RE: Steemit and the Web of Trust: A Potential Love Story
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. There are several issues with these kinds of approaches that have shown themselves through existing social systems online. Facebook, for example, already allows use to show more (and I think also less) of 'posts like these' and I think also applies similar logic between people too. With so many people in the facebook network, the result has been that not every post that is made is actually visible to users - meaning that our 'meaningful relationships' can turn into 'echo chambers' or worse.
If I deny significant aspects of who you are, am I really a friend? Do I really know you? If I am blocking out certain things about you/us, then maybe I will never learn more about the topics I don't want to see, that you actually like - and thus never learn more about you either.
A second issue is that as soon as you insert a process of recording fairly detailed information about human relationships into the public blockchain, you expose us all to data mining in a major way. Anyone, anywhere will be able to psychologically profile everyone here for free and without our knowledge or consent. It's one thing to read our posts, but another to exponentially expand the available data to include a level of depth that yields results that maybe we don't even know about ourselves.
Something else to consider is that in China, there is currently a system called sesame that the government is intending to enforce on people that literally limits free will based on their reputation on the network! They may lose the right to travel in real life if their online repuation drops enough! This is based on a kind of 'web of trust' system and actually involves their 'friends' losing reputation if they post something the government says is bad.. It's a dystopian nightmare that we all have responsibility to prevent.
I appreciate the need to organise the posts in a more user friendly way - my most basic suggestion is to make filtering the lists by tag keywords a very easy affair. That would dramatically improve the UI in that regard.
Any solution must be assessed for it's openness and capacity to introduce unintended side effects and limitations.
The system proposed provides far less data than is already on the blockchain. In fact, it would probably just be implemented by an up or down thumb. You could do the same type of AI computations on what you upvote as you would on such a system. Combine that with actual text from posts and comments, and you got way more about you than you intended to share.
fair enough, in my mind's eye i was imagining that there would be levels of public data available that go beyond what is perhaps being defined here. in scanning the way that elements are ordered in the examples above, i am not 100% sure of why certain ordering choices have been presented as being the outcome - given the -/+ options shown. i'll re-read it when i am less busy.