@donw @jwz this is not related to any technology (unless you're just alluding to a person, then ignore the rest)
there's a specific type (to drastically simplify, think lawful good) that thrives on very hands-on, very detailed rule-making. they like to be useful, they like to punish transgressors, they don't like unrighteous who don't heed their warnings.
when they end in a position of a sole decision maker, which they frequently do, because they're driven by duty, the damage they end doing is immense.
(i think that any person managing their own mail server for longer than a decade would recognize the phenomenon)
@timbray @jwz @lwndow Hence my proposal for curation.
People subscribe to one or more curators who promise to find them content they are likely to 'like' and unlikely to 'dislike'. They are held accountable by the client suppressing results from poorly performing curators.
The curators take the like/dislike responses from a large number of users (a million say) and perform AI analysis to identify a much smaller number of orthogonal traits (hundreds). Each user is classified according to the extent to which their responses have a positive/negative correlation with the traits. This is then used to provide individualized recommendations for each user.
In this model, the people producing the spam will of course create a citation cartel liking the garbage as a sibyl attack on the system. But these responses will be identified as a separate trait which most users correlate negatively. So the fact that the spammer citation cartel is liking the post makes it less likely I will see it. Contrawise, the fact that Putin's people are disliking posts critical of the diminutive dictator will actually make it more likely I see them.
In this model, the instance you post from is irrelevant. Only the interactions of people whose responses closely correlate with your own are going to affect what you see. So the NAZIs will get feeds containing lots of the pathetic content they enjoy and I will see none of it.
@bobwyman @timbray @jwz @lwndow The key for me is preventing the ‘enshitification’ that @doctorow talks about.
What distinguishes the curators in my system from Facebook or Twitter is that if they fail me, I have a tool that will tell me immediately.
Of course, I am going to expect that a free service supported by adverts is going to contain less relevant content than one I pay for. But a curation service that starts playing the Zuckerburg game of filling my feed with posts by NAZIs just to try and provoke a response from me is going to end up down rated pretty quickly.
It is all about accountability. The curators in my system are accountable, the curators at Twitter and Facebook are not.
I am building a client. But probably won’t get round to making a curation service. Certainly not this year at least.
@Elucidating @jwz @lwndow @timbray there were a few, that one was very badly moderated.
…the best block list i have ever seen was the one created at the time of irish 8th amendment repeal campaign: very well vetted, and with appeal mechanisms. i never had false positives from that one, and it happened to be quite effective against the general terfery too.
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