I'm guessing the plan is to evolve this into some sort of a web service. "Algorithms" have gotten a bad rep because of big tech, but if it's opensource, gives people freedom of choice, and doesn't skew towards one side whether it's Trump or Biden or Kim Jong Un, it IS free speech.
If gatekeepers start deciding search results for millions of people, then it goes the other way (what Google has become today).
If the idea of "information rating system" is to allow anyone to rate anyone without worrying about being censored, it's probably going in the right direction. I have no idea how this could be defined mathematically, or in code. But if you can do it, build it on top of Hive, facilitate discoverability, Hive might actually start competing against big tech.
You'd go into all sorts of questions like what validates a certain rating or identity etc. Dan got lazy and tried this with horrendous KYC for Voice. I think you're aiming for something better, more objective. I have questions like what stops someone with a lot resources from controlling a group of bots to create a fake network? Or what IS identity in this system? What gives one rating more relevance to me vs another rating?
Hive voting and "trending" right now is nothing more than "who's the richest person on Hive and what does he/she think?" It has zero relevance to me. Posts like this kinda make me think there's potential for something more enticing. I'd love to see more details laid out and perhaps opensource code?
The basis of it wouldn't be a web service, but a peer-to-peer network for exchanging information and associated opinions about that data. However, web services could certainly built on top of it, just like you see web sites built on top of Hive, that offer different ways to look at the underlying data.
The underlying protocol would definitely be open-sourced. For sites built on top of it, the choice of open-sourcing would be up to each operator. But I see the most valuable and trustworthy analysis being done by open-source software being run on computers controlled by each individual user.
One of the aims of this idea is indeed to operate as a better alternative to censorship. I believe the current calls for censorship are the wrong solution to a real problem: the problem of media manipulation in the form of bots, paid shills, etc. Centralized censorship is very dangerous because it puts too much power into too few hands. But the power of a few people to manipulate the information supplied to a lot of people is probably equally dangerous, especially when the information sources can magnify the power of their speech so that it appears to come from many people (e.g. using bots). They are two sides of the same coin.
There's various algorithms that can be used to detect a fake network made up of bots, but this is a somewhat technical topic, so I'm reserving the discussion for a future post.
thanks. i already see people freaking out but i don't see much of an issue with the idea itself. in fact i think it could be something that saves hive.
It's predictable that some people would freak out, I think. I suspect that the more someone's brand is that of an "out of the box" thinker (regardless of the reality of that assessment), the more likely they don't like to imagine that someone may be rating what they say or publishing that rating. Unfortunately, that also goes for con artists.
What's amusing so far is I see one case where two obviously contradictory arguments are used simultaneously to attack the idea. I can already imagine the response when I discuss how computers could help spot cases of cognitive dissonance.