Anders Sandberg wrote:
> While the kill thread and topic stuff might not be necessary, I like
> the idea of Kookify/Glorify! A more soft incentive to produce good
> posts.
I don't like the idea of Kookify/Glorify as I understand it. Let's say you all decide I'm a Kook and virtually everyone heavily Kookifies me by clicking the Kookify link at the bottom of every message I send to the list. I don't care how you prevent multiple votes (it's not that hard), but it won't make a difference in the end... If I post a lot of rubbish for a while, I will attain an extremely high level of Kookiness after a short time.
My point is, maybe both the Glorifieds and the Kooks should be given an automatic, periodic, proportional adjustment in the opposite direction of their current tendency, just to make sure nobody gets stuck in any holes.
> I have been thinking of running some program through the list archives
> to do data mining, for example build sociograms (who responds to
> whom?), find threads where someone participates, who glorifies who and
> perhaps extract clusters of discussion. Maybe the way of improving
> quality of the list lies in making archives more powerful?
A lot of that stuff is interesting to me as well. I'll bet you'd find some of cliques that respond primarily to each other, and ignore newbie/clueless posts as well as posts from Already Certified Kooks. Then there are the debaters, and the people with way too much time on their hands that respond and argue everything. (I'm not saying that's bad, I'm just saying, well, I don't have that much time. I can only afford to catch up with this list, all msgs dumped into a separate folder, once or twice a day, and I am forced to use the delete key without reading most messages).
Anyway, to implement the kind of data mining and analysis Anders describes, in an efficient and easy-to-program manner, we would need a database, of course. Anyone want to donate cycles and space on a mySQL server on a really fast box with a gig or two of storage? Give me a login there, I'll give you everything Anders described above and much more. We'd also need a way to easily modify headers and footers of list messages on a per-message basis. It could start small and grow to be an engaging, real-life experiment in collaborative filtering. I wouldn't mind a share of that $10K if you all like it well enough :-) And if list members mostly just ignore those funny new extra footers on the bottom of all the list messages, so what. We'll take them out. No harm done.
-Bart
(aspiring Extropian Kook)
> --
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension!
> asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
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