I think curation (of said pluralities) would be possible on social media (like it's possible for example on Wikipedia), but the interactions are effectively owned (controlled) by the media owner, and they don't necessarily want the participants to have that power.
Yeah, this is very true. I may have overstated my initial idea. When I think more about it, maybe what I'm looking for is handcrafted curation, but that let's anyone share their curation speccs and discover relevant things to curate from. To me, that suggests some kind of algorithmic component, maybe in the form of search, voting, etc., but I wouldn't necessarily want the whole thing driven by either machine or mob.
I like this idea of a platform for curating content. I'm imagining something like Reddit (multiple, unrelated subreddits with independent moderators) but where only hand-selected discussions can be seen?
It's intriguing, because it would still suffer from bias (like any platform) but maybe the diversity of moderators would neutralize that a bit, and maybe you'd see more cross-pollination between groups because of the quality of the discussion.
Given 1) how hard it is to bootstrap a new social media platform and 2) the resurgence of independent blogging, I'm wondering if a prototype could come in the form of a pluggable comment system, but where you hand curate the comments that show up (or could even feature them in a subsequent blog post)? Something as easy to set up as Disqus, but OSS and designed to de-escalate rather than escalate conversations.
How would you set it up? The decentralized world doesn't really have a great system for curation at this point (unless you can point to a counterexample!), and so I'm in favor of any sort of playing around with decentralized voting/curation until we find something that seems to be working well.
None of us function in this way. While part of the solution does have to involve people becoming better at vetting their information-sources, it is equally important to acknowledge that for everyone to do this individually would be absolutely impossible given time constraints.
What we need, fundamentally, is a media environment that can harness the collective capacity of humans to vet and debate new information in an organized fashion that can be trusted. This site is a good example where a knowledgeable community, and the simple mechanism of votes does some automatic, crowd-based content curation. But the Reddit-like model is very basic - so much more could possibly be done to allow individual users to contribute to a collective process of knowledge-building.
I think we need more development and discussion devoted to what kind of systems could be designed to encourage transparency, quality, and critical analysis in our news-making.
I've previously considered some kind of social website built around the idea of annotating arbitrary sections of existing content instead of replying postwise. I can't help but suspect it'd deteriorate into a Derrida-esque anarchy of words, though.
Mmm...impartial curation is certainly difficult to find online. I also wonder how it is in today's political climate compared with 10 years ago - even with teachers. Probably the biggest challenge to the whole concept. I think any system needs to be designed without a reliance on such an authority. But then all you have is some kind of voting or reputation system. How do you develop a karma system optimized for impartiality - that's something for me to sleep on.
> people would be teamed up so as to collaboratively come up with the strongest argument against their own beliefs.
I have very conservative, and very liberal friends... I myself lean libertarian, which puts my conservative on some issues and liberal on others... so, there is definitely a need for curation for quality, and diversity of opinion.
I wonder if privacy conscious people will eventually start feeding their posts into locally-run LLMs or something, and posting the output.
Or better yet, replace social media with LLM’s, instead of reading individual posts you discuss topics with a sort of artificial gestalt average user. Maybe let people “join” a gestalt by tagging their discussions.
Then we can let the gestalts argue amongst themselves!
It don't think it is possible with a format like Twitter - I can imagine something like Wikipedia, but with sources limited to scientific publications, where each person improves upon a shared document.
Maybe Google wave is a better fit, allowing rich non-text items to enter it.
On Twitter you will have each person fight for their side, and you will never see a convergent product.
Of course this answer (and your question) presupposes that we are trying to achieve some form of shared consensus, whereas on Twitter, it is really two or more sides of a culture war fighting and wars are zero or negative sum games. If we are trying to find the truth I benefit even if every theory I had was wrong, because it still helped us get to the one that works, but in a war if I don't win I am sure to lose.
I love the idea of adding some way to have crowd bias and not all mlent alone curating. Not that I think you’ll be corrupt, but more that popular opinion is _often_ good.
There is so much room for different approaches here, I don't think anyone has a solution at the moment. What I'm proposing is just a directed search for a solution. I don't think we know enough to rule one out either.
For instance, maybe it involves employing a large number of people (maybe Amazon Turk style), piecing together commentary on shared subjects from varied sources (e.g. different newspapers)
—not that I think that is a particularly good solution, I just mean to point out the potential range of solution-types possible here.
I'm wondering how popular media sites could apply to their comments sections some of the things Wikipedia is doing. For example, imagine commenters divided into two opposing camps over a controversial issue discussed in a news report. A separate discussion is organized to create a report on the issue using the Wikipedia process and rules. Any commenter can contribute, and it is guided by (perhaps volunteer) editors. Such reports then get aggregated in a separate section of the site...
Could something like this actually 1) create value for the media by engaging users and generating content 2) elevate the discourse between readers and 3) actually make the media less biased over time as it is repeatedly called out for partisan slant in its editorial and reporting?
You have me thinking about kind of a cool board idea. 150 person twitter boards. Cap it at 150. People in that group can all vote on their own moderation, they can't interact with groups in other boards through quote tweeting or voting, though obviously they can copy paste.
You might get racist boards, but then its easy to get rid of all of them at once.
I have no way to distribute anything. I tried to do my own annotations board on literature but no one joined. I just think it sounds cool to be in a personable board like that.
agree! It’s a challenging problem to solve. Im working on a new project that’s a sort of hybrid between twitter/slack/discord, and actively thinking about these issues... Still young but my aim is both scale and nuanced convo! (example post https://sqwok.im/p/TU2ba6D-iDEYuQ)
Agreed. You aren't going to get this to work with Wikipedia. But I could see some utility on the small scale (if it weren't easy to break with conflicts). A Discourse install for local discussion in an oppressive regime run across a few hundred commodity computers could be pretty hard to shut down and reasonable to have work for 50k people, the weakness here is that one bad actor could disrupt it just by flooding it with valid but conflicting writes (not to mention being able to just issue deletes against all the state if all actors are treated equally)
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