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Is who I mute relevant to the commons (scarcity in the form oflitandtop)?
Yes, because that mute is something you don't have in common with everyone else.
If you can protect yourself from an insult to the community, you will (most likely) not take further action against the insult, leaving others exposed to the insult (until they each take action against it themselves).
Forgive me. I know this is a subtle and abstract thing.
Still suffering fever so do bear with me here, I may hallucinate, lol. Regardless, something feels off about that statement.
I think that just like my view of the top content, my sats, my time and my state of mind aren't something I have in common with everyone else either, as they are mine. So expanding the commons to include each individual may be dangerous. The individuals interact with the commons but aren't part of it, as this isn't communism (I hope, lol.)
There has to be a distinction between the resource that is part of the commons, and the user of said resource, or the user becomes enslaved to the system. Take away individual preference on what to interact with, and life will quickly become hellish, because then everything is a chore. Must downzap, must interact with people I dislike, must be pissed off all the time, must be insulted... sounds pretty nasty to me.
So I'd turn it around: if the system cannot protect me against being insulted, then the system is broken. If the system needs me to spend money after being insulted to not be reminded that I was just insulted, then the system is broken. Because the system does not have my back. It is rigged against me, and in favor of my adversary; after all, I am forced to read their insult, so they have guaranteed success, whereas I become the eternal plaything being messed with, as I'd have no defense.
I agree that there are tons of wrong ways to solve this problem. I'm not proposing a solution and I get that no one wants what harms them.
This problem: how do we share your (and others') defenses against insults with lurkers and new stackers?
THE problem: how do we scale sharing without resorting to trust (or as you say, the evil of oligarchs) or more personalization (ie sharing less)?
What I'm learning, I think, is that we/people don't want to share in the absolute sense. We/people want the benefits of sharing but only to the extent that it isn't too costly.
If this makes sense, and absolute sharing is wrongunism, then I think SN needs to either:
- personalize well beyond mutes (ie reduce sharing generally)
- deputize people (eg reputation/trust; ie reduce sharing power)
- come up with some way of marginalizing insults without (1) or (2)
Okay, but what if "insult" is subjective? Note, I'm not talking about spam here, because that's a different issue by nature, and every wave of it should eventually wear off as long as there's a cost to it.
Take the war topic as an extreme. Some people are interested in it. Others are explicitly not. Yet again others are not for or against the existence of the topic in general (probably/hopefully the majority.) So from where I'm sitting, in a commons there must be a place for it. Doesn't have to be at the top and it definitely doesn't have to be in "my top", for me, but since there are people interested in the topic, it should have a place. Not be downzapped until no one can ever see it unless they have the item id/link - that's also disrespectful of the time (and sats) someone put into posting something.
more personalization (ie sharing less)
Can you explain this particular point a bit more? How is more personalization (on the consumer side) equivalent of sharing less (on the producer side? Or as in sharing less sats?)
what if "insult" is subjective?
It is. Arguably everything is. How many subjects experiencing something as an insult are required to consider the insult objective? 51%? 100%?
since there are people interested in the topic, it should have a place
How much of a place should it have if it's one person interested in a topic particular piece of content?
Can you explain this particular point a bit more?
Best I can do is a crude metaphor. On the same night, each k00b and Elon Musk are throwing a party. They've invited 1,000 people to consume media in their homes.
Elon's theme is "personalization": Everyone at Elon's party gets an iPad and can consume whatever media they choose.
k00b's theme is "sharing": Everyone at k00b's party gets a remote control to a single TV.
As you'd expect, people at k00b's party complain that someone(s) are aggressively changing the channel to rage bait war slop and they'd like to mute that channel. k00b obliges and, now, depending on the remote control in your hand, you see something other than the shared, default channel.
Hence, the TV is no longer shared. The channel you see is personalized based on the channels you've opt'd out of.
Further, k00b and his guests have declared global defaults biased against one channel or another "evil" and "wrong" because it is subjective. Thus, new people joining k00b's party are forced to watch rage bait war slop - everyone who knows better muted the rage bait war slop, ceding the default shared channel to rage bait war slop. New people who are not interested in rage bait war slop must find the channel mute button (and personalize their experience) before they decided to leave.
They'll most likely choose to leave, won't they?
How many subjects experiencing something as an insult are required to consider the insult objective?
This is a nice one, but I think we cannot make a subjective thing objective by democracy, that is exactly what makes me shudder in life for a long time now - we're still a pre-truth civilization as we have not been able to consistently separate fact from fiction in day-to-day life. This is why we haven't reached the information age; we're still tribal, territorial primates with a long evolution ahead of us.
What you can do is measure consensus. But that is also not what is happening on SN now, as "money is the moderator", not "stackers' collective opinion is the moderator". The distinction being that SN is open loop, so there is no limit to moderation power other than Bitcoin's built-in limits (assuming that there is no paper bitcoin, and that assumption is likely faulty.)
How much of a place should it have if it's one person interested in atopicparticular piece of content?
In my personal utopian scenario: in a decaying position in global new, a slower decaying position in territory new, and since no one is interested in it, the bottom of all ranked views. If everyone muted the author, then it will never rise to prominence because it won't get zaps.
But if you were asking: how much of a place does it have right now? Then the answer is: the place the author is willing to buy. And this is the issue here. We don't want people manipulating their own ranks with sockpuppets, so instead we gave everyone a button to manipulate their rank. Let me apply that to your metaphor:
As you'd expect, people at k00b's party complain thatsomeone(s)self-proclaimed millionaire(s) are aggressively changing the channel by outbidding to manipulate the ranking system to rage bait war slop and they'd like to mute that channel. k00b obliges and, now, depending on the remote control in your hand, you see something other than the shared, default channel.
The root cause of this problem isn't the mute. The root cause is the boost (or sockpuppet upzapping in lieu of boost - same outcome) and the root enabler of that is open loop money being the unbounded moderator. The muting is just a personal defense mechanism, and I think that undue weight is given to the usage of it. I counted less than 10 stackers (maybe even less than 5) that were actively trying to selflessly counter the big downzap war earlier this year. If it doesn't happen organically, it won't happen as a forced mechanism. If forced, the established base may leave, which is even worse than the new stacker leaving, as the established base provides the content. This will only make it harder to fight "rage bait war slop".
I wish I were better at math, so that I could define a formula that shows the impact of unbounded open-loop. The soothing effect of sum(log10()) ranking we had before no-trust is truly missed, but I suspect that it simply masked the problem by flattening the curve, instead of solving the underlying problem.
sum(log10()) was great but it relied on counting people, because it favors sybils, and we counted people via trust, which is not perfect either.
I think we all want something democracy-like. As media/news consumers, we want to know what consensus is. Whether we realize it or not, we want algorithms to count people. On the internet, absent KYC, there are few if any objective ways to do that.
Bitcoin's consensus relies on bottom-up economic activity to achieve consensus but, unlike SN, economic activity is the point of bitcoin.
but it relied on counting people, because it favors sybils
I remember - we discussed it when you shipped no-trust and it makes sense that in lieu of anti-sybil mechanics there is no such dampening possible on rank.
As media/news consumers, we want to know what consensus is.
Yes, and this is why it's worth talking about this. I still agree with reputation being a potentially useful tool in this, just it is hard to meet both that and your ELI5 requirement for post ranking, and then to make it non-hierarchical, avoid bubbles / winner-takes-it-all schemes.
I'm still running my mute experiment. I prolonged it because it's bliss. I have not muted any new bots though, and I'm considering removing the existing ones from my list. That wasn't what made this bliss. What did was muting "top" stackers that waste my time. Probably I am wasting yours, so feel free to mute me if I am bothering you. Or just say "zip it opti" - I can handle it.
My point in bringing this up was to note that there are a number of signals that currently don't get captured by SN's money is the moderator system. If money is the moderator truly isn't working, might it not be because of this?
I've fallen pretty hard for thinking about SN as a market because I think it is true that no one knows what the front page of SN should look like. The problem of what the feed should look like feels like a classic example of something that only a market can solve well.
When I look around at the world, things that distort markets seem to be the source of so much trouble -- why would it make sense to add things that distort the market for visibility on SN?
I admit I am susceptible to prioritizing theory over reality. Sometimes people need to say, "Scoresby! That isn't how the world works! Stop it!"
I think this is true: social media has a hard problem to solve because users want to see good and interesting things but users also want to have their stuff get seen.
To date, social media platforms try to solve this with moderators and algorithms. Both of these are akin to command economies. It's like asking a politboro to predict how many loaves of bread to bake or how many nails to manufacture. It's very hard to get right.
I think it is clear that unless social media platforms kyc (which is an even worse evil than moderation in my book), voting or relying on any signal that isn't costly is going to result in a distorted platform -- creating sock puppets is too easy.
So: money is the moderator.
But there's a problem, which you point out further down the thread: it kind of looks like rich rank. Highly motivated people who want to boost their own content can out spend the community who mostly just want to be a casual user of the platform.
I really want to figure out what the root problem is here. Is is that signals on the internet are not costly? or is it that the internet makes the commons too big? (people don't want to be at a party with all 7 or 8 billion other people on the world).
Social media isn't just a bunch of invite-only chat rooms. People seem to want some amount of open public square-ness. But an open public square to which anyone in the world can come is kind of an insane thing to keep pleasant and tidy.
A market solution is interesting because maybe it will allow a better experience to emerge.
Isn't it the case that what a stacker doesn't want to see and how badly they don't want to see it are very valuable signals for the community? possibly as valuable as what a stacker is willing to zap?
I'm probably taking the marketization of social media much farther than it is useful to take it, but I think it's a useful thought experiment, at least.
Exactly. But, I think you should put it in perspective of "the commons" as @k00b puts it. Is who I mute relevant to the commons (scarcity in the form of
litandtop)?I don't think it is, but maybe I missed something there. My rationale would be that who I choose to not see does not influence the top ranked posts overall, it just changes my perception of it, but only mine.
The only thing you miss is my downzap. So it is better to not mute stackers, and mute posts, imho.