It appears as if Bartley R. Troyan <btroyan@littlekoala.com> wrote:
|
|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.
Yes, if you behave like a Kook, people will brand you as one. With the Kookify/Glorify function your reputation becomes public knowledge. You cannot escape your reputation by refusing the Kookify/Glorify software. Censorship is not the answer to a bad implementation of reputations.
|Now, let's say perchance six months down the road the tradition develops that
|people tend to filter out Kooks (based on an X-Kook-Level or X-Kook-Ratio
|header or something included in all of the messages). They rarely, if ever,
|read messages from someone as certifiably Kooky as me. And now that there
|are, say 100 Million AOLers, there are also 10K subscribers to Extropians
|mailing list and lots of other kooks posting all sorts of junk. So assume
|that a filtered version of the list is created, that the AOL hordes (no
|offence EvMick) can subscribe to on the web site. Extropians-No-Kooks provides
|a list view in which the messages from Kooks at level x or greater are not
|even sent out with normal list traffic (say, due to bandwidth and other
|resource constraints. It's not cheap to send 300 pieces of email to 10K
|different email addrs every single day. But that's the level of traffic one
|must anticipate 6 months or a year down the road. It's a problem the entire
|net will continue to face as it continues to grow rapidly).
You might want to have a reputation half-life implemented to solve the problem. Unless somebody really find you offensive, your bad reputation would diminish over time, until such time when you would become unKookified.
But... what you write will continue to haunt you in the form of list archives. You cannot escape your reputation by refusing the Kookify/Glorify software. "Internet does not forget."
|Anyway, therefore I will never be de-Kookified, even if I suddenly experience
|a Zen-like enlightenment and start posting like a networked super-brain better
|than a merged consciousnesses of the best posters (you know who you are). I've
|been rolled into a local minimum in Kook-space and now I can't get out. And
|everybody loses out on my godlike wisdom and conspiracy-theory-debunking
|insights.
Solution: Make a more complex reputation survival function.
Do not kill off a good idea because the implementation sucks. Suggest and make a better implementation instead.
|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.
Yes, we should avoid statist implementations of reputations.
Nobody should live forever on old glory, and we should not assume that old Kooks cannot become enlightened. We should prepare for change.