. But yea, would probably lead to greater actual discussions than something like twitter, which seems to feed on the anger of its users.
  - randysalami 2y ago
    Yes, definitely less of a company that exists to maximize profit but more of a public service for the greater good. Platforming bad people isn’t ideal but in my opinion, it’s important and those groups should look pathetic in comparison to the majority. I’d imagine memberships in the thousands while more popular beliefs have hundreds of thousands. At the end of the day, they are our fellow countrymen and we all need to know where we stand. If they were somehow the majority, that doesn’t reflect poorly on application but poorly on the society we live in. It’s like a mirror. I also want to add that it exists to organize practical action. In these indexes, there would exist mechanisms to organize people politically in the real world with direction and funding. I think how there are so many local elections that go unopposed or have meager voting turnout. These elections could be displayed and individual indexes could actually crowdfund and run candidates on their behalf. People which might never vote in these elections all the sudden are realizing that 500 people in their small town believe the exact same thing as them (not just go blue or go red) and can actually !win! an election. Their candidate is now elected and a direct member of their index which they can talk to and have advocate for them. The big idea is the bottom up approach could eventually lead to the platform getting senators or governors elected by users of the network if indexes become large enough and potentially threaten the traditional two party system when people realize they don’t stand alone in their distinct beliefs and can do something about it. Pretty cool and pretty powerful (:
gsf_emergency_2 2y ago
Here's one vision: HN, after it's been overwhelmed by Eternal Septembrists, opensources it's moderation code. o7 uses the the data to hunt for possibility theorems while lone humans herd diffusion generators to spray humanity with miniHN In the meantime, lesser entities find better realtime algos to extract/compress novel information from random fora

randysalami 2y ago

I’ve had an idea for a while called DoubleSign except it’s for political beliefs. It resolves the agreement issue by indexing users with other users that believe the same thing as them e.g. socialists are grouped with socialists, fascists with fascists, etc. but on a more granular level. By making it transparent and obvious unlike algorithmic echo chambers, people know where they are, and immediately achieve consensus and can organize for productive aims rather than bicker and in-fight. There are many more mechanics and concepts but that’s the high-level.

patrickTs 2y ago
This actually seems cool, but it would be difficult to exist as a tech company that explicitly exists to organize extremists. But yea, would probably lead to greater actual discussions than something like twitter, which seems to feed on the anger of its users.
- randysalami 2y ago
  Yes, definitely less of a company that exists to maximize profit but more of a public service for the greater good. Platforming bad people isn’t ideal but in my opinion, it’s important and those groups should look pathetic in comparison to the majority. I’d imagine memberships in the thousands while more popular beliefs have hundreds of thousands. At the end of the day, they are our fellow countrymen and we all need to know where we stand. If they were somehow the majority, that doesn’t reflect poorly on application but poorly on the society we live in. It’s like a mirror. I also want to add that it exists to organize practical action. In these indexes, there would exist mechanisms to organize people politically in the real world with direction and funding. I think how there are so many local elections that go unopposed or have meager voting turnout. These elections could be displayed and individual indexes could actually crowdfund and run candidates on their behalf. People which might never vote in these elections all the sudden are realizing that 500 people in their small town believe the exact same thing as them (not just go blue or go red) and can actually !win! an election. Their candidate is now elected and a direct member of their index which they can talk to and have advocate for them. The big idea is the bottom up approach could eventually lead to the platform getting senators or governors elected by users of the network if indexes become large enough and potentially threaten the traditional two party system when people realize they don’t stand alone in their distinct beliefs and can do something about it. Pretty cool and pretty powerful (:

gsf_emergency_2 2y ago

Here's one vision: HN, after it's been overwhelmed by Eternal Septembrists, opensources it's moderation code. o7 uses the the data to hunt for possibility theorems while lone humans herd diffusion generators to spray humanity with miniHN In the meantime, lesser entities find better realtime algos to extract/compress novel information from random fora