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I don't know if I'm just lazy, but there is no way I would use something like this.



Yes, but it would save everyone else from having to read your drivel.


Can you honestly see yourself ranking people based on how many levels of the people they ranked you want included in your white list? Do most people even use the filtering capabilities available today? I don't think I've ever blacklisted anyone on a forum, even if they drove me absolutely insane.


Can you honestly see yourself joining a knitting community?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ravelry


That's different. People join knitting communities because they enjoy knitting. Very, very few people enjoy rating things just for the sake of rating them. People join knitting communities, but not rating communities. People rate as a means to an end. The end has to be worth the hassle of the means. This rating system sounds substantially more complicated than anything in popular use today, and for me, even what's in use today isn't worth it. I don't think I'm in the minority in not using blacklists and similar capabilities. If people won't even do that, how will you get them to go through some of the complications of this system?


Is there a way that hierarchical whitelisting could be derived from up/down votes like on HN and reddit?


For a user of which you have voted on many posts, we can define "interesting" directly. If we use I(you, u) to denote our proxy of the chance that you find user u interesting, we define I(you, u) = (number of upvotes to this user) / (number of total votes on all users).

For any user u on which you have not cast a lot of votes, calculate I(you, u) as the sum of I(you, u') I(u', u) over all users u' (other than you or u), plus the above formula.

There are some issues with this: it'll take some work to make it perform, and it strongly favours established accounts. But if you can solve the first issue, you can probably live with the second - karma has the same problem.


If so, then that would be really cool. I'm just saying I don't think the average user will do it on their own.


You are not asking when and why.

Why?

Forums have a life cycle. They start small, full of interesting people. Hoi polloi find them and join, to spectate and snark and lark. The signal to noise ratio falls and the interesting people leave.

Forums self limit by drowning in mediocrity. If some mechanism could prevent this a forum could grow larger and have more interesting people on it. There may well be a critical mass of interesting people that no forum has reached yet. Failing that it would still be a big win if a forum could persist. Having to move on and find somewhere else is a pain and people would use a complicated system if it actually delivered on the promise of keeping the signal to noise ratio up. What is at issue is the individual signal to noise ration, what you see given your white list. It doesn't matter if the forum as a whole goes down the tubes as long as the interesting people never find out. It also doesn't matter if people disagree about what is signal and what is noise, each to his own white list.

When?

Outer Circle starts small. So participants can simply use the ALL option, and not bother with rating. However, the Outer Circle client should offer each user vote up and vote down puttons. These are private. As the forum grows and ages, two things happen: there is plenty to read, the signal to noise ration falls. Each participant has a breaking point at which he asks the system to use the his personal voting tallies to auto-build him a white list.

Perhaps it should include those with positive totals and leave out those with negative totals. That could be done with putting all the positives on level zero, but if the forum is thriving the list will be thousands long. No. It is important that the auto-build takes some time to discover some structure so that it can build a hierarchical list.

There is a social science hypothesis lurking here. Outer Circle assumes that the authors you rate very highly will read authors that you rate highly and that there is a clustering of preferences sufficiently tight that hierarchical sharing of white lists becomes an efficient way of constructing and managing large white lists.

There after rating is pain-driven. When the signal to noise ration that you experience drops too low you think to yourself "Outer Circle is dying, where do I go to instead?" Then you remember your white list. You have continued to upvote and downvote, it is a habit, even though it doesn't seem to do anything. Now you can ask your Outer Circle client why the forum has become crap and it can tell you the paths by which you see the articles and suggest deepenings, shallowings, and directings to improve your experience.

I think that there is a threshold effect. If the rating system is elaborate enough to keep the forum from dying it is worth the hassle, but a slightly simply system, which merely slows the decline and thus prolongs the agony is worthless.


You assume that online communities die because there are too many (sub-)mediocre people. I admit that this is a reasonable hypothesis that explains part of what can be observed, but it is a rather big leap to get to "a community will not fail as long as its populated by the elite". Even the elite has a finite attention span, after all, and any sufficiently large community is likely to splinter into sub-communities anyway. Either that, or people have to stop posting all but their best posts - and that does not seem likely.


I think the take-away point is that this system would provide a way to have (one or more) communities within the community. The various subcommunities would overlap and cross-pollinate, so to speak, but if there were a small community of serious thinkers, they'd generate interesting talk on their own. This doesn't exclude the larger community - in fact, it permits the existence of a larger community to continue, and occasionally to cross over into the inner community.

I'm not expressing this well, on reading back over it. But I think you're miscontruing the point. It's not that online communities die because there are too many sub-par people; it's that that many sub-par people dilute the original community and everybody throws up their hands and finds another place. This allows the original community to persist amid the din.

'S perfect. I like it.


I was specifically responding to what I construed as "this will allow a critical mass of smart people to emerge/collaborate": due to people's finite attention span and inability to keep track of too many different people, there is a natural limit to the size of a community anyway, and it is possible that "elite" communities run into this bound before they achieve critical mass (which is rather nebulous anyway, but I interpret this as "genius happens".)

I'm really not trying to misconstrue your point, BTW; if it didn't interest me, I'd have stopped responding long ago, and I have better things to do than trolling.


This is an excellent explanation. I'm not 100% convinced, but I'm definitely more convinced than I was before.




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