
Saving forums from themselves with shared hierarchical white lists - alan-crowe
http://www.cawtech.demon.co.uk/outer-circle/core.html
======
mustpax
Maybe this is why Twitter works. You only see those you follow in your stream.
You can't opt to see everything someone else is seeing, mostly because their
platform can't really handle that sort of fan-out yet. But the basic idea of
whitelisting is the same.

That's why Twitter's still fun for me regardless of how many social media
consultants are around. I just don't follow them.

~~~
lawrence
Exactly. This problem is why the friending / follower / newsfeed format has
won. Everyone's accountable for curating their own feed. Want to expand the
universe? Allow friend of friend, or friend of friend of friend views.

------
JoachimSchipper
Have you considered PGP's web of trust?

PGP's web of trust shows that you can have a decentralized system without
going full-blown peer to peer, and has many of the same issues with regard to
trusting people and trusting people to trust people. It also shows that even
this model - which is simpler than what you propose - has difficulty gaining
acceptance.

I also don't see in what context you want to use this protocol, but there are
a lot of fora that would be improved if only one had the ability to write
Usenet-style killfiles (which can do a lot more than kill by author!).
However, NNTP and SMTP clients largely already have these abilities to a
sufficient level that you'll have a hard time displacing them, and web fora
are very different and hard to script client-side.

~~~
alan-crowe
I've heard the phrase "web of trust" and googled it, but found something very
different to what I have in mind.

There is a tradition, going back to The Well, of having a serious adult forum
invaded by children and their poo, pee, belly, bum posts. The adult forum
resists and is destroyed.

My idea is that the different users are all legitimate and that success comes
through coexistance. By coexistance I mean obliviousness. Chrome-Dome posts a
cerebral contribution of great erudition. Chuckle-Head replies with vulgar
mockery. In a traditional forum Chrome-Dome is driven away by this. The
traditional response is to try to find a way to drive Chuckle-Head away
instead.

The problem is that it is Chuckle-Head who is the popular figure, read and
admired by hundreds of lame brains. Chrome-Dome is read and admired by dozens.
So systems of voting and karma end up reflecting the fact that the mob greatly
out numbers the elite.

The vision driving Outer Circle is that Chrome-Dome is happy with a white list
of authors of some intellectual pedigree. If Outer Circle is a success, with
millions involved, Chrome-Dome's, err, corner of the circle has thousands of
authors, more than he can actually read, so he never gets round to expanding
his white list to the point that he sees Chuckle-Head's post. Chrome-Dome is
oblivious to the vulgar mockery around him and is not driven away by it.

Simultaneously, no administrator is banning Chuckle-Head, and Chuckle-Head is
not retaliating by organising a DDoS of the site. Why would he? He has white
listed his mates and is larking about, mocking the occasion boring adult he
stumbles across, and enjoying acting his age.

The goal of Outer-Circle is the coexistance of incompatibles through
invisibility.

Suppose that Middle-Brow, whom Chrome-Dome reads, comes across Chuckle-Head's
vulgar mockery and replies to it, complaining that it is rude. We don't want
this making it visible to Chrome-Dome. That would be a failure of invisibility
and might drive Chrome-Dome away.

On the other hand, Chrome-Dome isn't reading all the replies to his posts.
Ordinarily when Middle-Brow replies to a reply to one of Chrome-Dome's posts,
the Outer-Circle software should promote the middle post to Chrome-Dome's
attention, least there be a break in the threading. So the fine detail, of
letting Middle-Brow control whether his replies do or do not implicitly
endorse the comments to which they are attached, is actually essential to the
overall plan.

~~~
JoachimSchipper
I'm not convinced you understood what I was saying in the way I intended it to
be understood, so let me clarify.

PGP's web of trust is designed to answer the question "is john@example.org who
he says he is". A user is "valid" (in the above sense) if you have marked it
as such, or if a sufficient number of users of sound judgement vouch for it.
(There are multiple levels of "vouching", and the meanings of "of sound
judgement" and "sufficient number" are user-configurable; and "users" are
really "keys".)

By default, PGP believes that users who are vouched for as in the above model
are valid but not of sound judgement (i.e. we don't let this users vouch for
others), but you could easily change that.

The point I was trying to make is that, if you replace "PGP" by "Outer Circle"
and define "valid" to be "worth reading", the above sounds a lot like what you
want to achieve. It has also been deployed in the real world for quite a
while, so you can see to what extent it has worked (it's rather succesful in a
very small part of the population).

Additionally, PGP is effectively decentralized, even though day-to-day
operation uses keyservers. This model is a lot easier than full peer-to-peer
(which, in the presence of NAT, is probably not possible without centralized
servers anyway), and a combination of clever crypto and fallback options means
that PGP does not _rely_ on keyservers. Look at the documentation for more
details.

Notwithstanding the above, which is honestly intended to be good advice, I
don't see how your system is ever going to become sufficiently widespread to
be worth learning for the average user, and I don't really see the value in
keeping a medium that's 99% nonsense usable for the last few erudite users -
just let them migrate.

~~~
alan-crowe
Thank you for expanding on that. In trying see the relevance of PGP's web of
trust to Outer Circle, two things throw me off the scent.

First, identity in Outer Circle is simply a public key used to decode each
signed post. When an identity is highly regarded, others will wish to
impersonate it, in order to get their writing or advertisements read, but they
are unable to do so because they do not know the private key.

Prevention of passing off is the whole of identity in Outer Circle. We do not
care if users have multiple accounts nor do we care whether group accounts are
acknowledged or pretend to be an individual. Circle jerks, be they
conspiracies or sock puppets, do not undermine the Outer Circle system because
an identity, even in good standing, has no _right_ of recommendation. If some-
one on your direct list starts reading crap you "shallow" him or drop him, and
that is part of the normal operation of the system as tastes change (his or
yours) or time pressures squeeze.

So it is confusing to me to read about web of trust because Outer Circle has
no notion of who somebody really is. Ossian is welcome.

Second is Outer Circles core concept of the coexistence of incompatible
through invisibility. Whether somebody is who he says he is is a valid concept
that is either true or false. I see the idea that a post is worth reading or
not worth reading is a trap. There is no truth of the matter and that is the
heart of the reason that traditional forums with moderation and meta-
moderation collapse. They are trying to forge a consensus when they should be
facilitating disagreement.

You doubt the value in keeping a medium that is 99% nonsense usable for the
last few erudite users. That foregrounds the issue of scaling. I picture Outer
Circle growing from a thousand elite users to million users, 99% hoi polloi 1%
elite. So the proportion of erudite users falls, but the absolute number rises
tenfold. I see the endless migration of the nomadic elite as an important
problem, preventing them reaching critical mass.

Do you still think that PGP's web of trust is relevant? How do I relate "is
john@example.org who he says he is", which has type _boolean_ , to "john is
worth readng", which has type _function from users to boolean_?

~~~
JoachimSchipper
Hmm, you had not previously expanded on the prevention of impersonation,
although that is indeed desirable. In fact, piggybacking this whole thing on
PGP (with special "is interesting" messages) may work. Somewhat.

I don't see why the web of trust-approach would fail. Certainly, I admit, "is
worth reading" is not (intended to be) a global value, while "is really that
person" is.

But ultimately the web of trust answers the question "do _I_ trust that person
to be who (s)he says (s)he is". For instance, someone who trusts a lot of
people is likely able to verify that key D5327CB9 belongs to Wietse Venema,
while someone who has just created a key but doesn't yet trust anyone cannot.
Therefore, while this key belongs to Wietse or does not belong to Wietse
irrespective of who asks this question, the answer may differ.

There are obvious parallels to "do I trust this person to produce interesting
content/tag appropriately".

I can understand your desire to bring the elite together, but what is the big
added value over, say, Twitter or blogs? These are fairly stable, fairly
reliable identifiers of people, with connections between them. Filtering out
the nonsense is so easy that it's hard to notice that we're even doing it, and
"clusters" of smart people form more or less automatically. (Which is not to
say that either Twitter or blogs are the best possible communication medium,
especially for small messages like this, but they seem to get this mostly
right.)

~~~
alan-crowe
What is the big added value? I was prodded into making another attempt to
bring coherence to the swirling mass of ideas I call Outer Circle by a recent
thread here on Hacker News: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=916448> Other
people consider the forum problem important.

When Kuro5hin died, I started reading The Edge, <http://www.edge.org/>.
However The Edge is what I call an Inner Circle site. Outsiders get to
spectate, but there is no way for outsiders to ask questions or raise
objections. The Edge seems introverted to the point of sterility. My dream for
Outer Circle is that it should impose a wholesome discipline on outsiders.
They are not confined to spectating but can ask questions and raise objection.
On the other hand outsiders have to work for access, playing nicely, and
earning a place on insider's white lists.

The big win happens when you have people you don't know making unexpected
positive contributions. The hard question is how to permit that without
suffering the usual forum problem.

~~~
JoachimSchipper
I understand that people believe this to be important, and I see the value in
interesting communities. It's just that I don't consider the forum model
something to emulate, but rather a regression from earlier models - I much
prefer mailing lists or Usenet groups, both of which allow a user much more
control via their client, and both of which seem to, on average, suffer less
from "the idiot problem" than their web-related counterparts.

Part of the reason may have been that many web fora try to appeal to the
broadest possible audience, while many mailing lists and Usenet groups have a
formal or informal charter.

------
wmf
This is interesting but whitelists/blacklists worry me because newcomers will
either see everything or nothing, both of which are pretty unfriendly.

~~~
alan-crowe
If it spreads by word of mouth, you can use your friend's white list. If you
see everything you can pick the best of a dozen posts and then use the authors
white list. Once you have a human written white list to start from you can
manage the volume by controlling the depth that you descend the search tree,
and start adding authors you like to your direct list. Every time you add an
author to your direct list you chose a number to set a search depth with him
as the tree root and his direct list as the first level, so I think you
quickly take control and adjust the list to your taste.

I'm more worried about how a new author gets read. Nobody sees his comments
because he is on nobodies white list. I guess there has to be a slush pile.
When people get bored they can turn to the slush pile and maybe find a gem.
Alternatively one may wish to see all the replies to ones own posts, not just
those from the authors on ones white list. If that is common practice it gives
a new author an audience of one simply by replying.

------
DanielStraight
I don't know if I'm just lazy, but there is no way I would use something like
this.

~~~
crystalis
Yes, but it would save everyone else from having to read your drivel.

~~~
DanielStraight
Can you honestly see yourself ranking people based on how many levels of the
people they ranked you want included in your white list? Do most people even
use the filtering capabilities available today? I don't think I've ever
blacklisted anyone on a forum, even if they drove me absolutely insane.

~~~
crystalis
Can you honestly see yourself joining a knitting community?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ravelry>

~~~
DanielStraight
That's different. People join knitting communities because they enjoy
knitting. Very, very few people enjoy rating things just for the sake of
rating them. People join knitting communities, but not rating communities.
People rate as a means to an end. The end has to be worth the hassle of the
means. This rating system sounds substantially more complicated than anything
in popular use today, and for me, even what's in use today isn't worth it. I
don't think I'm in the minority in not using blacklists and similar
capabilities. If people won't even do that, how will you get them to go
through some of the complications of this system?

~~~
stcredzero
Is there a way that hierarchical whitelisting could be derived from up/down
votes like on HN and reddit?

~~~
JoachimSchipper
For a user of which you have voted on many posts, we can define "interesting"
directly. If we use I(you, u) to denote our proxy of the chance that you find
user u interesting, we define I(you, u) = (number of upvotes to this user) /
(number of total votes on all users).

For any user u on which you have not cast a lot of votes, calculate I(you, u)
as the sum of I(you, u') I(u', u) over all users u' (other than you or u),
plus the above formula.

There are some issues with this: it'll take some work to make it perform, and
it strongly favours established accounts. But if you can solve the first
issue, you can probably live with the second - karma has the same problem.

