[EM] Proportional hierarchy

[Rob Lanphier]

On Wed, 2006-08-23 at 23:14 -0400, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
> At 09:55 PM 8/23/2006, Rob Lanphier wrote:
> 
> >My solution would be to come up with a hierarchical filtering
> >mechanism, where all users are placed (via election method described
> >below) in small groups of 6-10 people.  The leaders of each of these
> >groups would themselves be members of small groups, up to the top of
> >the hierarchy. Members of each group see all posts by all other
> >members.  Either the leader or a majority of the group can then vote
> >to promote items to a higher tier.
> 
> Congratulations, Rob. You have now reached the point in thinking 
> about this problem that I was at about twenty years ago. I don't 
> think you need to take twenty years to go further. :-)
>
> (Well, you have gone into details that I didn't consider, perhaps 
> because I came to a conclusion that voting was entirely unnecessary 
> except in a polling sense, voting need not have the ability to 
> control anything at all. But that takes going into the Free 
> Association concept, which is about as thoroughly libertarian as one 
> could imagine.
> 
> Delegable Proxy I see as a communication method, an essential aspect 
> of which is how it filters information. You have described, more or 
> less, with slightly different numbers, a DP network, including a bit 
> of how it would communicate. I've assumed that proxies would learn to 
> run a mailing list for their clients, just as you have described.

Congratulations, you just insulted me by telling me I'm 20 years behind
you, and assuming that I'm trying to solve the same problem you are.
Ignoring, of course, the fact that I wrote about something like DP 11
years ago (it's now in the "1996" section because that's where I lumped
a bunch of my old eskimo.com pages, but I posted this on Hypernews on
May 30, 1995):
http://robla.net/1996/steward/

I'm talking about something different than DP, on purpose.  I'm looking
to create a hierarchy in a comment system, based on a set of ranked
preferences.  The problems being solved are:
1.  Information filtering
2.  Giving people the sport of climbing the hierarchy (more on this in a
bit)

The reason is this.  In these large communities, the easy out is to
delegate to someone who is already a popular figure in the community.
It becomes difficult to find those that are most closely affiliated.

So, the idea behind this is to create a system that puts people everyone
into small groups.  It also automatically divides the load among the
ambitious.

Back to my "sport" point.  It seems a lot of sites try to encourage good
behavior by granting elevated status to those that make valuable
contributions.  This becomes a bit of sport...there's competition to get
higher status, which in turn causes more contribution.

The problem is that the contribution is geared more toward quantity than
quality, because that's the way the incentives are.  Most of the time,
only time spent actually commenting is rewarded...good filtering isn't.
Yet both are important roles.

So, this system is designed to reward both commenting and filtering.

Rob