Saving forums from themselves with shared hierarchical white lists

http://www.cawtech.demon.co.uk/outer-circle/core.html

by alan-crowe • 17 years ago

39 26 17 years ago

cawtech.demon.co.uk

wmf• 17 years ago

This is interesting but whitelists/blacklists worry me because newcomers will either see everything or nothing, both of which are pretty unfriendly.

alan-crowe6• 17 years ago

If it spreads by word of mouth, you can use your friend's white list. If you see everything you can pick the best of a dozen posts and then use the authors white list. Once you have a human written white list to start from you can manage the volume by controlling the depth that you descend the search tree, and start adding authors you like to your direct list. Every time you add an author to your direct list you chose a number to set a search depth with him as the tree root and his direct list as the first level, so I think you quickly take control and adjust the list to your taste.

I'm more worried about how a new author gets read. Nobody sees his comments because he is on nobodies white list. I guess there has to be a slush pile. When people get bored they can turn to the slush pile and maybe find a gem. Alternatively one may wish to see all the replies to ones own posts, not just those from the authors on ones white list. If that is common practice it gives a new author an audience of one simply by replying.

kurtosis• 17 years ago

I think this is a very serious possible problem with this sort of system, but there are ways around it. The system could take everyone's whitelist and derive a "public whitelist" that it can use to filter articles and comments for people that are new to the site and have unknown preferences. This "public whitelist" could be derived from an average of everyone's whitelist, with other heuristics thrown in. As the system learns what type of posts a new user prefers their whitelist is updated.

One can also imagine how a user could use a whitelist on their own posts to maintain a separation between the things they would say in public vs. their private thoughts (which others may find offensive or unpopular)

mustpax• 17 years ago

Maybe this is why Twitter works. You only see those you follow in your stream. You can't opt to see everything someone else is seeing, mostly because their platform can't really handle that sort of fan-out yet. But the basic idea of whitelisting is the same.

That's why Twitter's still fun for me regardless of how many social media consultants are around. I just don't follow them.

alan-crowe6• 17 years ago

I'm imagining Outer Circle being implemented as a peer to peer application. In my example Albert->Carol->David. That is Albert is reading David's posts because Albert has white listed Carol (at level one) and Carol has white listed David.

How does the text of David's post get from David's machine to Albert's machine? We already have routing built into the semantics of the white listing hierarch. Since Carol is reading David's posts, Albert can get them from Carol.

I've read that one of the issues with amateur web comics is that good ones become popular and the artist suddenly finds himself with bandwith bills to pay. A peer to peer implementation of Outer Circle could cause this problem if an author becomes popular by millions of fans putting him on their direct lists, but I think that the common case is that a popular author reaches a large audience because he has been picked up by a hundred influention Circlers who are read at two removes by the Outer Circle. So the tree structure will usually give the system good fan out just because few users will wish to manage a direct list of more than 50 or 100 and will therefore access the system through several layers of hierarchy.

lawrence• 17 years ago

Exactly. This problem is why the friending / follower / newsfeed format has won. Everyone's accountable for curating their own feed. Want to expand the universe? Allow friend of friend, or friend of friend of friend views.

DanielStraight5• 17 years ago

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

crystalis2• 17 years ago

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

DanielStraight5• 17 years ago

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.

JoachimSchipper7• 17 years ago

Have you considered PGP's web of trust?

PGP's web of trust shows that you can have a decentralized system without going full-blown peer to peer, and has many of the same issues with regard to trusting people and trusting people to trust people. It also shows that even this model - which is simpler than what you propose - has difficulty gaining acceptance.

I also don't see in what context you want to use this protocol, but there are a lot of fora that would be improved if only one had the ability to write Usenet-style killfiles (which can do a lot more than kill by author!). However, NNTP and SMTP clients largely already have these abilities to a sufficient level that you'll have a hard time displacing them, and web fora are very different and hard to script client-side.

alan-crowe6• 17 years ago

I've heard the phrase "web of trust" and googled it, but found something very different to what I have in mind.

There is a tradition, going back to The Well, of having a serious adult forum invaded by children and their poo, pee, belly, bum posts. The adult forum resists and is destroyed.

My idea is that the different users are all legitimate and that success comes through coexistance. By coexistance I mean obliviousness. Chrome-Dome posts a cerebral contribution of great erudition. Chuckle-Head replies with vulgar mockery. In a traditional forum Chrome-Dome is driven away by this. The traditional response is to try to find a way to drive Chuckle-Head away instead.

The problem is that it is Chuckle-Head who is the popular figure, read and admired by hundreds of lame brains. Chrome-Dome is read and admired by dozens. So systems of voting and karma end up reflecting the fact that the mob greatly out numbers the elite.

The vision driving Outer Circle is that Chrome-Dome is happy with a white list of authors of some intellectual pedigree. If Outer Circle is a success, with millions involved, Chrome-Dome's, err, corner of the circle has thousands of authors, more than he can actually read, so he never gets round to expanding his white list to the point that he sees Chuckle-Head's post. Chrome-Dome is oblivious to the vulgar mockery around him and is not driven away by it.

Simultaneously, no administrator is banning Chuckle-Head, and Chuckle-Head is not retaliating by organising a DDoS of the site. Why would he? He has white listed his mates and is larking about, mocking the occasion boring adult he stumbles across, and enjoying acting his age.

The goal of Outer-Circle is the coexistance of incompatibles through invisibility.

Suppose that Middle-Brow, whom Chrome-Dome reads, comes across Chuckle-Head's vulgar mockery and replies to it, complaining that it is rude. We don't want this making it visible to Chrome-Dome. That would be a failure of invisibility and might drive Chrome-Dome away.

On the other hand, Chrome-Dome isn't reading all the replies to his posts. Ordinarily when Middle-Brow replies to a reply to one of Chrome-Dome's posts, the Outer-Circle software should promote the middle post to Chrome-Dome's attention, least there be a break in the threading. So the fine detail, of letting Middle-Brow control whether his replies do or do not implicitly endorse the comments to which they are attached, is actually essential to the overall plan.

JoachimSchipper7• 17 years ago

I'm not convinced you understood what I was saying in the way I intended it to be understood, so let me clarify.

PGP's web of trust is designed to answer the question "is john@example.org who he says he is". A user is "valid" (in the above sense) if you have marked it as such, or if a sufficient number of users of sound judgement vouch for it. (There are multiple levels of "vouching", and the meanings of "of sound judgement" and "sufficient number" are user-configurable; and "users" are really "keys".)

By default, PGP believes that users who are vouched for as in the above model are valid but not of sound judgement (i.e. we don't let this users vouch for others), but you could easily change that.

The point I was trying to make is that, if you replace "PGP" by "Outer Circle" and define "valid" to be "worth reading", the above sounds a lot like what you want to achieve. It has also been deployed in the real world for quite a while, so you can see to what extent it has worked (it's rather succesful in a very small part of the population).

Additionally, PGP is effectively decentralized, even though day-to-day operation uses keyservers. This model is a lot easier than full peer-to-peer (which, in the presence of NAT, is probably not possible without centralized servers anyway), and a combination of clever crypto and fallback options means that PGP does not rely on keyservers. Look at the documentation for more details.

Notwithstanding the above, which is honestly intended to be good advice, I don't see how your system is ever going to become sufficiently widespread to be worth learning for the average user, and I don't really see the value in keeping a medium that's 99% nonsense usable for the last few erudite users - just let them migrate.

Saving forums from themselves with shared hierarchical white lists

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