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6
technology - - (+5|-0)
Idea: a change-oriented community(self)
2 commentsbyLarrySwinger

+3 so I'll use it on an important post.

One thing I don't like about link aggregators is that users are ultimately consumers of information, like they're designed to keep people occupied with stuff that grabs their attention. We can see this happening here with the recent increase in userbase and volume of content: it's too much to keep up with and we have to filter. And even if we filter, at the end of the day, we get informed about some matters but knowledge which isn't acted upon is useless.

Here's my idea for a different kind of community, one oriented on effecting change. It's completely different from what we're used to. First of all, it's invite-based even for viewing, for having it public invites adversaries to act upon the information and AI to scrape it. So think of an invite-only message board. Why that? Because the first step is to agree on a worldview and a vision for what kind of changes must be effected. We need to discuss what the important issues and solutions are.

Such a community would have project management integrated into it. That should be the main aspect of it: an area that helps people identify goals to work on, reminds them of their current tasks, lets them suggests goals/tasks to others, etc. People should also be paired up for working on goals together as that increases the success rate significantly. There's prioritization of tasks and a calendar is included as well.

There's also a section for getting to know users better so we can find out what they're good at and what tasks to delegate to them. Getting to know each other intimately is also good for social cohesion.

Because it's invite-only, it should be an on-going goal to identify new, competent people to recruit. And people should be free to apply for access via a motivation letter.

In a way, this operates like a secret society or intelligence agency. There's no harm in being like those so long as we have good goals and operate more horizontally instead of hierarchical. I'm not sure if democratic is the right form of governance because then every new recruit has the same voting power as the senior members. The important thing is that humans (and only humans) should agree on overarching goals to set, then a mechanism should be put in place to ensure that tasks / smaller goals are in alignment with the overarching goals. So that is the extent of what should be covered by votes, by the way. By a weighed voting system that preserves the original character of the community (a la Hacker News) seems best, but applied to todo items instead of content to promote / censor.

As a secretive organization (I prefer this term over the others as it's more neutral / doesn't remind people of some dark practices), there should be support for e2ee. The server-client model, while robust, creates a single point of vulnerability for cyber criminals. I'm not sure about the right approach here as decentralized software tends to be unreliable. But TLS-based communication with a server may not be enough; e2ee should be supported so that individuals can communicate off the record and all information can be shared selectively. Large-scale e2ee may not be practical (although Signal achieves this). Possibly it's okay for the semi-public part to be protected simply with TLS although it should also be encrypted at rest. This part remains to be explored.

Finally, there is a section for content sharing as well, but it shouldn't take prominence. Content should be shared selectively with users based on how relevant it is to them. I.e. we manual select users we know to share it with, like what Facebook provides and Google+ used to. There can be tags / topics that users manually subscribe to, and all content can also be shared with that specific tag. This should work like ping groups on rdrama. Perhaps it shouldn't use notifications with any bright colour because that creates dopamine addiction, that's what we're trying to move away from. The index page for this section should just be a (chronological) stream of content that's been shared with them, with a separate stream of content from topics they're subscribed to. Or it can be more like a hyperlinked wiki that people contribute to.

Okay, I don't want to overburden the topic. There's more to explore such as what software to use for this. But first I want to gauge interest. What do you guys think of this idea?

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[-]x0x72(+2|0)

I like the idea. We could do some of that here. Right out the gate you said something I think about.

One thing I don't like about link aggregators is that users are ultimately consumers of information.

I've been thinking about this. Is this an effect of design or an effect of how they get used? This is one of the reasons why I've said to folks that I want GoatMatrix to be a more project oriented site. There have been pros and cons to growing. In theory it would be great to have it all. When goatmatrix was slower it was easier to share what you were working on and I wasn't the only one who did it. Almost all of the first users of the site were project oriented people with things they were working on and telling people about.

But the problem is news is so much easier to post, can be posted at high volumes, and gets just as upvoted. And I'm not saying that news is bad. I'm just saying it sucks that it can drown out other things a forum can be. Things that goatmatrix was and that I'd love to see it be with a larger pool of people.

I think what you are saying in making a change-oriented community and what I'm saying of a project-oriented community aren't the exact same thing, but they sit on the same side of a specturm. I don't think a forum has to be only one thing. There are a lot of good things a forum can be. They can be a place for posting projects, or talking about ideas, or trying to organize change, or trying to share and engage in content that will improve people's lives, or catching up with events, or learning new things. The problem is if they are good, how good? Do they rank against each other? If I were to rank them that would be my own opinion but it would go like this, and crossing into the negative.

  • posting projects
  • organizing real action
  • learning new things
  • talking about ideas
  • self-improvement
  • funny/entertainment
  • the news
  • complaining about reality
  • arguments with strangers online
  • peacocking assholeness

The news is at the very bottom of what can be counted as being the good side. And for some it largely serves as a conversation starter for the last three. So the question is how do we run a site where of course you can post the news but there is space for the things above it? I have a few thoughts on how a group might acheive it.

The most simple and maybe the weakest is maybe we don't need more news. Of course we want some news. But more is not always better.

But that outlook does nothing if the even better solution isn't happening which is the things above it need to be happening at some rate if they are going to compete. Getting those things to compete with news is hard when they don't even show up. So be the change we are trying to see in the world and post some of those things. It's hard because a lot of those take real thought while posting news articles takes zero effort.

The last two thoughts I have may sound negative but aren't meant to be at all. One is to block users that post a lot of news. That may sound like I dislike them. I don't. It doesn't impact them if you block them. It's just shaping what you want to see. No harm in that. And I think more people want to see the things above news when they really think about it, rather than interacting with the news every day. But that yeilding a good outcome requires some of point 2 happens. GoatMatrix used to have a lot more of that content. It is ok to talk about ideas you are working on. Maybe we need to increase the percent of people who are working on their own ideas. We can help you with that. Just ask.

The last thought also might seem negative until we look at it closely. It's voting. There is an information problem with votes. Let's say everyone hypothetically agreed with the order of my list (I know you might not, but it's a hypothetical). And let's say everyone agreed with my line of where good ends and bad begins. And everyone upvoted everything they thought was good and downvoted everything they thought was bad. It wouldn't solve the problem because the news is universally seen as good, gets universally upvoted the same as any other good content, and so better content never outshines it. It's an information problem. People's votes don't actually encode what is the best. They are statistically very flat. 100% upvote rate on both.

So how can you fix it without making voting much more complicated? Judge them on different standards. Be liberal with downvotes with news and sparing with upvotes. And be liberal with upvotes for things that are above it and sparing with downvotes.

The trick is for people to get over getting a downvote and not taking it personally. Then we can beat that information problem. And also because of proximity here people can shape what they see with what they downvote. So it's more reason to do it and more reason to not get hung up about getting one. You really can downvote the news to see less of it if you want a more change-oriented site or any of the other things. We just have to get rid of that emotional cost of getting a downvote.

So is news bad? It depends on the definition. If an investment returns 1% a year is it a good investment. It is profitable. But if you have an investment available at 6% then the opportunity cost of the 1% investment exceeds its value. So with news being on the edge and its opportunity cost it's good while being bad. It's not something you'd want to dominate if you want to make something that is better than the standard.

I know I've been pissy about trying to do better lately. You have to see things from my perspective. I've seen a site that had really good personal content, but maybe a little too litte of it, that was different than a standard news dump and argument section. And I realized that's a really cool thing. Really cool. I think a daily events and reaction site can be fun and I'd be happy to run it. But I want one shot at saying, guys, there is something even cooler we could run and I've seen it work. And I don't think numbers ruin it. You just need new folks who only know what they have seen before to buy in on it. At the end of the day a site is just a tool. But what a tool really is is how you use it. If you use a monkey wrench as a hammer then it is a hammer. But a site is a social tool with many people having hands on it. If there are people who don't know how else a tool can be used how can you convince them to try the cooler thing? Instead of beating bolts with the thing we could turn bolts with the thing. And that would be really cool.

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[-]LarrySwinger0(0|0)

Is this an effect of design or an effect of how they get used?

Design. It's the design that invites users to simply drop content without adding their own comment to it, and that results in a high volume of content that other users are then made to sift through. There's nothing actionable about most content. It's just meant to inform people. It's the community aspect on le reddit that comes from the will of its userbase, in spite of the website's design. This is partially the agreeable nature of users that promotes community-type posts, but also the autonomy of subreddits that can self-organize with their own mods, rules, wikis, and pinned posts. Reddit's design promotes communal aspects insofar as it lets users moderate subreddits, but its sorting method still makes it focused on news.

So this is why I didn't post this to /c/ideas4matrix, because it's really a different concept not meant to be applied to this website, but as a separate project. By defaulting to an existing design you inherit things that are no longer applicable. It makes you stuck in the mindset of adapting what already exists. To arrive at a design in line with your goals, you need to start from scratch.

Check out this program. This gives you a better idea of what I mean. It's a self-hosted, multi-user GTD app. Something else that's cool is Habitica.

Now think of that combined with Retroshare, which provides encrypted communication, link aggregation, file sharing, forums, and microblog-like channels. The combination of these two softwares really provides all that's needed. There's a cultural aspect of getting a large group of people to use two different softwares (since task management is the one thing lacking in Retroshare), but that shouldn't be impossible to overcome. Also, Retroshare solves the news problem by keeping it separated in what they call Boards (link aggregation). Forums is where people would showcase personal projects.

@JasonCarswell and I have tested Retroshare extensively. The process of adding someone is too complicated for large-scale adoption I would say, also there are no real phone clients, the Android one only supports chat and we couldn't get it to work. So that's kind of sad. But it's the only program that's as feature complete.

In fact, I forgot to mention that the main area should be more like a Wiki. Instead of the latest news, the focus should be on perennial information. That format helps to on-board with informing new users what the group is all about and where the priorities lie. Jason already hosts https://projex.wiki. So maybe a combination of that and GTD software works although it still isn't in accord with the original vision. It requires dedicated software.

One more point about your focus on personal projects. It's nice, of course, but it's individualist and still mostly about leisure. What I have in mind is more collectivist in nature. What do we dedicate our resources on? How can we work together on something?

There are two existing communities that are like what I'm describing. One is LessWrong. Another is a private group by Asha Logos that exists on Matrix (the protocol).

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